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Pictured: Warsaw Pact tanks in front of the Government Office in Bratislava, August 1968 (author: Ladislav Bielik)
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Two generations later, the memory of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent twenty years of occupation, a period known by the term “normalization”, becomes increasingly blurred. For young people born after the Velvet Revolution it is not a discriminating event in the country’s recent history.
According to a poll commissioned by the Globsec think tank, virtually one in three Slovaks under the age of 35 has no opinion on the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 by Warsaw Pact troops.
While 78% of the three thousand interviewees over the age of 65 perceive this historical event in a negative way, only 55% of the interviewees aged between 25 and 34 have the same attitude. And a large percentage of young Slovaks don’t know how to evaluate what happened 54 years ago.
Overall, 66% of the interviewees have a negative idea of what happened between 1968 and 1969. On the contrary, 14% of the individuals interviewed (one out of seven) have a positive perception of these eventswhile one in five does not know what to answer.
According to Globsec’s analysis, reported by Pravda, the fact that the younger generations have a low awareness of crucial historical events “increases their vulnerability to those who intentionally try to interpret these historical events to polarize and spread disinformation”.
(Red)
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Pictured: Warsaw Pact tanks in front of the Government Office in Bratislava, August 1968 (author: Ladislav Bielik)
