World: RUSSIANS GO HOME!

IT had been a lilting summer day throughout Eastern Europe. In the cool of a starry evening in the Czechoslovak capital of Prague, vast Wenceslas Square was alive with couples strolling arm in arm, tourists and Czechoslovaks bustling homeward. Then, just before midnight, telephones began to jangle as friends and relatives living in border towns frantically put in calls to the capital. The alert was spread by taxi drivers and owners of private cars, who raced through the medieval streets with their horns wailing warning. Soon the roar of jet engines reverberated through the night skies; Russian planes were flying ominously low. At 1:10 a.m., Radio Prague interrupted a program of music to confirm the worst: "Yesterday, on August 20, about 11 p.m., troops of the Soviet Union, the Polish People's Republic and the Hungarian People's Republic, the German Democratic People's Republic and the Bulgarian People's Republic crossed the frontiers of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic."

Striking with stunning speed and surprise, some 200,000 soldiers of the five Warsaw Pact countries punched across the Czechoslovak border to snuff out the eight-month-old experiment by Alexander Dubcek's regime in humanizing Communism. Russian and East German units smashed southward from East Germany. Forces thrusting from the

Ukraine rolled across from the east. Polish and Russian troops quickly seized the industrial city of Ostrava in northern Czechoslovakia. Some 250 Soviet T-54 tanks raced from Hungary into the Slovak capital of Bratislava. They hit the city at an awesome tank speed of 35 m.p.h., their smoking treads churning up the asphalt as they knocked down lampposts, street signs, even automobiles that stood in their way.

Prague was assaulted first from the air, as giant Tupolev transports, covered by MIG jet fighters, began landing every minute at Ruzyne airport. The first passengers were the elite paramilitary units of the KBG, the Soviet secret police, whose mission was to secure the capital's airfields, railroad stations, cable offices and broadcast centers. It was perhaps at Ruzyne that the first sign of Czechoslovakia's remarkable campaign of passive resistance appeared. The airport officials refused to supply the Soviet planes with fuel. At nearby Pardubice airport, the Russians had to set up their own control tower after Czechoslovak air force officers re fused to guide the arriving armada down to the landing strip. Forbidden by the Dubcek government to shoot back at the overwhelming force of invaders, the Czechoslovaks, from high army officers down to shoeshine boys, quickly established a principle and stuck to it through the days that followed: anything that the Warsaw Pact intruders wanted done they must do themselves. With few exceptions, the invaders found no collaborators.