World: RUSSIANS GO HOME!

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Throughout the country, black flags of mourning appeared on buildings, statues and monuments. On walls, barn doors, highway signs, car and store windows, the Czechoslovaks tacked up posters and chalked messages demanding in all the languages of the Warsaw Pact that the invaders go home. One message scrawled on a wall in Prague read: "Lenin, wake up. Brezhnev has gone mad!" Said another: "Hungarians, go home. Have you not had enough of these things?" Wenceslas Square turned into a fleet of Czechoslovak flags bobbing on a sea of demonstrators, who shouted in the direction of the 20 tanks parked among them: "Russian murderers, go home!"

Thousands of foreign tourists were caught in Czechoslovakia when the Russians came. Among them were 4,000 geologists attending the International Geological Congress. The Russian delegates were so embarrassed by the invasion that they removed their name tags. The U.S. embassy hired 20 buses to help transport some 1,500 stranded Americans, including onetime Film Star Shirley Temple Black and TV Actor Robert (U.N.C.L.E.) Vaughn, to West Germany and Austria. Tourists streamed out of the country in their cars, often driving past menacing Soviet tanks parked at lonely countryside junctions with their guns pointed at the road. The Czechoslovaks at first begged the tourists to stay and aid them in their struggle, then put them to work carrying out mail for relatives abroad and film to show the world what was happening. As the tourists left the country, Czechoslovak frontier guards urged them to mobilize opinion against the Russians when they got home. Meanwhile, many Czechoslovaks on vacation hurried home to join the struggle.

Stronger than Tanks. That struggle grew more and more coordinated—and cunning—as the Czechoslovaks mobilized all their resources to baffle, stymie and frustrate their occupiers. The campaign was directed and inspired by radio stations that continued to operate secretly throughout the country—reportedly with transmitters provided by the Czechoslovak army—after the Russians had shut down the regular government transmitters. "We have no weapons, but our contempt is stronger than tanks," proclaimed one such station near Bratislava. The station suggested that its listeners "switch around street signs, take house numbers from the doors, remove nameplates from public buildings and, when a Soviet soldier asks you something, say that you don't understand Russian."