World: THE ARSENAL OF RESISTANCE

FROM the outset, the Czechoslovaks' remarkable campaign of passive resistance was aimed straight at their oppressors' vulnerabilities—their sense of direction, their stomachs and their morale. The tactics were laid down in one of the many variations of "the ten commandments of resistance" that went up on walls all over town: "We have not learned anything, we don't know anything, we don't have anything, we don't give anything, we can't do anything, we don't sell anything, we don't help, we don't understand, we don't betray." The tenth was printed in large letters: "We will not forget anything." The "commandments" proved to be captive Czechoslovakia's secret weapon against the Russian invaders.

Clicking Shutters. The backbone of resistance was Czechoslovak radio, which managed to stay on the air by wit and engineering wizardry. Middle-of-the-night calls went out to nearly all station personnel when the invasion started, and announcers managed to talk their way past Soviet lines even after the studios were surrounded. Věra Stovíčková, one of the best-known voices of Prague Radio, got past Russian guards by claiming that she was a charwoman. Others slipped out of the studios with vital transmitting equipment, which was soon wired up to put "Radio Free Czechoslovakia" on the air from a downtown Prague apartment. Because single transmitters are easy to track, engineers bounced their signal to transmitters at new locations every quarter hour, some of them supplied by the Czechoslovakian army. The underground radio network was such a total success that President Svoboda had to broadcast official statements through it last week; the Russian-occupied regular studios remained deserted and unused.

The clandestine voices not only kept Czechoslovaks and the world abreast of Russia's occupation; they also called most of the interference plays. When an announcer urged his countrymen to take pictures of the Russian invaders "for later documentation," a small army of Prague amateur photographers started clicking their shutters at the Russians. After Villiam Salgovič, an anti-Dubček conservative, rounded up 40 security agents to run errands for the Soviets, an underground station broadcast all of their license-plate numbers. A truck driver who recognized one plate bore down on the car and rammed it against a brick wall with his two-ton trailer rig.

Czechoslovakia's national television network also juggled its beams from one location to another, always keeping one jump ahead of Soviet search parties. At one point, announcers were broadcasting from the city planetarium in the Moravian city of Brno. Crowed an engineer: "The Russians have plenty of tanks, but tanks cannot detect signals." Having learned just that, the Soviet commander in Moravia became so incensed at the persistent television coverage that he threatened to level the town if the station stayed on the air. Technicians thereupon switched off, temporarily. Meanwhile, cameramen were stuffing Bolex gear under their raincoats to shoot some of the most daring footage ever taken of the Red army at work. By week's end, just minutes ahead of Soviet secret police, the underground TV crew fled across the border to Austria.