"no reform was possible"

Mark Kurlansky is on WNYC's On The Media this week, pushing his book 1968: The Year That Rocked The World. Here's a soundbite so neat I had to listen to it again:

"as Gorbachev pointed out some years later, the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union because it showed people that, contrary to the promise of Communism, no reform was possible and therefore there was no hope."

I'd heard all the coverage of the fortieth anniversary of Prague Spring, but I'd forgotten that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred during the 1968 Democratic Party national convention. Kurlansky mentions among other things that Daniel Schorr resented being pulled from the convention to cover the invasion, thinking the convention was the bigger story.

Man. It must have seemed like the end of the world.

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