Invasion documented

Press, 11 August 1980, Page 15

Invasion documented

The final of the “McPhail and Gadsby” series on One is on Wednesday. The following Wednesday will see the screening of Britain’s most expensive ($700,000) documentary drama, *,‘lnvasion.” It tells of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

“Invasion,” made by Granada Television, can claim to be a scrupulously accurate account of the event. The consultant for the programme was Dr Zdenek Mlynar, a former secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee — the highest-ran-king communist defector since Trotsky. In 1970 Dr Mlynar was

thrown out of: the Czech Communist Party and became a founder member of the dissident movement, Charter 1977.. Dr Mlynar, who now lives in Vienna, was one of the principal participants in . the so-called ‘‘Moscow negotiations” which took place after the invasion.

With First Secretary Alexander Dubcek and a dozen members of the Czech Communist Party praesidium, Dr Mlynar was first held captive by Russian paratroops and then flown to Moscow, where the Czechs were confronted with an ultimatum by President Brezhnev. He said they must return to Czechoslovakia and rule

as Russian puppets —or risk a bloodbath if they resisted. . Dr Mlynar agreed to act consultant on “Invasion,” and the producer, Eva Kolouchoua, herself a Czech exile, spent 18 months working with him.

In this period he gave the first full eyewitness account of the event in minute detail. The Mlynar tapes, which gave a minute-by-minute account of the arrest of the praesidium, the abortive plot of the hardliners, and the final, devastating psychological assault in Moscow, are the primary source of material for the script of “Invasion” written by David Boulton.