The cartoonist who produced this clever play on an old Czech fairy tale used caricature and widely recognizable symbols to depict the Warsaw Pact states during the August invasion. The "five brothers" in the cartoon represent the leaders of the Warsaw pact countries: Leonoid Brezhnev, leader of the USSR, stands next to the East German, Hungarian, Polish, and Bulgarian heads of state. Instead of Socialist comrades stepping in to protect socialism from subversive elements within Czech society as the Warsaw Pact leaders insisted, the leaders are depicted as duplicitous, armed giants prepared to kill the young girl representing Czechoslovakia to "save" socialism. What would have been even more striking to contemporary readers is the hat worn by the young girl. The Frisian liberty cap was one of the most prominent symbols to emerge from the French Revolution more than 150 years earlier. Czechs "reading" this image in 1968 would have immediately made the connection between the cap and the implication that the Czech people, like their French predecessors, were involved in a struggle of liberty against tyranny.
Source:
"The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: August 1968," the Labadie Collection of Social Protest Material, exhibit at the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library. Documents selected by Brian Rosenblum and Jonathan Bolton and translated by Jonathan Bolton. Originally published in DIKOBRAZ (27 Aug 1968). http://www.lib.umich.edu/spec-coll/czech/desdik07.html.
