“Shoot!” screamed the man in thee blue overalls. Emil Gallo is a municipal plumber in Bratislava. He shouts abuse at the crew of a Soveit T-55 tank and tears his shirt open, ready to die. The photo, almost a sister image to the Tank Man photo that came out from Beijing 31 years later, was the iconic image of the Prague Spring.
On August 21, 1968, tanks from Russia and four other Warsaw Pact countries rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down Prague Spring – a period of political liberalization under Alexander Dubcek. Ladislav Blielik, the photographer who captured the scene, works for the local newspaper Smena. Together with his colleagues, he printed a clandestine edition of the newspaper with this photo on the front page. A copy of the film reached the German Press Agency on the same day, and the photo was published around the world.
After the revolution had failed, Bielik had decided to stay in Czechoslovakia, but this meant the end of his professional career. He was dismissed; he continued to work but his photos were no longer good, declared the communists. He ended up as a sports photographer and was killed tragically in Budapest in 1984 at a car race. Dubcek withdrew from the public life and lived in obscurity but lived to see the collapse of the Evil Empire he so opposed. Gallo, a father of four, committed suicide three years after the photo was taken.
