The chairman of the senate lowered his chin into his hand. A smile spread across his face as he gazed out the window. In a soft, dreamy, voice he says, "I cannot imagine it."
Petr Pithart still cannot believe that 30 years after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia he will be in Moscow - receiving an apology for the assault. "I am all the time thinking about it," he says. "This is unprecedented."
It may not be an official apology - that came in 1993 - but it will surely be the most public one.
As part of a new friendship treaty between the two states which was signed five years ago, Russian President Boris Yeltsin apologised for the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, which began just before midnight on August 20th, 1968.
For 21 years Moscow remembered the event as the "Brotherly Assistance". The so-called "Assistance", however, consisted of 28 uninvited divisions (300,000 military troops), 6,300 tanks, 2,000 pieces of heavy artillery and 550 fighter jets.
They poured into Czechoslovakia from the then East Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union and Hungary. Their purpose was to quash the country's lurch toward civil society, known as the Prague Spring.
"Socialism with a human face" was the slogan of the day. By year's end 90 people had been killed: some were crushed by tanks, others shot. Most of the carnage came during that first week.
The Spring began picking up steam in the first week of 1968, when reformists in the Communist Party's Central Committee ousted First Secretary, Antonin Novotny, and replaced him with the reformer, Alexander Dubcek.
But Novotny remained president until he resigned on March 21st - hence, the Spring sobriquet.
At that point the floodgates had burst open.
"Newspapers became completely open within a fortnight," Mr Pithart recalls. "Criticism of the past was very sharp and very open.
"There was hope that times would change. People were drunken by the freedom of the moment."
It was not necessarily a move toward unfettered democracy, says Iva Drapalova, a retired reporter. "We really believed it could have been a Third Way. We wanted to build a prosperous society and a caring society - combining the best of two systems."
But Moscow had other ideas. Militarily the invasion was a smooth operation, but politically it was botched before it got started. The result was confusion, as described in the following telegram from the US Embassy to the State Department on August 24th, 1968.
"This is bizarre kind of occupation. Although occupying forces have taken over key points they have not established martial law, have not imposed military government, and have not yet installed puppet government.
"Communist Party organs managed to convene Party Congress under noses of occupying forces despite fact that Congress severely complicates Soviets problems in installing compliant regime."
So what went wrong? On the night of August 20th, Czechoslovak hard-liners - backed by the Kremlin - were supposed to introduce a resolution during the Party's Central Committee meeting calling for foreign assistance to halt the reform process.
The resolution, however, was put at the bottom of the agenda - and the political battle was lost before it got started.
As that embassy telegram notes, "Lacking a Quisling administration Soviets were obviously unprepared to take over the country."
With the Kremlin forced to lean on the existing leaders, Dubcek and other top members of the Central Committee were kidnapped and taken to Moscow.
For seven days - while the Czechoslovak leaders resisted outright capitulation - radio and print journalists more or less ran the country, telling people what was happening and what they should do to resist.
MANY consider that week to have been a high-water mark for the country. But it also marked "the beginning of the end of communism", says Ms Drapalova. "It not only destroyed the ideals of communism here, but for intellectuals all over the world."
About 100,000 people subsequently emigrated from Czechoslovakia and one-third of Communist Party members - about 500,000 - either resigned or were kicked out of the party.
On August 27th, Dubcek and the other leaders were returned to Prague, having been forced to capitulate. A distraught Dubcek, his voice breaking (some say he was sobbing), addressed the nation upon his return.
People were stunned. But unlike the past, no one was jailed, no one was sent to Siberia and no one was executed. Dubcek even retained his job atop the Central Committee.
And so the people maintained - miraculously - a glimmer of hope. When Jan Palach, a university student, immolated himself in Prague's main square in January 1969 to protest at the continued Soviet presence, the country recoiled in horror.
But still they hoped. Even after Dubcek lost his top spot in the Committee in April, the people continued to hope. Finally, on the first anniversary of the invasion when thousands rallied in the streets, the country realised that all was lost.
For their protests were not met with the might of 100,000 Soviet troops still in the country: their rallies were crushed by the tanks and soldiers of the Czechoslovak military.
At that point all hope was extinguished and for the next two decades the country laboured under one of the most retrograde Communist reg imes in the Soviet-bloc. Indeed, it was not until the middle of 1991 - a year and a half after the so-called Velvet Revolution that saw the end of communism - that the last Soviet soldiers left Czechoslovakia.
This week a number of ceremonies and exhibitions took place in both Prague and Moscow to commemorate the invasion.
Igor Nikitin, first secretary of the Russian Embassy, stresses that the political reconciliation began five years ago, but that this year's remembrance "is more on a human level". He says he expects a wreath-laying ceremony will take place in Wenceslas Square - at the memorial site for Jan Palach.
"We understand that the events of 1968 left deep scars in people's psyche, which can't be eliminated by a political agreement," Mr Nikitin says. "We should remember that the ideas of the Prague Spring - freedom - are still important, and that violent suppression belongs only to the past."