Czechoslovakia entered the 1960s as an industrialized consumer economy forced into Soviet heavy industry under hardliner Antonín Novotný. Cracks opened with a 1963 conference in Liblice rehabilitating Franz Kafka and widened after Novotný’s crackdown on the 1967 Writers’ Congress. In January 1968 Alexander Dubček, head of the Slovak Communist Party, displaced Novotný after Leonid Brezhnev refused to intervene. In April Dubček launched his Action Program, socialism with a human face: an end to censorship, freedom of speech and travel, a turn toward consumer goods, and continued Communist leadership inside the Warsaw Pact.
The uncensored journal Literární listy reached 300,000 copies a week, and television put former political prisoners face to face with the secret police officers who had tortured them. After summits at Čierna nad Tisou and Bratislava failed to rein him in, troops and about 4,600 tanks from four Warsaw Pact nations crossed the border on the night of August 20 to 21, 1968. Dubček ordered the army not to fire; 72 citizens were killed. Flown to Moscow as a prisoner, he signed the Moscow Protocol, lost power to Gustáv Husák in April 1969, was expelled from the party and sent to work for the forestry service in Slovakia. In November 1989 he joined Václav Havel on a Prague balcony during the Velvet Revolution and became chairman of the federal assembly before dying after a car accident in 1992.
- East German troops were halted at the border at the last minute to avoid echoes of the 1938 Nazi invasion.
- Citizens painted over or turned street signs to point toward Moscow, and villages renamed themselves Dubček or Svoboda.
- Student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in January 1969 to protest the return of repression.
- Asked the difference between Gorbachev’s reforms and the Prague Spring, a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman replied: 19 years.
- Hockey star Jaromír Jágr wears number 68 for his grandfather, who died in prison after the invasion.
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