Prague Spring

The Prague Spring was a brief experiment in reform communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Under the new party leader Alexander Dubček, censorship was lifted and citizens were promised a "socialism with a human face", until troops of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded on the night of 20–21 August and brought the reforms to an end. Its suppression shaped two decades of Czechoslovak life and became an emblem of the Cold War.

Czechoslovakia under Antonín Novotný moved away from Stalinism more slowly than most of its neighbours. Victims of the show trials of the early 1950s were not rehabilitated until 1967, and the Soviet economic model suited an already industrialised country poorly, so growth faltered in the early 1960s. Intellectuals began to test the limits: a 1963 conference at Liblice rehabilitated the writer Franz Kafka, and in June 1967 writers such as Milan Kundera openly criticised the regime. When Novotný lost the confidence of the party's Central Committee, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev declined to rescue him, and on 5 January 1968 the Slovak communist Dubček replaced him as First Secretary. In March Novotný also gave up the presidency, which passed to Ludvík Svoboda.

Censorship quickly fell away. The writers' weekly, renamed Literární listy, appeared uncensored from the end of February and reached a circulation of 300,000 by August. The media examined the crimes of the Stalinist years. In April the party adopted an Action Programme promising freer speech, press and travel, more consumer goods, limits on the secret police, a federal arrangement giving Czechs and Slovaks equal status, and, over a transition of about ten years, a more democratic form of socialism. Dubček insisted that the party would stay in charge and the country would remain in the Warsaw Pact, but popular pressure for faster change grew.

The leaders of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were alarmed, fearing the reforms would spread or weaken the bloc. Some drew parallels with the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Soviet and Czechoslovak leaders met at Čierna nad Tisou on the Slovak border from 29 July to 1 August, and on 3 August all six parties signed the Bratislava Declaration. The Czechoslovak side promised to rein in the press, while hardliners within its own party, it later emerged, secretly invited Soviet intervention.

On the night of 20–21 August, forces from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria crossed the border; Romania and Albania refused to take part. About 165,000 troops and 4,600 tanks entered on the first night, and the total force eventually reached perhaps half a million or more. Dubček urged citizens not to fight back, and Czechoslovak forces were confined to their barracks. Resistance instead took non-violent forms: people gave the invaders wrong directions, took down or repainted road signs, and kept clandestine radio stations on the air. Estimates of Czechoslovak deaths during the invasion range from 72 to 137. Dubček and other leaders were flown to Moscow and pressured into signing the Moscow Protocol, which allowed him to stay in office for the moment.

Some 70,000 people fled at once, and perhaps 300,000 emigrated in the following years. In January 1969 the student Jan Palach burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square in protest. In April 1969 Gustáv Husák replaced Dubček and launched "normalisation": censorship returned, reformers were purged from the party and from public life, and Soviet troops stayed. The only reform to survive was federation, which created separate Czech and Slovak republics within the state in 1969. Moscow's claimed right to intervene wherever socialism seemed threatened became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

Many of those purged after 1968 later became dissidents, and the regime finally fell in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, after which Dubček returned as chairman of the federal parliament. The last Soviet troops left in 1991. The two halves of the old federation are today the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Our 1960 and 1985 maps show Czechoslovakia within the Soviet-led bloc, bordered by Poland, East Germany, Hungary and the Soviet Union.