Prague Spring and Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia
In January 1968, Alexander DubÄek became First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and launched a programme of reform he called 'socialism with a human face' — loosening censorship, rehabilitating victims of Stalinist purges, and proposing a more federated model for the party. The Prague Spring, as the reform period was called, attracted enormous popular enthusiasm and international attention. For seven months it seemed possible that a communist system might genuinely liberalise from within. On the night of August 20-21, 1968, Soviet, Polish, East German, Bulgarian, and Hungarian forces — some 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks — invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the reform movement. DubÄek was arrested, taken to Moscow, and forced to sign a document reversing his reforms. The invasion was justified by the 'Brezhnev Doctrine,' the assertion that the Soviet Union had the right and duty to intervene in any socialist state where socialism was threatened. The invasion provoked widespread international condemnation, including from many Western communist parties, and marked a significant moment in the decline of Soviet ideological authority — if 'socialism with a human face' was prohibited, what exactly was Soviet socialism for? The memory of 1968 shaped Gorbachev's approach to reform twenty years later: he was determined to avoid the catastrophic resort to force.
- Year: 1968 CE
- Category: Military
