The Prague Spring of 1968 Remembered

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It’s hard to believe that it has now been fifty years since the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which began on Aug. 20, 1968, crushed the attempts by the country to reform its Communist system and bring about “socialism with a human face.”

The Prague Spring, as it became known, is usually dated from January 1968, when the Stalinist apparatchik Antonın Novotny was replaced by Alexander Dubccek as First Secretary of the  Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC).

The Party’s Action Program, which was launched on April 5, increased freedoms of speech and of the press and introduced economic reforms to improve the quality and availability of consumer goods. 

It was still based on the principles of socialism, with emphasis on the leading role of the KSC, but the combination of economic and political reforms was supposed to lead to a new, more democratic kind of socialism. 

The idea was to allow a limited role for market forces and to loosen the Communist monopoly on politics. It wasn’t all that threatening to the Communist political order.

But the abolition of censorship allowed opposition voices to be heard and alternative political clubs to be formed, and their demands quickly became more radical.

Although the leaders of other states in the Warsaw Pact greatly feared what was happening, Dubcek was confident that the majority of society supported the Party and its leading role in the reform process. 

During bilateral talks between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in July, he defended the reforms while pledging continued commitment to the Warsaw Pact. 

However, these assurances were not enough, and the armies of five Warsaw Pact states --Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union –invaded the country.

To prepare for the takeover, KGB operatives and the Soviet embassy recruited puppets in the KSC.

These collaborators were to appeal for fraternal assistance from the Soviet bloc to mount a “rescue mission” to save the country from a supposed attempt by western counter-revolutionaries, led by West Germany, to destroy Czechoslovak socialism.

This became known as the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” promoted by then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

It asserted that the USSR had the right to use military force to maintain the rule of Communist parties in nearby Warsaw Pact countries.

Despite the lack of armed resistance, in the first week of the invasion more than 70 people were killed and hundreds more were injured.

Dubcek and other members of the leadership were taken to Moscow and pressured to sign the Moscow Protocol, which rolled back the freedoms introduced in the spring.

Alternative political groups were banned, censorship was reimposed, and central economic planning was restored. Dubcek was replaced as leader by Gustav Husak a year later. 

The self-immolation of 21 year-old student Jan Palach on Jan. 19, 1969 was a desperate plea for people not to resign themselves to the repression, but to no avail. 

The dissident movement was not totally crushed, though. Its most important initiative was Charter 77, a petition circulated in 1977 in response to the arrest of members of a rock band.

It demanded that the authorities respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the state constitution and by Article 7 of the Helsinki Accords, signed by 35 sovereign states in 1975. 

Many of the 242 people who signed the petition were punished by the regime in various ways. Some lost their jobs or saw their children refused entry to higher education; others were imprisoned or forced into exile. 

One of them, the playwright Vaclav Havel, would become the first president of a democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989.

I was in Czechoslovakia that year, and it was a very sad and dreary place – this was the case even in beautiful Prague. Its working-class suburbs looked shabby, and industrial cities like Ostrava were hideous.

Yet Charter 77 was a milestone on the road to eventual freedom. It continued to discredit Communist power, and the regime was forced to lie ever more to defend its position.

When the tenth anniversary of the invasion approached in 1978, the Soviets sought to lessen the anger with gestures. They helped build the Prague Metro’s A line and chose a Czech, Vladimír Remek, to be the first cosmonaut from outside the USSR.

The memory of 1968 remained part of the political psyche of the people of Czechoslovakia, and the mass protests in the streets in November 1989 – the “Velvet Revolution” that brought down the Communist regime -- echoed the Prague Spring of 21 years earlier.