The 1960s was the height of the Cold War. That meant that the countries in Eastern Europe languished under Soviet domination, and had done since they were overrun by the Red Army in the dying days of the Second World War. The Yalta and Potsdam agreements, signed between the victorious Allies, had committed the USSR to holding free and fair elections in the countries it had invaded. But no country led by Joseph Stalin was going to allow that. The regimes in these countries imposed one-party communist rule, and were to all intents and purposes Soviet puppet regimes. Dissent was ruthlessly crushed, with the full apparatus of secret police and stifling authoritarianism imported directly from the Soviet Union.
Only two countries had dared to break the mould. In the late 1940s, the leader of Yugoslavia, Tito, made it clear that he was willing to accept American money to rebuild his country. This lead to Yugoslavia leaving the Soviet sphere of influence, and forging its own middle way between the East and the West. In reality, the communist world probably wasn't big enough for the dominant personalities of Tito and Stalin. In Hungary in 1956, a new leader, Nagy, attempted to dismantle the communist system, and take Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact. This brief flowering of freedom had been swiftly crushed by Soviet forces, and Nagy was brought to Moscow as a prisoner and executed. Since then, political and cultural freedom behind the Iron Curtain was vastly curtailed.
But then along came Czechoslovakia in 1968. In January of that year, Alexander Dubcek became leader of the country, and introduced a package of mild reforms. The idea was to allow a measure of democratisation, free speech, and cultural expression, whilst simultaneously allowing the Czechoslovak communist party to hold on to power. Dubcek called these reforms 'socialism with a human face.' The cultural output, and the noisy free press, that emerged from under the shadow of repression was known as the Prague Spring.
The leadership of the USSR was not amused. Despite Dubcek's assurances of his commitment to communism and the Warsaw Pact, they saw this as the first chink in the armour of the Eastern Bloc. Having failed to dissuade Dubcek, at midnight on 21st August 1968 armies from the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed the Dubcek government. Despite Dubcek's call for no resistance, there were widespread protests against the Soviet invasion, and thousands confronted the Soviet forces on the streets. This so spooked the Soviets that they refrained from formally removing Dubcek until the following year. Protests continued, and in January 1969 Czech student Jan Palach burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square in Prague. Thousands attended his funeral.
Yet the damage was done, and there was no going back. Dubcek was removed, a new leader installed, the secret police resumed their activities, protests ebbed, and authoritarianism once again returned to Czechoslovakia.
This was a severe test for the Western alliance. The Truman Doctrine had committed the USA to supporting any people or government attempting to throw off communism. In 1956, the Suez Crisis had prevented a unified, credible response to the invasion of Hungary. Surely, this was the West's time?
But it failed. It was only six years since the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there was no appetite for another showdown with the USSR. Even had it wanted to, the USA was in no position to respond. It was already bogged down in an anti-communist war in Vietnam, and the full scale of the quagmire was becoming apparent, with public support for the war in free fall, and massive protests starting to be seen. The US was also in the middle of a political crisis; the 1968 election was threatening to tear the country apart. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had died at the hands of assassins' bullets, the President had been forced to abandon his re-election bid, the Democratic Party was engulfed in a civil war, race riots were rocking the largest cities, and the spectre of racist George Wallace and the hardliner Richard Nixon hung over the electorate. With the leader of the Atlantic Alliance consumed by crisis, the rest of the West hung back. The Czechoslovaks were on their own.
The long term consequences of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were huge. It created the Brezhnev Doctrine, whereby the USSR said that any attempt to leave the Eastern Bloc would be met with force by the Warsaw Pact. Across the Eastern bloc, many communists who agreed with Dubcek and wanted reform, and those who wished to see communism done away with entirely, were cowed into silence by fear that the USSR would come crashing down on them. For now, it looked as if the Soviet Union's hegemony over Easter Europe was complete.
But the crushing of the Prague Spring also showed that armed force was all that would keep the communist regimes in place. There hadn't been many Czechoslovaks committed to stopping Dubcek. The idea that communism was a force for human good and progress was shattered. The invasion also drove many left wingers in the West away from support for the communist regimes. Since the 1920s, there had been many Western communists who had either pretended that the hard edge of the Soviet system was capitalist propaganda, or acknowledged its repression by saying that a few eggs would needed to be broken in the making of the omelette of the worker's paradise. But now the USSR was clearly shown as the authoritarian dictatorship the Soviet people already knew it to be. In both East and West, support for communism began to slide.
Lastly, but perhaps most significantly, an entire generation of Czechoslovak activists was inspired by the brief period of freedom they had enjoyed. They hoped that, one day, they could reprise their moment in the sun. They were the ones who would, two decades later, take the lead in tearing down the communist regime in the Velvet Revolution.
Czechoslovak citizens confronting the Soviet soldiers in Prague
(For more photos showing the Soviet invasion, only published this week, follow this link.)
