The Prague Spring (1968)

On 5 January 1968 the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia elected Alexander Dubček as First Secretary, replacing Antonín Novotný after a winter of internal party criticism of his rule. Dubček, a Slovak party official who had pressed for a more open system, lifted the pace of reform immediately, and restrictions on press and speech began to loosen. Economic stagnation and the grievances of Slovakia had helped force the change, which the party presented as renewal within socialism.

Location: Prague, Czechoslovakia

Through March 1968 censorship loosened and newspapers began publishing open criticism of party leaders, corruption, and the Stalinist past, including debate over the rehabilitation of political victims. On 30 March the National Assembly elected the wartime general Ludvík Svoboda president, completing Novotný's removal from top office. Public life reopened at a speed without precedent in the Eastern Bloc, and the Soviet leadership convened allied parties to discuss the drift that same month.

Location: Prague, Czechoslovakia

On 5 April 1968 the party presidium adopted the Action Programme, the reform blueprint of "socialism with a human face": guarantees of speech, press, and travel freedom, partial decentralization of the economy, independent courts, and a federal reorganization of the state into Czech and Slovak republics. The document's authors took care not to condemn the post-war Communist order, only policies they argued had outlived their use. It stopped short of multi-party politics but committed the party to an open press and legal protections for citizens.

Location: Prague, Czechoslovakia

On 27 June 1968 the writer Ludvík Vaculík published "Two Thousand Words", a manifesto signed by scientists, athletes, and workers that called the reform process too slow and urged citizens to push for change themselves. The text spread through uncensored newspapers and alarmed the Soviet leadership, which treated it as evidence of counter-revolution. Communist parties in the Warsaw Pact condemned the manifesto while Czechoslovak leaders refused to suppress it.

Location: Prague, Czechoslovakia

On 15 July 1968 the leaders of five Warsaw Pact states, the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria, sent a collective letter to the Czechoslovak party declaring that the situation threatened the common security of the socialist community and demanding a halt to "anti-socialist" tendencies. The letter stated that the internal affairs of one country could become a matter for all when the socialist system was at stake, an early public form of what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. Czechoslovakia replied that the reforms posed no threat to the alliance.

Location: Warsaw, Poland

From 29 July to 1 August 1968 Dubček and Leonid Brezhnev met at Čierna nad Tisou, where Dubček defended the reform programme while pledging loyalty to the Warsaw Pact and Comecon and promising to curb "anti-socialist" tendencies. On 3 August the Warsaw Pact members and Czechoslovakia signed the Bratislava Declaration, affirming solidarity while declaring that the Soviet Union would intervene in any member country where socialism was under threat. The compromise averted intervention for three weeks; Soviet and allied military preparations continued.

Location: Čierna nad Tisou, Czechoslovakia / Bratislava, Slovakia

On the night of 20 to 21 August 1968 forces of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia in an operation involving some half a million troops and thousands of tanks, taking control of the country within hours. The East German army stayed on its own territory, and Romania and Albania refused to join. The Czechoslovak Presidium declared that troops had crossed the border without the government's knowledge, and the Soviet press presented the operation as "fraternal assistance" against antisocial forces, a claim Czechoslovak leaders and public rejected.

Location: Czechoslovakia

As the occupation began, the Czechoslovak army remained in barracks and civil resistance spread: radio and television broadcast the invasion until seized, street signs were removed to confuse convoys, curfews were defied, and fraternization efforts met the occupying troops. The resistance was unarmed, and sporadic violence and protest suicides accompanied it; the Soviet military command's plan to subdue the country in days met opposition that persisted for months. Abroad, Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu condemned the invasion, Albania left the Warsaw Pact, and the UN Security Council debated the crisis before the issue was withdrawn from its agenda on 26 August.

Location: Prague, Czechoslovakia

Dubček and the senior Czechoslovak leaders, arrested on the night of the invasion, were flown to Moscow and held under intense pressure to sign an agreement authorizing the occupation. All signed the Moscow Protocol except František Kriegel; the text pledged to restore censorship, suppress "anti-socialist" forces, and keep Soviet troops on Czechoslovak soil. A wave of emigration followed, and the occupation continued as the guarantee of the settlement.

Location: Moscow, Soviet Union

In late August 1968 the country's publishers suspended newspapers for a day of reflection, and writers agreed to a limited reinstitution of the censorship office for three months. At the September plenum the party installed a censorship resolution declaring that press, radio, and television were instruments of party and state policy, and independent publications were progressively banned through the autumn. The press freedom of the Prague Spring was over; the federal structure of the state, agreed under Dubček, was the one formal reform that survived the invasion.

Location: Prague, Czechoslovakia