Praha - August 1968 (part 1)

In the morning hours of August 21, 1968, the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia along with troops from four other Warsaw Pact countries. The occupation was the beginning of the end for the Czechoslovak reform movement known as the Prague Spring.

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. The reform movement had been brewing for years, fed by economic problems as well as growing demands from Communist intellectuals for more freedom and pluralism within a socialist system.

In January 1968, the Communist Party's Central Committee replaced its hard-line First Secretary Antonin Novotny with the moderate reformer Alexander Dubcek, who eventually sided more and more clearly with the forces for change. In March, censorship was loosened and Novotny was relieved of his other function, President of the Republic. He was replaced by a career soldier, Ludvik Svoboda, whose last name in Czech means "freedom" - a purely linguistic coincidence.

In the following months, censorship was further loosened, some political prisoners were freed, and topics that until recently had been taboo began to be openly discussed. These reforms were not received well by the Soviets who sent thousands of Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to occupy the country. Although the Czechoslovak reformers always affirmed their intention of remaining within the bounds of a socialist system led by the Communist party, the reforms eventually began to take on a life of their own.

The Soviets attributed the invasion to the "Brezhnev Doctrine" which stated that the U.S.S.R. had the right to intervene whenever a country in the Eastern Bloc appeared to be making a shift towards capitalism. Still the days leading up to the invasion was a rather calm period without any major events taking place in Czechoslovakia.