Praha - August 1968 (part 2)

Pamphlets and flyers spread information about the occupation, calling on Czechoslovaks to resist peacefully and reaffirming popular loyalty to Dubcek and the other reform leaders, who had been interned in the early hours of the invasion and shipped off to Moscow for "negotiations" about the country's future.
Newspapers and magazines continued to publish, often with the words "Legal" or "Free" added to the masthead to indicate that they were not in the hands of the occupiers. Radio continued to broadcast from secret transmitters even after the central radio building in Prague had been battered into submission. Flyers printed in Russian were designed to explain the situation to Soviet soldiers, many of whom had little idea of where they were or what they were doing there.

Cover of the periodical The World in Pictures, from August 21, 1968. The picture caption reads: A view of the situation in front of Prague radio, 21 August 1968, at 10:35 a.m. They were still broadcasting from the building. The headline reads "WHY?" in Czech and Russian.

The popular opposition to the invasion was expressed in numerous spontaneous acts of nonviolent resistance. On January 19, 1969, student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague's Wenceslas Square to protest against the renewed suppression of free speech.

The country persisted in a state of tentative resistance for months. The reform leaders who had been interned and brought to Moscow for negotiations were more or less forced to sign the so-called Moscow Protocol, which re-instituted controls over the media, and rolled back the reforms in other ways.

Protests on August 21, 1969 were brutally suppressed and turned out to be the last mass demonstrations against the invasion, as the country settled down into the gray years of bureaucratic oppression known as "normalization."

Czechoslovakia remained occupied until 1990.


Sources:
www.lib.umich.edu/spec-coll/czech/
Invaze68: Josef Koudelka
Wikipedia