The Prague Spring

JAN 01 1968 · 12:00

Soviet T-55 tanks on the streets of Prague, 21 August 1968. The intervention ended the reform programme of Alexander Dubček. Place: Wenceslas Square, Czechoslovak Radio building, the streets of the Old and New Towns Figures: Alexander Dubček, First Secretary · Ludvík Svoboda, President · Leonid Brezhnev, in Moscow · the Warsaw Pact armies (Soviet, Polish, East German, Hungarian, Bulgarian) Dubček is elected First Secretary in January 1968. By April the Action Programme is published: press freedom, freedom of assembly, freedom to travel, market correctives to a planned economy, federalization with Slovakia. The phrase is socialism with a human face. Writers publish openly. Students argue in cafés. The June manifesto Two Thousand Words, drafted by Ludvík Vaculík, is signed by seventy intellectuals and read aloud in factories. Moscow watches with growing alarm. Warsaw Pact maneuvers stage on the border through July. Brezhnev meets Dubček at Čierna nad Tisou and Bratislava in early August. Dubček returns to Prague believing he has bought time.