On this day in 1968, Alexander Dubček’s experiments in “socialism with a human face” were met by the force of Moscow. Eliot Wilson tells us about the crushing of the Prague Spring in the latest instalment to City AM’s on this day series
It started with a 56-year-old from Uhrovec in the Trenčín region of Slovakia, where the ruins of a 13th-century castle look down from the Nitricke Vrchy hills. And it ended, as defiance of Russian often does, with the clank of tank tracks, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the blood of unarmed civilians running in the streets.
The Prague Spring is crushed
On this day in 1968, just after 11.00 pm, the first soldiers of a massive Warsaw Pact military force of 165,000 crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, between the Saxon town of Bärenstein and Vejprty, a Bohemian settlement of a similar size. They had jumped the gun – H-hour was supposed to be 1.00 am, but events moved quickly.
Ruzyně International Airport was quickly secured by the invaders, and not long after 1.00 am transport aircraft began landing with more soldiers, soon coming at 50-second intervals: these were the 7th Guards Airborne Division, with their sky-blue berets and striped telnyashka undershirts. In seven hours, 250 aircraft brought an entire division.
Operation Danube, as the Soviet High Command dubbed the invasion, was formally a joint Warsaw Pact enterprise, with Soviet units alongside 70,000-80,000 soldiers from Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, and a handful of East German liaison officers. There was no doubt from where the direction came, however, and Moscow was at first glance extraordinarily successful.
By late morning on 21 August, Czechoslovakia was effectively occupied by its Warsaw Pact ‘allies’, its People’s Army confined to barracks. Soviet commandos, KGB troops and personnel from the feared Czech state security agency, the ŠtB, occupied the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee’s headquarters and arrested the First Secretary, Alexander Dubček.
Alexander Dubček and ‘socialism with a human face’
Dubček was that 56-year-old from Uhrovec, who had grown up in Bishkek in the Soviet Union then in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), a huge industrial city on the River Volga. At 17 he returned to his birthplace and joined the Communist Party of Slovakia, then illegal, and fought against the Nazi puppet Slovak Republic during the Second World War. Dubček’s brother Július was killed in 1944’s Slovak National Uprising.
He was a loyal, enthusiastic Communist: in the 1950s he attended the Communist Party’s Higher Party School in Moscow (supposedly but doubtfully, a classmate was a young Mikhail Gorbachev), became secretary of the West Slovak Regional Committee of the Slovak Communist Party and then moved to Prague to serve the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In January 1968, the party’s First Secretary, the autocratic Antonín Novotný, was ousted and Dubček took his place, though Novotný remained the country’s president for another 11 weeks.
Czechoslovakia was struggling. The heavily centralised economy had stopped growing, incomes were falling and consumer goods were scarce and shoddy. Dubček had a plan, an “Action Programme” of reforms which, while they were to be conducted under the Communist Party’s supervision, were daringly liberal. There would be more freedom of speech, greater freedom of the press and freedom of movement; perhaps even a multi-party government in the longer term. The period of liberalisation would come to be known as the Prague Spring.
This was all carefully framed as continuity with the past. The foundation of the Communist state had provided “an economic system providing conditions not only for rapid restoration but also for further development of the economy towards socialism”, but it had required “centralist and directive-administrative methods used during the fight against the remnants of the bourgeoisie”.
The situation had now changed, and Czechoslovakia needed to move forward into a new phase. “Socialism,” the Action Programme averred, “can only flourish if scope is given for the assertion of the various interests of the people and on this basis the unity of all workers will be brought about democratically.”
The West watches on
Dubček meant what he said: he wanted “socialism with a human face”. Censorship was abolished in March, and the following month the party’s Central Committee adopted the Action Programme. But the radical liberalisation of the Prague Spring alarmed his Warsaw Pact colleagues, not least because they feared it might spread to their own fiefdoms. Anxious comparisons were drawn with the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev denounced Dubček and his colleagues in July as “revisionist” and “anti-Soviet”. A sometimes-boorish authoritarian who could still by 1968 hold his drink, he hesitated briefly in the privacy of the Politburo but was quickly persuaded that Dubček must be stopped, and he ordered military action against the reformers in Prague.
Czechs and Slovaks undertook massive displays of non-violent resistance, and around 100 people were killed. The international community expressed its outrage – but did nothing. Within a week, Dubček and the other Czechoslovak leaders had been forced to sign the Moscow Protocol, essentially abandoning reform. Dubček himself was removed in April 1969 and became a “non-person”, eventually working in a clerical job for the state forestry agency.
On this day 57 years ago, Russia demonstrated its approach to the “near abroad”. It was neither the first nor the last time force would be used against disobedient neighbours. The West watched, issued statements of support and outrage, and did no more. Perhaps there is a moral in that.
On this day 57 years ago, Russia demonstrated its approach to the “near abroad”. It was neither the first nor the last time force would be used against disobedient neighbours. The West watched, issued statements of support and outrage, and did no more. Perhaps there is a moral in that.