Prague Spring (1968): Dubcek's Socialism with a Human Face

The Prague Spring was a brief period of political reform in communist Czechoslovakia in 1968. Under Alexander Dubcek, who became party leader on 5 January, the government lifted censorship and promised “socialism with a human face”. On the night of 20-21 August, armies of the Soviet Union and three Warsaw Pact allies invaded and brought the experiment to an end, an event that shaped the Cold War in Europe for the next two decades.

Background: a frozen regime

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had taken full power in the Czechoslovak coup of 1948. In the early 1950s the country went through harsh Stalinist purges, including the 1952 show trial of party leader Rudolf Slansky and others, most of whom were executed.

By the 1960s the economy was stagnating, and the rigid leadership of Antonin Novotny, party first secretary and president, faced criticism from economists, writers and students. At the Writers’ Congress of June 1967 authors openly attacked censorship, and in October 1967 police beat students protesting about poor conditions in their dormitories in Prague.

Slovaks, too, were frustrated by centralised rule from Prague. Within the party, reformers and Slovak leaders combined against Novotny. In December 1967 Brezhnev visited Prague but declined to save him.

Dubcek and the reforms

On 5 January 1968 the Central Committee replaced Novotny as first secretary with Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the Slovak party. Dubcek, then 46, had spent much of his childhood in the Soviet Union and was seen in Moscow as a loyal communist.

Change came quickly. In early March censorship was effectively ended, and newspapers, radio and television began to discuss past crimes and present problems freely. Novotny resigned as president on 22 March and was succeeded by the war hero General Ludvik Svoboda. Reformers such as Oldrich Cernik, who became prime minister, and Josef Smrkovsky, the new speaker of the National Assembly, rose to prominence.

On 5 April the party adopted its Action Programme. It promised freedom of speech, assembly and travel, rehabilitation of victims of the purges, greater independence for courts and parliament, a federal structure giving Slovakia equal status, and economic reform designed by the economist Ota Sik. The Communist Party was to keep its leading role, but by persuasion rather than force. Dubcek had no intention of leaving the Warsaw Pact.

New clubs and organisations appeared, including one for non-party activists and another for former political prisoners. On 27 June the writer Ludvik Vaculik published the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto, signed by many prominent figures, urging citizens to press for reform from below. Moscow regarded it as openly counter-revolutionary.

Growing pressure from Moscow

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the leaders of East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria grew alarmed. They feared that free debate would undermine the party’s power, encourage similar demands in their own countries and weaken the defence of the Soviet bloc. The memory of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was strong in all their minds.

In July the five parties sent the “Warsaw Letter”, demanding that Czechoslovakia reverse course. Soviet and Czechoslovak leaders met at Cierna nad Tisou on the Slovak-Soviet border from 29 July to 1 August, and all six parties signed a vague declaration in Bratislava on 3 August. Privately, a group of Czechoslovak hardliners, including Vasil Bilak and Alois Indra, handed the Soviets a letter asking for “help” against counter-revolution.

The invasion of 20-21 August 1968

Shortly before midnight on 20 August, troops of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria crossed the border. Soviet airborne forces landed at Prague airport. East German divisions had been prepared but were held back at the last moment, partly because of the memory of the German occupation of 1938-1945. Romania, though a Warsaw Pact member, refused to take part, and its leader Nicolae Ceausescu publicly condemned the invasion.

About 250,000 troops took part in the first wave, rising to around half a million within days according to many estimates. The Czechoslovak army was ordered not to resist. Dubcek and other leaders were arrested in the party headquarters and flown to Moscow.

Citizens resisted without weapons. Crowds surrounded tanks and argued with bewildered young Soviet soldiers; road signs and street names were removed or turned around to confuse the invaders; and clandestine radio stations kept broadcasting. An extraordinary party congress met secretly in the Vysocany district of Prague on 22 August and backed Dubcek. President Svoboda, flown to Moscow, refused to appoint a puppet government.

Czech historians have identified 137 Czechoslovak civilians killed as a result of the invasion by the end of 1968, and around 500 seriously injured. Many died on the first day, in Prague, near the radio building.

The world’s reaction

Western governments condemned the invasion but made clear that they would not intervene militarily, accepting in practice that Czechoslovakia lay in the Soviet sphere. The United States, deeply involved in Vietnam, protested through diplomatic channels. The UN Security Council debated a resolution condemning the invasion, but the Soviet Union vetoed it.

Inside the Soviet bloc, open protest was rare and dangerous. On 25 August 1968 eight people staged a brief demonstration in Red Square in Moscow with banners reading, among other things, “For your freedom and ours”. They were quickly arrested, and several were sent to prison camps, exile or psychiatric hospitals. In Poland, a former soldier named Ryszard Siwiec burned himself to death in protest during a harvest festival in Warsaw in September 1968.

Yugoslavia and China, both communist but independent of Moscow, also criticised the invasion. China described the Soviet Union as a “social-imperialist” power, and Sino-Soviet tensions rose sharply in the following year.

The Moscow Protocol and normalisation

Under heavy pressure, the Czechoslovak leaders signed the Moscow Protocol on 26 August. Only Frantisek Kriegel refused. The protocol committed them to restoring censorship and accepting the “temporary” stationing of Soviet troops, and Dubcek returned to Prague as leader in name only.

On 16 January 1969 the student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in protest at public resignation and censorship, and he died three days later. His funeral became a mass demonstration. After anti-Soviet celebrations of Czechoslovakia’s ice hockey victories over the USSR in March 1969, Moscow forced Dubcek out. On 17 April 1969 Gustav Husak replaced him as party leader.

Husak’s period of “normalisation” expelled or struck off hundreds of thousands of party members, roughly a quarter or more of the membership, removed reformers from jobs in universities, the media and culture, and restored strict control. Tens of thousands of people emigrated, many in the months after the invasion. The only major reform to survive was federalisation, which created separate Czech and Slovak republics within Czechoslovakia from 1 January 1969.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Prague Spring aimed to abolish communism. Dubcek and most reformers wanted to reform socialism, not abandon it. They kept the Communist Party’s leading role and promised loyalty to the Warsaw Pact. Some intellectuals and new clubs went further, but they were not the leadership.

Myth: the invasion met no resistance. The army did not fight, but the population resisted massively and peacefully for months, and the Soviets needed eight months to replace Dubcek.

Key people

Alexander Dubcek (1921-1992) became a symbol of reform communism. Expelled from the party in 1970, he worked for years as a forestry official. In 1989 he returned to Prague and was elected chairman of the Federal Assembly.

Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982, gave his name to the Brezhnev Doctrine, which claimed the right of socialist states to intervene when socialism was threatened elsewhere in the bloc.

Ludvik Svoboda remained president until 1975. Gustav Husak, a Slovak once imprisoned under Stalinism, led the party until 1987 and was president from 1975 to 1989.

Consequences and legacy

The invasion ended hopes that Soviet-style communism could be reformed from within. Many Western communist parties, including those of Italy and France, criticised it, a step towards “Eurocommunism”. Coming in the same year as the May 1968 protests in France and student unrest across the world, it became one of the defining events of 1968.

Soviet troops remained in Czechoslovakia until 1991. In December 1989, during the Velvet Revolution, the Soviet Union and the other participating states formally declared the invasion to have been wrong.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1968, 5 January: Alexander Dubcek replaces Antonin Novotny as party first secretary.
• 1968, 22 March: Novotny resigns as president; Ludvik Svoboda succeeds him on 30 March.
• 1968, 5 April: The party adopts its reformist Action Programme.
• 1968, 27 June: The “Two Thousand Words” manifesto is published.
• 1968, 3 August: Warsaw Pact parties sign the Bratislava Declaration.
• 1968, 20-21 August: Warsaw Pact forces invade Czechoslovakia.
• 1968, 26 August: Czechoslovak leaders sign the Moscow Protocol.
• 1969, 16 January: Jan Palach sets himself on fire in Wenceslas Square.
• 1969, 17 April: Gustav Husak replaces Dubcek as party leader.

Why it matters

The Prague Spring showed both the appeal of a freer socialism and the limits Moscow would impose on its allies. Its suppression confirmed the division of Europe, inspired dissidents such as the future president Vaclav Havel, and was finally repudiated only when communism collapsed in 1989.