Il August 20, 1968exactly 54 years ago, 200 soldiers and 5 tanks of the Warsaw Pact, led by the USSR, invaded Czechoslovakia to put an end to Prague Spring. Thus ended the largest attempt at liberalization ever attempted up to then in a country of the Soviet bloc, which began on 5 January of that same year, when Alexander Dubcek he had become secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
Dubcek's reforms
Supported by a fermenting public opinion and enthusiastically supported by intellectuals, students and the workers themselves, Dubcek pushed the renewal process up to limits unthinkable before then. During the eight months of the Prague Spring, administrative and economic control was partly decentralized and to the citizens greater freedoms were granted, starting with those of movement and expression. Press restrictions were also eased. After a nationwide discussion on the possibility of transforming the country into a federation of three republics (Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia and Slovakia), Dubcek chose to take a different path, preferring to divide Czechoslovakia into two distinct nations (Czech Republic and Slovak Republic).
The differences compared to the Hungarian crisis
However, the Prague Spring was not an attempt to westernize the country: the goal was reconcile the socialist system with elements of pluralism economic and above all political, including the presence of different parties. Unlike the Hungarian motorcycle from 1956, therefore, the Prague spring was always led by the Communists and did not put never questioned the location of the country in the Soviet alliance system.
Occupation and protest
However, the Czechoslovakian renewal constituted equally an intolerable threat to the Soviet Union, worried about the possible contagion that could have spread among the other states of the Eastern bloc. After the failure of the negotiations (the Soviets tried in vain to induce the Prague leaders to block the liberalization process), troops from the USSR and four other Warsaw Pact countries (East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria) occupied the entire territory of Czechoslovakia.
The "normalization"
The invasion triggered a wave of migration to Western Europe, while non-violent protests multiplied within the country: the most famous remains that of the student Jan Palach, who committed suicide in Wenceslas Square in Prague by setting himself on fire. Czechoslovakia thus entered into a so-called “normalization period”: Soviet-imposed leaders undid Dubcek's reforms and restored pre-Prague Spring political and economic conditions.
Czechoslovakia remained occupied until the fall of the Berlin Wall, which in 1989 marked the end of the Soviet bloc.
