In the night between 20 and 21 August 1968 the troops of Warsaw Pact (NATO of the Soviet Empire) invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the so-called Prague Spring or the attempt of the leader of the Communist Party of that country, Alexander Dubcek, to build a more open and democracy-oriented regime. The prospect of a "communism with a human face" (as it was called at the time) had aroused many hopes (and illusions) in the world (still shaken by the winds of youth protest that were blowing throughout the West). But that experience was deemed unsustainable by the despots of the Kremlin due to the imitative effects that it was feared would explode in all the countries of the so-called real socialism. The word then passed to the tanks. It took another twenty years for those regimes to fall, one by one, like houses of cards, after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.
LPolitical office of the PCI (the most important executive body at the time) distanced himself with a statement which was greeted – for the words ''grave dissent'' – as a turning point in the Party's line of conduct. ''As things stand, it is not clear how the serious decision to intervene military could have been taken in these conditions. The political office of the PCI therefore considers this decision to be unjustified, as it does not reconcile with the principles of autonomy and independence of every communist party and every socialist state and with the needs of defending the unity of the international communist and labor movement. It is in the spirit of the most convinced and firm proletarian internationalism, and reaffirming once again the profound, fraternal and sincere relationship that unites the Italian Communists to the Soviet Union, that the political office of the PCI feels the duty to immediately express its grave dissent". '.
Of note is ''the profound, fraternal and sincere relationship that unites the Italian Communists to the Soviet Union''. Perhaps, historically speaking, it would be good to reduce the importance of that turning point and recognize that, at the time, people were very generous towards the PCI, overestimating political acts characterized by circle-bottomism. August 21 is an important date in the history of the PCI. Four years earlier on that same day Palmiro Togliatti died in Yalta. ''Gramsci, Togliatti, Longo, Berlinguer'': it was the proud intonation that accompanied the oceanic demonstrations of the PCI in the beautiful time that was, when the Unity Festivals constituted the scenario for the resumption of political activity after the summer break. Today that role is played by the Rimini Meeting.
