Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and 5.000 tanks of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invade Czechoslovakia. It is the night between 20 and 21 August 1968. The Prague Spring ends in the most dramatic and violent way possible.
For press days, television news and newsreels talk about nothing else. The West is dismayed. The images of the population surrounding the Soviet armored vehicles and trying to dialogue in vain with the invading soldiers went around the world.
“Faced with the military intervention of the five countries of the Warsaw Pact, we expressed the our grave dissent and our reprobation, not only because in the face of those events every political force was required to demonstrate clarity of judgment and assumption of responsibility, but because we hoped that our voice, united with that of other communist parties, could bring help and prevent the worst from happening”, he accuses Pietro Ingrao, communist president of the Chamber, speaking to the deputies of Montecitorio on 29 August of that year.
The Invasion of Czechoslovakia represents the response of the USSR, which controlled the area since the end of World War II, to the so-called socialism with a human face wanted by the reformist leader Alexander Dubček.
The general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (PCC), convinced of the need to go beyond the Soviet model, had started the "new course" in January 1968, later called Prague Spring, represented by a series of reforms aimed at introducing greater democracy in all sectors of society in Czechoslovakia and at granting more rights to citizens. In a few months Dubček initiated a partial decentralization of the economy and administrative authorities, relaxed the restrictions on the press, opened the division of the country into two distinct nations: the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Too much for the central communist party which, after a failed attempt to negotiate, decides, together with the allies of the Warsaw Pact, to take action. On 20 August 1968, a military expedition from Saxony invaded the country. The tanks arrive. Immediately Dubček is deposed and arrested. Gustáv Husák was called to replace him, and in a short time he started the so-called "normalization", canceling his predecessor's reforms with a clean sweep.
The population begins to emigrate - it is estimated that in a few months about 300 people leave Czechoslovakia - but above all to take to the streets. Symbol of these protests is the suicide of the student Jan Palach, who in January 1969 sets himself on fire in the central square of Prague. She dies after three days. 600 people attend his funeral.
The occupation of Czechoslovakia continues until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
