Reform and Crisis

OPENING SCENE

It is just after midnight on August 21, 1968. In Prague, Czechoslovakia, people are asleep. The country has spent the past eight months living through what its leaders called "socialism with a human face." Censorship has been loosened, political prisoners have been freed, and for the first time in two decades, Czechoslovak citizens have been permitted to debate their country's future in print. The Prague Spring, as the West has taken to calling it, represents the most ambitious reform experiment ever attempted within the Soviet bloc.

Alexander Dubček, the First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, has not declared a revolution. He has not announced a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. He has simply argued that socialism can be compatible with civil liberties, that a communist party can govern with the consent of the governed rather than through fear alone. In Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev has watched these eight months with growing alarm. His advisers have warned him that if Czechoslovakia liberalises, the infection will spread to Poland, to Hungary, to East Germany, to the entire western buffer zone the Soviet Union spent millions of lives securing during World War II.

At 11:00 PM on August 20, the order goes out. By midnight, an estimated 650,000 troops from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany have begun crossing into Czechoslovakia, rolling toward Prague on every major road. Dubček is awakened by his aides. He reportedly refuses to believe it at first. Then the tanks arrive on the streets below his window.

By morning, Soviet armoured vehicles line Hradcany Square in the shadow of Prague Castle. Czechoslovak citizens stand in front of the tanks and argue with Soviet soldiers, asking in Russian why they have come. Many of the soldiers have been told they are responding to a counter-revolutionary coup. Some of them look confused. Others look straight ahead. The cameras of every Western news agency are rolling. The images will become among the most reproduced photographs of the Cold War.

The Prague Spring is over. It lasted 223 days.