Prague Spring
The 1968 attempt to build socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia, crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion of half a million troops.
For eight months in 1968, Czechoslovakia tried to prove that a communist state could also be a free one. In January the reformer Alexander Dubcek took over the Communist Party and set about dismantling the machinery of fear. Censorship was relaxed and then abandoned, travel opened up, victims of the old purges were rehabilitated, and citizens began to argue in public about how their country should be run. Dubcek called it socialism with a human face, and for one intoxicating spring the phrase seemed possible. Then, on the night of August 20, the human face met the tank.
What the reforms actually were
Dubcek was no dissident; he was a lifelong communist who believed the system could be saved by making it popular. His Action Programme, published in April, promised freedom of the press and assembly, an independent judiciary, and a Party that would have to earn its authority rather than impose it. It stopped short of multiparty democracy or leaving the Warsaw Pact, precisely because Dubcek understood how far Moscow could be pushed. But openness, decades before Gorbachev gave it a name, has a logic of its own. Newspapers printed criticism, a manifesto called the Two Thousand Words demanded faster change, and the sheer energy of the thing frightened the Kremlin far more than any formal program.
The tanks answer
Leonid Brezhnev feared that a free Czechoslovakia would infect the rest of the bloc, and he had the precedent of Hungary in 1956 to guide him. On the night of August 20 and 21, some 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops poured across the borders, a force that swelled toward half a million, with thousands of tanks. The Czechs and Slovaks did not fight; they argued. The iconic images of that week show unarmed civilians surrounding tanks, climbing on them, pleading with bewildered Soviet conscripts, waving bloodied flags in Wenceslas Square. Roughly a hundred people were killed. Dubcek was flown to Moscow, forced to sign away his reforms, and slowly removed. The following January a student named Jan Palach set himself on fire in protest, and the spring was over.
The doctrine and the echo
Moscow codified its logic into what the West named the Brezhnev Doctrine: the claim that once a country had gone socialist, the Soviet Union had the right to intervene by force to keep it that way, national sovereignty be damned. For twenty years that doctrine held, and the lesson of Prague was bitter and clear. The bloc could not be reformed from within, because the tanks would always come.
The echo came in 1989. When the peoples of Eastern Europe rose again, the decisive fact was not that they were braver than the generation of 1968, though many of the same faces were there. It was that Mikhail Gorbachev, facing the same choice Brezhnev had faced, chose not to send the tanks. The Prague Spring proved that Soviet communism could only be changed when Moscow itself stopped believing in it, and in 1968 that day was still twenty-one years away.