50 years on, what can we learn from the Prague Spring?
Fifty years ago this week, on 21 August 1968, the citizens of Prague awoke to find tanks on their streets. For some it came as no surprise. Student activist Pavel Kamenicky was sleeping. “At first I thought it was the university bus trying to find the right gear,†he says. “But I realised it was way too loud. I jumped up thinking, ‘they’ve come’.â€
Czechoslovakia had dominated news bulletins throughout the summer after its premier, First Secretary Alexander Dubcek, had begun reforming his communist government’s structures earlier that year. But now, what had become known as the Prague Spring, or Dubcek’s “socialism with a human faceâ€, was lying crushed beneath the tank tracks in Wenceslas Square.
The Soviet Union feared its grip on the satellite states of eastern Europe was loosening and its patience had finally run out. Czechoslovakia and Dubcek had fallen foul of USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev’s eponymous doctrine, espoused retroactively in justification the month after Warsaw Pact troops took to Prague’s streets: “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries,†Brezhnev said
Read more at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/prague-spring-anniversary-czechoslovakia-soviet-union-wwii-czech-republic-slovakia-a8485326.html
More reading:
https://www.rferl.org/a/invasion-of-czechoslovakia-through-womens-eyes/29442053.htmlThe Soviet army but also, those of 3 other Iron Curtain countries quashing the uprising.
Lots of articles out for this week on the anniversary.
