Dubcek's 1968 thaw met half a million Warsaw Pact troops
The Prague Spring was a 1968 liberalisation inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It began on 5 January when reformer Alexander Dubcek became First Secretary of the Communist Party and tried to decentralise the economy while expanding civil rights.
The thaw had slow roots. Antonín Novotný began de-Stalinisation in the late 1950s, more cautiously than most Eastern Bloc leaders, and after declaring socialism complete he renamed the state the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The economy stumbled in the early 1960s because the Soviet blueprint suited poor agrarian countries, not one that had industrialised before the war, and his 1965 New Economic Model only sharpened appetite for political change.
Culture moved first. In May 1963 Marxist scholars held the Liblice Conference on Franz Kafka, rehabilitating a writer long attacked in the bloc and nudging censorship looser; every Eastern Bloc country was invited, but Moscow sent nobody. The writers' union weekly Literární noviny began arguing that literature should not answer to party doctrine, and the reputation of interwar president Tomáš Masaryk revived, helped by Milan Machovec's 1968 biography.
Once in charge, Dubček eased controls on the press, speech and travel and pushed administrative decentralisation. After debate over a three-part federation of Bohemia, Moravia–Silesia and Slovakia, he settled on two republics, Czech and Slovak, the only formal reform that outlived the crackdown. Talks with Moscow failed, and on 21 August 1968 the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Poland invaded with roughly half a million soldiers; The New York Times relayed reports of 650,000. Citizens resisted by befriending troops, removing street signs and ignoring curfews, while a large wave of emigration followed.
Normalisation came next. Gustáv Husák replaced Dubček as party chief, later became president as well, and undid nearly every reform. The spring lived on in art: it shaped the writing of Václav Havel, songs by Karel Kryl, compositions by Karel Husa, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the celebrated book by Milan Kundera.
Source: Prague Spring
