A note on the date
The Prague Spring was a 1968 event, not a 1967 one. It belongs in a history of 1967 because its causes can be traced to the second half of that year, when pressure inside the Czechoslovak Communist Party began to build.
The background in 1967
Czechoslovakia had a developed industrial economy and a strong pre-war democratic tradition, but under communist rule from 1948 it was one of the more rigid members of the Soviet bloc. In the 1960s the economy slowed, and some economists argued for limited market mechanisms. Writers and intellectuals pressed for more freedom.
At the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in June 1967, several authors openly criticised censorship and party control. The party responded with punishments, but the argument had become public. In October, students protesting about conditions at a Prague dormitory were met with police violence, and the leader of the party and president, Antonín Novotný, was under growing criticism from within the leadership. The Slovak party also felt that Prague had neglected its interests. Leonid Brezhnev visited in December, reportedly declining to intervene to save Novotný.
Dubček takes over
On 5 January 1968, the Central Committee replaced Novotný as First Secretary with Alexander Dubček, a Slovak communist who was seen as a moderate and a compromise figure. Novotný resigned as president in March, and General Ludvík Svoboda succeeded him.
The reforms moved quickly. Censorship was relaxed in the spring, and later formally limited. Newspapers, radio and television discussed topics that had been off limits, including the show trials of the 1950s. In April, the party published an Action Programme that promised greater civil liberties, economic reforms and rehabilitation of victims of earlier purges. It also proposed a federal structure to give Slovakia a stronger voice. The programme was often summarised with the phrase “socialism with a human face”.
Dubček was not trying to end communist rule or leave the Warsaw Pact. He and his colleagues believed that a reformed system could keep the party’s leading role while winning more public support. The distinction mattered less to the Soviet leadership than the direction of events.
Warnings from the bloc
Other communist leaders, particularly in East Germany, Poland and Bulgaria, feared that the example might encourage unrest in their own countries. In March they met Dubček in Dresden and criticised his course. In June, the writer Ludvík Vaculík published a manifesto, “Two Thousand Words”, which called for citizens to support the reforms and to press for more. It was signed by many prominent people, and it alarmed Moscow. Warsaw Pact military exercises in Czechoslovakia in June and the slow departure of foreign troops added to the pressure.
In late July, the Soviet and Czechoslovak leaderships held direct talks at Čierna nad Tisou, on the Slovak border. They ended with an apparent compromise, and on 3 August a meeting in Bratislava with other bloc leaders produced a statement supporting socialist principles. The mood afterward was uncertain.
The invasion
On the night of 20 to 21 August 1968, troops from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria crossed into Czechoslovakia. East German forces were kept out of the main operation. Romania refused to take part. Several hundred thousand soldiers were involved, according to commonly cited estimates, and many tanks. Aircraft landed at Prague airport and troops quickly occupied key sites.
The Czechoslovak army was ordered not to resist, and Dubček urged calm. Even so, people confronted the soldiers in the streets, argued with them, removed street signs and painted slogans. Some were killed, and later figures commonly place the death toll at around one hundred over the following months. The Soviet side had hoped for a group of hardline officials to declare a new government, but that failed to materialise.
Dubček and other leaders were arrested and taken to Moscow. There, under pressure, they signed an agreement, the Moscow Protocol, which accepted a temporary presence of Soviet troops and a halt to many reforms. The troops stayed for more than two decades, until 1991.
Normalisation
Over the following months the reformers were removed step by step. In April 1969, Dubček was replaced as First Secretary by Gustáv Husák, who led a process known as “normalisation”. Thousands of party members lost their jobs, and censorship returned. The self-immolation of the student Jan Palach in Prague in January 1969 became a symbol of protest.
The Soviet justification, later known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine, held that the socialist states had a collective duty to defend socialism in any member country. It was later abandoned. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and Dubček returned to public life as speaker of the federal parliament. The Prague Spring is remembered as a rare attempt to reform a communist system from within, and as a lasting example of the limits that Moscow imposed on its allies.