A Storm Starts in the Prague Spring. August 18, 1968.

 WARNING! Border Zone. Enter only on authorization.

It had been building for awhile, but on this date it became inevitable.  Leonid Brezhnev convened an meeting with his Warsaw Pack counterparts which made the invasion of Czechoslovakia inevitable.

We haven't really dealt with the Prague Spring much here, but this was one of those events of 1968 which would explode onto the news.  The term refers to a reform movement undertaken by the sitting Czechoslovakian government to liberalize and open up the nation in spite of its Communist rule.  In some ways, the movement prefigures what would happen in the later Polish Solidarity movement and the following Czech Velvet Revolution.

Czechoslovakia had never been an eager Communist nation and had fallen to Communism in what was effectively a slow motion coup immediately following World War Two, in 1948.  It had never been an enthusiastic Communist nation however and its indigenous Socialist party had a history of hostility towards the Soviet Union dating back to the Russian Civil War.  In 1968 it introduced a series of reforms that started opening the country up, moving it in a less authoritarian direction.  Indeed, it completely eliminated censorship of the press, a revolutionary move in any Communist country, and it had set in motion reforms designed to allow freedom of movement and refocus the economy on consumer goods.  It was fairly clearly moving in a direction that far departed from conventional Communism.

Czech Legion soldiers, mostly Socialist, near an armored train. The Czech Legion had fiercely fought their way across Russia in a bitter campaign against the Red Army in a successful effort to return to the fighting the Germans in 1918.

This caused the USSR grave concern.

And not without reason.

While little appreciated or understood in the West, Soviet Communism had never been anywhere near as stable as imagined and had struggled with forces dedicated to its elimination since day one.  In the USSR itself, armed resistance to the Communist carried on until the late 1920s, well after the Russian Civil War is generally imagined to have ceased.  During World War Two large numbers of Soviet citizens fought against the Reds and with, or allied to, the Germans for a variety of reasons.  That carried on inside the USSR in some quarters against hopeless odds into the late 1940s.

 German postage stamp commemorating the 1953 uprising against the Soviets.

The USSR had imposed Communism on the the Eastern European countries, as is well known, following World War Two.  But that too saw resistance.  In 1953 East Germans rose up against the Soviets, the first East Block rebellion against the USSR since the end of the war and perhaps ironically one which saw the defeated Germans take on the victorious Soviets.  It was of course put down.  In 1956 the Hungarians tried the same thing in a revolution that Hungarians naively hoped would see Western intervention.  So the Czechs were not unaware of the risks.

This was particularly so as leading into the late summer, the Soviets had sent various representatives to the Czechs to try to redirect them, without success.