Tanks crush the Prague Spring

On the night of 20 August 1968, the Soviet Union led troops from four Warsaw Pact countries across the borders of Czechoslovakia. The first units crossed in the small hours, and within a day they had seized Prague, the major cities, and the country’s transport and communication links. The aim was blunt: to crack down on the reformist mood gathering in the Czechoslovak capital.

That reform movement was the Prague Spring, a brief season of liberalisation under First Secretary Alexander Dubček, who had promised “socialism with a human face.” Easing censorship and loosening party control alarmed Moscow, which feared the experiment would spread across the Eastern Bloc.

The invasion turned a hopeful spring into two decades of “normalisation.”

Czechs and Slovaks met the tanks not with weapons but with defiance, surrounding armoured columns and arguing with crews in the streets. Resistance could not reverse the outcome. Moscow soon justified the action through what became the Brezhnev Doctrine, the claim that it could intervene wherever socialist rule appeared threatened.