Events in czechoslovakia 1968 prague spring

In 1968, the new head of state, Alexander Dubcek, gave a course to reforms: ensuring freedom of speech, control over the security service, the ability to create private enterprises without obstacles, and the multiparty system, inconceivable for the leadership of the USSR. The Greek Catholic Church is being restored, before, under the pressure of the Communist Party, converted to Orthodoxy (Catholicism implies direct subordination to Rome, and this is very suspicious). In the course of the phrase «socialism with a human face.» A. Dubcek, already openly warned, first Brezhnev, and then past the harsh school of the Hungarian rebellion Janos Kadar, that the reforms in Czechoslovakia are already going too far. The countries of the socialist bloc have limited state sovereignty, and this allows, if necessary, the possibility of military intervention from the outside. Dubcek is on his own.
At 2 am on August 21 at the airport near Prague, with an interval of 15 minutes begin to land An-12 with paratroopers. Already at 4.30 the building of the Central Committee of Czechoslovakia is surrounded by Soviet troops with armored vehicles. The reformers are looking for and sending «on the carpet» to Moscow.
Between the military and civilian population begins a war of nerves. Large-scale collisions are avoided, the Czechoslovak army is blocked in barracks and there is no obvious resistance. The prudent government of Czechoslovakia is signing the Moscow Treaty, which stipulates the permanent presence of Soviet troops on the territory of the republic. None of the reformers is even arrested, but the transformations are curtailed, with the exception of one; Czechoslovakia is divided into Czech and Slovak federal republics.
The former cordial relations of the peoples of the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are breaking off.
Losses of the parties: the USSR — 96 people, 84 of them are non-combat casualties. Poland — 10 people, Hungary — 4, Bulgaria — 1. Czechoslovakia — 108 people, however some victims could not be registered. The helicopter and the AN-12 with a cargo of food suffer a catastrophe. Destroy 10—12 tanks and armored personnel carriers.
Special role in Operation «Danube» is played by GDR soldiers. While Soviet soldiers obey the order not to shoot, they suffer humiliation and spitting from the crowd, the Germans use the firearm without the slightest hesitation. Soviet tanks stop when civilians protest on the road — German armored cars are confidently moving forward. The reason for this behavior is the massive expulsion of 3 million Germans, as well as Hungarians from Czechoslovakia in 1945—46. This was the 60,000-strong army of Ludvik Svoboda (to the captive Czechs, the Hitlerites were particularly cruel), and also the Czech population itself. To begin with, former citizens were forbidden: walk on sidewalks, use public transport, talk in public places in German. It was prescribed: to wear «N» stripes — a German, or a swastika bandage, to visit stores only at certain times, regularly to be seen in the police. Later all the property of «no citizens» was confiscated. During the exile, 19,000 people were killed, many refugees were maimed or raped.
…In 1989 in Prague there was a so-called. The Velvet Revolution. As a result of a series of mass demonstrations, the socialist system in this, not the smallest country in Europe was dismantled. Two years later, the shock wave of this event, having formed with others, caused the disintegration of the USSR.
Burned with milk, blowing on the water. The meaning of this proverb in relation to the «Prague Spring» means; after the horrors of the Hungarian uprising, the Central Committee of the CPSU decided that even if there is no urgent need to intervene, chaos and slaughter may begin. But History does not like to repeat exactly as before. You can not act on an established template, you need to make efforts to understand all the subtleties of the situation. The truth sooner or later is straightened out with an angular, shapeless force. I think, to the place of a verse from the poem of an Estonian poet (Toomas Liiv, «The swan, tearing off the wings of the tank»):
Oh, you’re a monster, you monster, you do not tear off, the swan
the tank has wings, oh, this poor little tank,
dying under the scorching sun, among
spitting field, eyeless, wingless,
exhausted in the unequal struggle with you, the swan
and what he did to you, this little iron,
protective color, this defenseless tank



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1. The expulsion of the German population from the German territories annexed to Poland, by Stalin’s decision, as well as, in effect, the Czech Germans living on their lands, is one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Sooner or later, the crimes committed before are manifested in the present. The way to aggravate this karma is silence.
2. Twenty Czech crowns in 1944 (the Czech Republic — the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Slovakia as part of the Third Reich). The whole country provides Germany’s requests without producing anything other than military products, without being subjected to crushing bombing of the Anglo-Saxons. Czech Slovaks are not particularly protesting, they are entering the Resistance movement only in the last months of the war, they are raising the uprising in Prague on May 6, 1945, and, having failed, cry for help to the Soviet tankmen.
3. Fifty Czechoslovak crowns in 1964. (Czechoslovakia is once again united, now it is a socialist state). Under the pressure of Stalin, Czechoslovakia had to abandon the Marshall plan. In 1948, the strength is gained by the Communist Party, with the support of the USSR it becomes the main leading force of the country. But, on January 1, 1993, there is a «Velvet Divorce». Neither the Czech Republic nor Slovakia insist on a «unitary state», do not bomb each other in the name of «unity,» and remain, as they say, friends.