Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia began at approximately 11 pm on the 20th of August 1968, when columns of tanks rolled silently toward Prague under the cover of darkness. Before dawn, 250,000 troops and 2,000 tanks had crossed the border. The soldiers had been told they would be greeted as liberators. Instead, crowds met them with stones, eggs, tomatoes, and apples.
How did a socialist reform movement dedicated to 'socialism with a human face' come to provoke the largest military operation in Europe since World War II? Who were the men who planned it, and who were the men who resisted? And what happened to the country - and to the broader communist world - in its aftermath?
Antonín Novotný began the process of de-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the pace was sluggish compared to other Eastern Bloc states. The rehabilitation of victims of the Stalinist-era Slánský trials, for instance, was considered as early as 1963 but did not actually happen until 1967. In the early 1960s, the country also experienced a serious economic downturn. The Soviet model of industrialization had been imported wholesale, but it was designed for less developed economies. Czechoslovakia was already fully industrialized before World War II, and the fit was poor.
Novotný's attempt to address this, the 1965 New Economic Model, created a new problem: economic reform had an appetite. Once people began debating how the economy should be run, they began debating how everything should be run. By June 1967, a small fraction of the Czech writers' union - including Ludvík Vaculík, Milan Kundera, Jan Procházka, Antonín Jaroslav Liehm, Pavel Kohout, and Ivan Klíma - had begun openly sympathizing with radical socialist ideas. The party responded by transferring control of the union's gazette, Literární noviny, to the Ministry of Culture. Even reformers who later became central figures in the Prague Spring, including Alexander Dubček himself, endorsed these punitive moves at the time.
On the 5th of January 1968, Alexander Dubček replaced Novotný as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Novotný had invited Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev to Prague the previous December hoping to shore up his position, but Brezhnev was surprised by the depth of opposition to Novotný and declined to back him. Dubček's rise was the beginning of what became known as the Prague Spring.
In April, Dubček launched an 'Action Programme' that promised freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of movement. It envisioned a ten-year transition toward democratic elections and spoke of mixing planned and market economies. The programme also proposed limiting the power of the secret police and federalizing the republic. Dubček called his vision 'socialism with a human face'.
The abolition of censorship was formally confirmed by law on the 26th of June 1968. It was, by the account of those who lived through it, the first time in Czech history that censorship had been lifted. Publications that had been organs of party propaganda rapidly became instruments of criticism. Television broadcast meetings between former political prisoners and the communist officials who had imprisoned them. The poet Jaroslav Seifert headed a Writer's Union committee formed in April 1968 to investigate the persecution of writers after the Communist takeover in February 1948. The press reform was probably the only Prague Spring measure to be fully implemented - though only for a short period.
Leonid Brezhnev and the wider Warsaw Pact leadership feared the Prague Spring for overlapping reasons. One was strategic: part of Czechoslovakia bordered Austria and West Germany, meaning defectors could slip west and foreign agents could slip east. Another was contagion: if liberalization went unchecked in Czechoslovakia, it might spread to Poland and East Germany. Within the Soviet Union itself, nationalism in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine was already troubling Moscow, and events in Prague threatened to make it worse.
According to documents from the Ukrainian Archives compiled by Mark Kramer, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and Communist Party of Ukraine leaders Petro Shelest and Nikolai Podgorny were among the most aggressive advocates for military intervention. A separate account holds that the push came first from Polish First Secretary Władysław Gomułka, who reportedly told Brezhnev he was 'blind' and looking at Czechoslovakia with 'too much emotion'. East German First Secretary Walter Ulbricht, worried about his own power and what he called the 'cancer' of Dubcekism spreading into East Germany, called the reforms 'antirevolutionary' and emphatically demanded military action at the Warsaw Conference in July 1968.
At a Soviet Politburo meeting on the 16th to the 17th of August, a resolution was unanimously passed to 'provide help to the Communist Party and people of Czechoslovakia through military force'. On the 18th of August, at a Warsaw Pact meeting, Brezhnev announced the intervention would proceed on the night of the 20th of August and asked for 'fraternal support'. The leaders of Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland all agreed.
The operation began not at the border but at Ruzyne International Airport in the early hours of the 20th of August. A Soviet spetsnaz task force from the GRU arrived on a flight from Moscow carrying more than 100 agents dressed in plain clothes, who had requested an emergency landing due to claimed 'engine failure'. They secured the airport and cleared the way for an airlift of Soviet Airborne Forces arriving on Antonov An-12 transport aircraft, equipped with artillery and light tanks.
Simultaneously, ground columns of tanks and motorized rifle troops moved on Prague and other major centers, meeting almost no resistance. The Czechoslovak People's Army, though considered one of the most advanced militaries in the Eastern Bloc, lacked an independent chain of command, and the government feared it might side with the invaders as the Hungarian People's Army had done during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Brezhnev wanted the operation to appear multilateral - unlike the Soviet intervention in Hungary - but Soviet troops outnumbered other participants five to one, and the Soviet High Command was in charge at all times.
East Germany's National People's Army was notably absent. Brezhnev had cancelled their participation just hours before the invasion, at the request of Czechoslovak opponents of Dubček who feared a larger resistance if German troops were present, given memories of the German occupation only thirty years earlier. Romania and Albania also refused to participate. Albania subsequently withdrew from the Warsaw Pact entirely in September 1968.
By morning, Dubček and other reformists had been arrested by the KGB and flown to Moscow, where they were held in secret and interrogated for days. Paratroopers had cut the telephone lines at KSČ headquarters and stormed the building. During the occupation, 137 Czechoslovaks were killed and 500 seriously wounded.
Popular resistance to the invasion was immediate and almost entirely nonviolent. Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun, then a junior Soviet officer leading a tank column, recalled being told the people of Czechoslovakia would welcome his forces as 'Liberators'. Instead, angry crowds attacked them with stones, eggs, tomatoes, and apples. Food and water were withheld. Locals quietly opened the gates of Czech breweries and spirit factories to the enlisted soldiers, making entire units inebriated and disrupting operations to the fury of Soviet commanders. Citizens removed street signs, except those pointing back toward Moscow. One poster targeting Walter Ulbricht read: 'German soldiers go home and liquidate Ulbricht, who is a new Hitler! Your people do not agree with your actions!'
The protests lasted roughly seven days before fading. Demoralization is the most common explanation - an overpowering military presence, abandoned by their own leaders, and Dubček's own call for his people not to resist. Many Czechoslovaks viewed the signing of the Moscow Protocol as an act of treason. The Protocol, signed after days of negotiations in Moscow, demanded the suppression of opposition groups, the full reinstatement of censorship, and the dismissal of specific reformist officials.
On the 19th of January 1969, student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in Prague to protest the renewed suppression of free speech. On the 17th of April 1969, Dubček was replaced as First Secretary by Gustáv Husák, and the period the Czechs called 'Normalization' formally began. Husák reversed the reforms, purged the party of its liberal members, and dismissed professional and intellectual elites who expressed disagreement. Many of those purged became the dissidents of Czechoslovak underground culture, active in Charter 77 and the movements that ultimately produced the Velvet Revolution.
The night of the invasion, Canada, Denmark, France, Paraguay, the United Kingdom, and the United States all requested an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. On the afternoon of the 21st of August, the Council met to hear Czechoslovak Ambassador Jan Mužík denounce the invasion. Soviet ambassador Jacob Malik insisted the Warsaw Pact had offered 'fraternal assistance' against 'antisocial forces'. US ambassador George Ball responded that 'the kind of fraternal assistance that the Soviet Union is according to Czechoslovakia is exactly the same kind that Cain gave to Abel'. The eventual vote was ten members in favor of a resolution condemning the intervention, three abstentions, and a Soviet veto.
The United States had its own reasons for restraint. President Lyndon B. Johnson was already committed to the Vietnam War and was pursuing a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Moscow that required Soviet cooperation. He had stated the US would not intervene on behalf of the Prague Spring. In an irony not lost on UN Secretary-General U Thant, the Americans pressed the case against Soviet intervention while their own bombing of Vietnam continued; Thant observed that if the Soviets were 'bombing and napalming the villages of Czechoslovakia' he might have called for an end to the occupation.
The invasion coincided with the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Student activist Abbie Hoffman called Chicago 'Czechago', drawing a parallel between Soviet repression in Prague and police repression of American protesters. On the other side, anti-Communist politicians such as John Connally used the invasion to argue for tougher posture toward the Soviet Union and a renewed commitment to the Vietnam War.
China responded furiously. Speaking at a banquet at the Romanian Embassy in Beijing on the 23rd of August 1968, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai denounced the Soviet Union for 'fascist politics, great power chauvinism, national egoism and social imperialism', compared the invasion to the Vietnam War and to Adolf Hitler's policies toward Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, and issued a barely veiled call for guerrilla resistance. Mao Zedong saw the Brezhnev Doctrine as ideological cover for a future Soviet invasion of China. The invasion contributed to Chinese fears that led them to accelerate the Third Front military-industrial campaign. The Sino-Soviet crisis ultimately pressured Brezhnev into pursuing détente with US president Richard Nixon in 1972.
Among communist parties outside the Warsaw Pact, the damage was lasting. Italian and Spanish eurocommunist parties condemned the occupation. The Communist Party of Greece suffered a major split, with its pro-Czech faction breaking away to found the Eurocommunist KKE Interior. The Communist Party of Finland's denunciation of the invasion fueled an internal dispute with its pro-Soviet faction that eventually led to the party's disintegration. Christopher Hitchens, writing in 2008, put it plainly: 'What became clear, however, was that there was no longer something that could be called the world Communist movement. It was utterly, irretrievably, hopelessly split. The main spring had broken. And the Prague Spring had broken it.'
Apologies came slowly and in sequence. The Hungarian government was first, on the 11th of August 1989, when the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party acknowledged the invasion as 'fundamentally wrong'. Poland's House of the National Assembly followed on the 21st anniversary of the intervention in 1989. East Germany's People's Assembly apologized on the 1st of December 1989, and Bulgaria issued its apology the following day.
On the 4th of December 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev and other Warsaw Pact leaders drafted a joint statement calling the 1968 invasion a mistake. The Soviet news agency Tass released the statement, which described the deployment of troops as 'interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign Czechoslovakia.' Gorbachev later said of Dubček that he 'believed that he could build socialism with a human face. I have only a good opinion of him.'
Dubček himself said: 'My problem was not having a crystal ball to foresee the Russian invasion. At no point between January and August 20, in fact, did I believe that it would happen.'
Russia's reckoning was more qualified. Boris Yeltsin condemned the invasion as 'aggression' and 'interference in the internal affairs' of a sovereign state. Vladimir Putin, during a state visit to Prague on the 1st of March 2006, acknowledged moral responsibility while explicitly declining legal responsibility, citing Yeltsin's earlier condemnation as speaking 'for the Russian Federation and for the Russian people.'
In 2015, the Russian state television channel Russia-1 aired a documentary called Warsaw Pact: Declassified Pages, which presented the invasion as a protective measure against a NATO coup. Slovakia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the film as an attempt to 'rewrite history'. Czech president Miloš Zeman called it a 'journalistic lie'. Even the Russian ambassador to the Czech Republic distanced himself from the film. Shirley Temple Black, the former child film star who had been sent to Prague in August 1968 to prepare for a US ambassadorship to a post-communist Czechoslovakia, was finally recognized as the first American ambassador to a democratic Czechoslovakia when Warsaw Pact forces withdrew from the country in 1989.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
When did the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia take place?
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia began at approximately 11 pm on the 20th of August 1968 and continued into the 21st of August. Four countries participated: the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
What was the Prague Spring and why did it lead to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia?
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that began on the 5th of January 1968 when Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party. Dubček's reforms, which included abolishing censorship, expanding freedom of speech and movement, and planning a mixed economy, alarmed Soviet and Warsaw Pact leaders who feared Czechoslovakia might defect from the Eastern Bloc and that liberalization would spread to Poland, East Germany, and the Soviet republics.
How many troops and casualties were involved in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia?
About 250,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks crossed the border on the night of the invasion, with the total eventually rising to 500,000 troops. During the occupation, 137 Czechoslovaks were killed and 500 seriously wounded.
Which countries refused to participate in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia?
Romania and Albania refused to participate in the invasion. Albania subsequently withdrew from the Warsaw Pact entirely in September 1968. East Germany's National People's Army was also excluded at the last moment, at the request of Czechoslovak opponents of Dubček who feared greater resistance if German troops were present, given the memory of the German occupation thirty years earlier.
What happened to Alexander Dubček after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia?
Dubček was arrested by the KGB on the night of the 20th of August 1968 and flown to Moscow, where he was held in secret and interrogated. He was returned to Prague on the 27th of August and initially retained his post as First Secretary. He was forced to resign in April 1969 following the Czechoslovak Hockey Riots, and was replaced by Gustáv Husák.
What was the Brezhnev Doctrine and how did it relate to the invasion of Czechoslovakia?
The Brezhnev Doctrine was the Soviet policy of compelling Warsaw Pact satellite states to subordinate their national interests to those of the Eastern Bloc through military force if necessary. It emerged directly from the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and was used to justify Soviet intervention whenever a communist government was deemed insufficiently aligned with Moscow.
All sources
74 references cited across the entry
- 1journalОдноси Југославије и Совјетског Савеза 1968: Између нужности сарадње и принципа слободеMilivoj Bešlin — 2011
- 4webOperace Dunaj a oběti na straně okupantůJaroslav Šatraj — Západočeská univerzita v Plzni
- 5webČs. armáda po roce 1945Pavel Minařík et al.
- 6webThe Soviet War in Afghanistan: History and Harbinger of Future WarCiaonet.org — 27 April 1978
- 8webBrali udział w inwazji na Czechosłowację. Kombatanci?Sławomir Skomra — Agora SA
- 9newsBulgaria's Role in 1968 Invasion of CzechoslovakiaLyubomir Gigov — 2024-08-27
- 11webHistorians pin down number of 1968 invasion victimsRuth Fraňková — 18 August 2017
- 12webAugust 1968 – Victims of the OccupationÚstav pro studium totalitních režimů
- 13book1968 : the year that rocked the worldKurlansky, Mark. — Ballantine — 2004
- 15webDubcek's Failings? The 1968 Warsaw Pact Invasion of CzechoslovakiaKelly Hignett — 2012-06-27
- 16bookPromises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and UtopiaCentral European University Press — 2011
- 17webThe Soviet-led Intervention in CzechoslovakiaJames Von Geldern et al. — Soviethistory.org
- 18newsAkční program Komunistické strany ČeskoslovenskaAlexander Dubček — Rudé právo — 10 April 1968
- 19webPrague SpringBeatrice Derasadurain — thinkquest.org
- 20webThe Prague Spring, 1968Library of Congress — 1985
- 21newsTwo Thousand WordsLudvík Vaculík — Literární listy — 27 June 1968
- 22webLudvík Vaculík: a Czechoslovak man of lettersLinda Mastalir — Radio Prague — 25 July 2006
- 23bookThe Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague SpringPaulina Bren — Cornell University Press — 2010
- 24newsPražské Jaro 1968Jitka Vondrová — Akademie věd ČR — 25 June 2008
- 25newsCo je Pražské jaro 1968?Jiří Hoppe — Charles University — 6 August 2008
- 27bookSoviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968Jiri Valenta — The Johns Hopkins University Press — 1979
- 30bookThe Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign PolicyMatthew J. Ouimet — The University of North Carolina Press — 2003
- 31webA Shattering Moment: LBJ's Last Hope and The End of the Prague SpringDavid Kurlander — 17 September 2020
- 32webWarsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia - ABC News - August 21, 196824 July 2019
- 33newsRussians march into Czechoslovakia21 August 1968
- 36bookEncyclopedia of the Cold WarRoutledge — 2008
- 37bookPromises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and UtopiaCentral European University Press — 2011
- 40news1955: Communist states sign Warsaw Pact14 May 1955
- 41bookThe Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968: Forty Years LaterStolarik, M. Mark — Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers — 2010
- 43webGRU, Alpha and Vympel: Russia's most famous covert operatorsrbth.com — 18 June 2017
- 45webThe Man Who Said "No" to the Soviets21 August 2015
- 47bookMit bloßen Händen – der einsame Kampf der Tschechen und Slowaken 1968Erich Bertleff — Verlag Fritz Molden
- 50webHear My Cry – Maciej DrygasJune 2007
- 51webCzech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek honoured the memory of Ryszard SiwiecPress Department of the Office of Czech Government
- 52bookPolitics and Popular Opinion in East Germany, 1945–68Mark Allinson — Manchester University Press — 2000
- 54bookNation Against Nation: What Happened to the U.N. Dream and What the U.S. Can Do About ItThomas M. Franck — Oxford University Press — 1985
- 56bookMao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War ChinaCovell F. Meyskens — Cambridge University Press — 2020
- 57webThe Verbal Revolution. How the Prague Spring broke world communism's main springChristopher Hitchens — 25 August 2008
- 58webWestern CPs Condemn Invasion, Hail Prague SpringKevin Devlin — Blinken Open Society Archives
- 59webThe Effects of the Prague Spring in EuropeErkki Tuomioja — 2008
- 60webSoviet, Warsaw Pact Call 1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia a Mistake With AM-Czechoslovakia, BjtAnn Imse — Dec 5, 1989
- 61webSoviets: Prague Invasion WrongVincent J. Schodolski — December 5, 1989
- 62newsCzech Republic: 1968 Viewed From The Occupiers' Perspective9 April 2008
- 63webGorbačov o roce 1968: V životě jsem nezažil větší dilemaMirko Raduševič
- 64webPutin: Russia bears "moral responsibility" for 1968 Soviet invasionRob Cameron — 2 March 2006
- 65newsRussian TV doc on 1968 invasion angers Czechs and Slovaks1 June 2015
- 66newsRussian Documentary On 'Helpful' 1968 Invasion Angers Czechs1 June 2015
- 67newsRussian 1968 Prague Spring Invasion Film Angers Czechs, SlovaksLadka Mortkowitz Bauerova et al. — 1 June 2015
- 69newsStatement of the Speaker of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic on the documentary film of the Russian television about the 1968 invasionMinistry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic — 31 May 2015
- 70newsFico to return to Moscow to meet Putin, MedvedevPrague Post — 1 June 2015
- 72newsMinistr Zaorálek si předvolal velvyslance Ruské federace1 June 2015