Thunder of '68 Rumbles Onward

Thirty-five years ago, on Aug. 20, 1968, Anton Tazky -- a secretary of the Slovak Party Central Committee and a personal friend of Czechoslovakian Communist Party chief Alexander Dubcek -- was driving back to Bratislava from an outlying district. He noticed odd, bright lights in the distance, and as he drove closer, he realized he had been seeing the headlights of tanks and military trucks with soldiers in foreign uniforms at the wheels. A movie shoot, Tazky decided. He went to bed as his country was being invaded, courtesy of Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Union.

It was the midpoint of a year unparalleled for wars, uprisings, revolutions and upheavals. And yet, with hindsight, it's clear that no single event of that eventful year had a greater effect -- or holds a stronger message for us today -- than the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader, recently said the 1968 invasion "had an effect on all domestic and foreign policy and the entire development of Soviet society, which entered a stage of profound stagnation."

It took only a day of world outrage for Brezhnev to realize he had made a terrible blunder, and he tried to backtrack. What he couldn't know was that it was the first crack in the post-World War II geopolitical structure; the Cold War, which was at the root of so much unrest in 1968, had begun to disintegrate.

Dubcek had come to power in Prague the first week of 1968 in a shakeup that ousted the most repressive government in the Soviet bloc. "We couldn't change the people," Dubcek said wryly, "so we changed the leaders."

Suddenly, Czechoslovakians were free to travel, their press was free to report on what it wanted in the way it wanted and their labor unions and agricultural associations were free to criticize government policy. What they had in mind was the creation of a Communist democracy, Marx's ideal made real. It came to be called the Prague Spring.

By summer, activists and hippies from Amsterdam to Berkeley packed the city to test Dubcek's experiment. It was difficult to find a hotel vacancy or even a table at one of Prague's few restaurants.