Alexander Dubcek Research Paper

During the night of August 20-21, 1968, the joint forces of the Warszawa pact invaded Czechoslovakia. This was the largest activity in Europe since the Second world war as up to two hundred thousand troops from Russia, East Germany, Poland, Republic of Bulgaria and Republic of Hungary occupied Czechoslovakia in ‘Operation Danube’. Launched in response to the social movement led by Czechoslovakia leader Alexander Dubcek (known as the ‘Prague Spring’), the Warszawa accord invasion was preceded by many months of negotiation and preparation. As Jiri Valenta argues, the Soviet leadership determined to intervene in Czechoslovakia ‘only when an extended amount of hesitation and vacillation’.[1] throughout the course of 1968, the steady increase of Dubcek’s reform programme 1st worried and then alarmed Moscow, finally persuading Soviet leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev that Soviet interests were seriously compromised by the threat of ‘counter-revolution’ in Czechoslovakia. above all, Dubcek’s failure to reply to various warnings and ultimatums issued between April and August 1968 appears to have played an important role in influencing Brezhnev’s call to
once he assumed the leadership, Dubcek faced the challenge of revitalizing the general public standing of the Communist Party; the previous leader Antonin Novotny had been wide criticised for his inability to redress the ‘political discontent of the people’ and, therefore, the ‘declining activity and interest’ of Communist Party members. On April 5, 1968, Dubcek revealed his Action Programme, a series of planned reforms that aimed toward rising economic conditions in Czechoslovakia and sanctioned a better degree of liberalization, promising greater freedom of speech, movement, association and greater political participation by non-communist organisations. the power of the police, military and judiciary were conjoint to be