Czechoslovakia, 1968
After the Second World War, unlike the other nations in the Soviet Block, Czechoslovakia began to stress heavy industry and consumer goods over agricultural and services. By the 1950’s, however, the concept of central planning had crippled the nation’s fledgling heavy industries with waste and corruption resulting in high labor turnover, low productivity, and poor product quality. The communist party, in addition to being burdened with a failing economy, was being toward apart by a conflict revolving around the extent to which the liberalization should be applied and an effort within the Slovak community for greater autonomy.
What were Czechoslovakia up to in the 1950's?
old War tensions were at their peak in the 1960s. The U.S. and Western Europe had formed into an alliance of collective defense called NATO, while the Soviet Union and the communist countries of Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia, allied under the Warsaw Pact. In the summer of 1968, a series of liberalizing reforms in Czechoslovakia, including increasing freedoms of the press and the loosening of political censorship, raised concern among Warsaw Pact leaders that the removal of press censorship and surveillance would pose security risks to all of the Eastern bloc countries. Because Czechoslovakia bordered Austria and West Germany, which formed part of the Western bloc, the Soviet Union feared that liberal ideas from the West would filter into the East through the Czech border. Warsaw Pact leader Brezhnev sent repeated warnings to the Czech government to end its liberalizing reforms, while Czech president Dubček defended these reforms and asserted that Czechoslovakia remained committed to the communist ideology and the Warsaw Pact. Brezhnev argued that the collective security interests of the Eastern bloc should be put above any one country’s national objectives. Under this claim of authority, a policy that would become known as the Brezhnev doctrine, the forces from the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968. Dubček and other Czech leaders did not believe that the Soviet Union would invade and failed to prepare; they were quickly arrested and sent to Moscow to be interrogated. The Soviet Union managed to quickly stamp out Czech resistance, but the incident spurred a number of protests and resistance movements across the Eastern bloc.