When the Brotherly Tanks Arrived - by Marian Kechlibar
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When the Brotherly Tanks Arrived<br>1968 and the collective trauma of former Czechoslovakia.
Marian Kechlibar<br>Aug 21, 2026
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Author: František Dostál, Wikipedia<br>In the West, the year 1968 is strongly associated with the rebellion of leftist students in Paris: an abortive microrevolution which was visually attractive and indeed televised by a dozen journalistic crews. This microrevolution didn’t achieve much, but it was the shape of things to come. The staid, mostly conservative elites of the Western world would now have to struggle against radical newcomers, and sometimes lose.<br>Behind the Iron Curtain, the meaning of 1968 is completely inverted. This was the year when a genuine attempt to reform a Communist country into a more pluralistic system was crushed from Moscow by military force. The Brezhnev Doctrine was clear: no deviation from orthodoxy would be tolerated. The staid elite won.<br>Note: I will be reposting this particular article on every August 21st, yearly. Some things should never be forgotten, and this is one of them.
Czechoslovakia of the late 1960s was an interesting country. After twenty years of confiscations and nationalizations1, the engines of the Czechoslovak economy were clearly sputtering; nothing worked quite like before, and an industrial nation which was once in the global top ten2 was clearly losing its edge. A need for at least economic reforms was becoming painfully obvious even to the Politburo which de facto governed the country.<br>The top guy of that period was Antonín Novotný, in the presidential office since 19573. Nicknamed “der schöne Toni” (handsome Tony), he allegedly once won an informal UN ballot for the best-looking politician present. What nature gave him in looks, it took back in smarts; Novotný possessed a mediocre mind, and he was also unlucky enough to recognize that. His feelings of insecurity towards smarter people caused frequent personal conflicts and dissuaded talented cadres from working for him. The Czech people, never particularly reverent towards their bigwigs, mocked him mercilessly4.<br>Worse still, der schöne Toni hated the Slovaks, the smaller of the two constituent nations of Czechoslovakia, and did not even try to conceal his revulsion. This was causing some serious bad blood right in the middle of a country which needed to work together, and this alone was a reason to get rid of him. Novotný was President, but not a Tsar; the real power rested with the collective Party, and the Party could replace him if it wanted to. And, by late 1967, it reached the conclusion that this could no longer be postponed.
Succession is never easy in authoritarian systems, but the Czechoslovak society of the 1960s was undergoing an extensive thaw which unfroze a lot of old skeletons from the early Communist era. In the Stalinist times (1948-53), hundreds of people were hanged on trumped-up charges and tens of thousands put in gulags, sometimes just for being born into the wrong family; Albert Einstein himself pleaded with brutal President Gottwald for the life of Milada Horáková, in vain. Ten years later, the regime grew softer and the survivors started clamoring for justice. Not every conviction was quashed, but a lot of them were, and it was becoming clear to everyone that the regime had a lot of blood and mayhem on its hands.<br>In the fall of 1967, a blackout at a student dormitory in Prague-Strahov resulted in student protests whose main slogan “We want light!” could be interpreted in more than one way. Novotný tried to suppress those, but his leadership position was shot so badly that his opponents made use of this occasion to topple him.<br>His successor, Alexander Dubček, was not as handsome, but he possessed genuine charisma and a capability to connect with the public. A down-to-earth guy whom power did not spoil, he didn’t mind going to a swimming pool full of normal citizens, eschewing the special amenities for the elite of the Party, and the people loved it. Measured by the total amount of jokes, Dubček commanded a lot more natural support than any of his Communist predecessors. He was also quite liberal and recruited more liberal colleagues into the top positions of the Party and the government. The thaw accelerated and, in a few months, turned the glaciers of the Communist regime into a vigorous flood.<br>The Spring of 1968, also called “building of socialism with a human face” (that face was Dubček’s), very quickly eroded the foundations of the authoritarian regime and uncovered the democratic roots underneath. Censorship was abolished; hundreds of victims of previous injustice were rehabilitated; informal organizations and movements started organizing themselves. The question whether the Party should give up its privileged position and become just one of many parties which compete for voters’ preference was no longer taboo. People talked and wrote and composed songs which,...