Introduction: Jiri Dienstbier writing for Newsweek explains that in the late 1960's Czechoslovakia was still part of the Eastern Bloc. Essentially that meant Czechoslovakia was a satellite of the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia was beginning to show a certain degree of independence. At the Thirteenth Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1966 a new economic policy was introduced. Steps were also being taken that might result in the separation of the Communist Party from the state government. In 1968, Ludvik Svoboda became President and Alexander Dubcek became head of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party. Press censorship and travel restrictions were eliminated. They also made plans for open elections, free trade, and economic reforms.
Czechoslovakia intended to become the most liberal Communist state in the world. The Czech government announced the policy of socialism with a human face. Many regulations were loosened or cancelled. Czechoslovak citizens were allowed to freely travel in and out of the country. The government enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the large majority of its population. However, Soviet party chief Leonid Brezhnev regarded the Czechoslovak experiment potentially infectious and therefore dangerous. The resulting euphoria and blooming of creativity was known as the "Prague Spring" (Dienstbier 25).
According to Jaromir Navratil in his book The Prague Spring 1968, on August 3, 1968, representatives from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia met in Bratislava and signed the Bratislava Declaration. The declaration affirmed unshakable fidelity to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and declared an implacable struggle against "bourgeois" ideology and all "antisocialist" forces. The Soviet Union expressed its intention to intervene in a Warsaw Pact country if a "bourgeois" system, a pluralist system of several political parties, was ever established...