When The Tanks Rolled In

"We are being jammed . . . We are being jammed . . . When you hear the Czech national anthem you will know it's all over."

-- Radio Prague, August 1968

The last surge of reformist fervor in Czechoslovakia ended abruptly the night of Aug. 20, 1968, when some 500,000 soldiers from five Warsaw Pact nations flooded across the borders. As the invading armies advanced on Prague, elite paramilitary units of the KGB landed at the capital's Ruzyne Airport, then fanned out and secured key transportation and communication centers. Czechoslovak citizens awoke to find the streets of all major cities blocked by tanks.

When the invasion began, the leaders of Alexander Dubcek's government were meeting to consider further liberalization and the ouster of some hard-liners from the ruling Presidium. "How could they do this to me?" Dubcek reportedly exclaimed. "I have served the cause of the Soviet Union and Communism all my life." All the reformers were quickly arrested, and Dubcek was hustled off to Moscow to be reprimanded by Brezhnev. TASS offered the lamest of rationales. "Party and government leaders," the Soviet news agency claimed, "have asked the Soviet Union and other allied states to render the fraternal Czechoslovak people urgent assistance" against counterrevolutionary forces. Moscow's assertion of the right to use force to prevent departures from Communist orthodoxy in satellite nations came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

The Czechoslovaks resisted as best they could. Mobs of youths surrounded the tanks and tried to persuade the young soldiers manning them to pull out. When persuasion failed, the Czechoslovaks began throwing garbage, rocks, bottles and, finally, fire bombs. A battle was fought around the offices of Radio Prague, where tanks and troops had to push through a barricade of buses and a hail of Molotov cocktails before taking over the station. In all, nearly 100 people were killed as the Warsaw Pact forces consolidated their putsch.

In the face of overwhelming military power, the will to resist soon waned, but dissidents continued to broadcast from clandestine radio stations for days after the invasion. "We have no weapons," said one renegade transmission, "but our contempt is stronger than tanks."