Why the Prague Spring was Doomed to Failure

‘Socialism with a human face’ came head to head with the realities of Soviet communism.

Soviet tanks roll into Prague, 21 August 1968.

The writer Milan Kundera made the world interested in the fate of Czechoslovakia. Scores of westerners who did not learn about the events of the Prague Spring from school textbooks or mass media did recognise it as the historical backdrop to Kundera’s novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

In Kundera’s telling, the Prague Spring was ‘a brief flowering of openness behind the Iron Curtain’. After many years of slow, slogging liberalisation following the death of Stalin, Alexander Dubček, the head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, took the country towards the much beloved and often romanticised idea of ‘socialism with a human face’.

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