The Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact Invasion Through the Soviet and East European Lens

Abstract

McDermott and Stibbe place the Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the context of broader global upheavals in the year 1968, and then explain what these challenges to the post-war order looked like from the more regionally-specific perspective of Soviet and East European actors. Reponses to Dubček’s reforms, both in Czechoslovakia and in neighbouring communist countries, were complex and varied. The chapter looks at how and why the ‘Warsaw Pact Five’ (the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria) reached a decision to intervene militarily in August 1968, and why Romania, Yugoslavia and Albania opposed this move. It also demonstrates how the invasion led to new and diverse ways of thinking about the state, patriotism, geography and borders across the region.