What produced the Prague Spring of 1968, and what were its consequences?

The Prague Spring represented the culmination of a period of rebelliousness that had been growing among Eastern and Central European satellites of the Soviet Union. The Soviet “sphere of influence”—the regions surrounding Russia largely ceded to it in discussions among US, British, and Soviet leaders during and at the end of World War II—was held together through military force and terror. Czechoslovakia fell under Soviet political influence by virtue of geography and the Red Army’s success at securing vast tracts of land following Germany’s defeat. An early indication of Czechoslovakia’s fate was the Soviet-backed Communist coup in Prague in 1948, during which initial suggestions of democratic freedoms were immediately crushed. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was intent on cementing his regime’s hold on as much European territory as physically possible, and he viewed Czechoslovakia as falling within the Soviet Union’s orbit.
While Stalin’s military and secret police organizations, aided and abetted by those of the satellite nations now under his control, secured their hold on what became known as “the Soviet Bloc” (and, more formally, as the Warsaw Pact), the seeds of rebellion had been planted in many of these captured nations. The bloodiest attempt at breaking away from the Soviet Union occurred in Hungary in 1956—a rebellion that was brutally crushed by the Soviets. Romania proved to be a minor thorn in Moscow’s side for decades with its independent Communist Party leaders, and Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito successfully separated Yugoslavia from Stalin’s grasp. The animosity between the Russians and the Poles was well-known, especially given Stalin’s decision to allow the German Army to ruthlessly suppress a major armed revolt by Polish forces prior to having his own military occupy Poland as German forces were pushed out. In short, the Soviet Bloc was not one big happy family despite Moscow’s success in establishing and controlling the armed forces and intelligence services of the nations under its control. Nationalism and opposition to communism continued to exist and fester, despite the ruthlessness of the regimes ruling each country.
Czechoslovakian politics were undergoing a dramatic transformation during the 1960s. As reform movements had appeared, however briefly, in other Soviet Bloc nations, the accession to the top of the Czech Communist Party of a liberal named Alexander Dubcek represented both a major setback for the Soviet Union and an equally major step forward for Czechoslovakia. Economic devastation wrought by adherence to Marxist-Leninist dictates had delegitimized Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia. Dubcek’s notion of “socialism with a human face,” in effect, the fundamental tenets of Marxism without the brutality and pervasiveness that characterized Communist regimes across Eastern Europe, was highly popular among the Czech and Slovak populations that together comprised Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Communist Party and Army leaderships, however, viewed Dubcek’s reforms as anathema to their priority of retaining a firm hold on all the satellite nations. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and other members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Politburo feared the loss of Czechoslovakia to the West. As Dubcek’s Prague Spring, the period of liberalization, advanced, Soviet fears intensified. Finally, on August 20, 1968, assembled armies of the Warsaw Pact, under Soviet control, invaded Czechoslovakia and restored a hardline regime loyal to Moscow back in power.
The effects of the Prague Spring and its suppression were profound. Whereas before many liberals in Europe had sympathized with the communist or socialist policies of eastern Europe, they were dismayed by the invasion of a peaceful country and the forced removal of a popular liberal leader, Dubcek. Many people across Europe and North America, disillusioned by the invasion, supported tougher policies by their own governments toward the Soviet Union. Indeed, liberal members of ruling Communist parties were sufficiently disillusioned that they increasingly emphasized their own independence from Moscow, which had routinely sought to control those parties. Suppression of the Prague Spring facilitated the subtle but persistent rise in anti-Communist and anti-Soviet sentiments in the very countries that the Soviet Union most sought to dominate.
The Prague Spring was militarily defeated. Intellectually and emotionally, however, its spirit lived on, evident in the later widespread demonstrations against communism and Soviet hegemony that resulted in the destruction of the most visible and potent symbol of that hegemony, the Berlin Wall.