Alexander Dubcek Research Paper

During the night of August 20-21, 1968, the joint forces of the Warszawa pact invaded Czechoslovakia. This was the largest activity in Europe since the Second world war as up to two hundred thousand troops from Russia, East Germany, Poland, Republic of Bulgaria and Republic of Hungary occupied Czechoslovakia in ‘Operation Danube’. Launched in response to the social movement led by Czechoslovakia leader Alexander Dubcek (known as the ‘Prague Spring’), the Warszawa accord invasion was preceded by many months of negotiation and preparation. As Jiri Valenta argues, the Soviet leadership determined to intervene in Czechoslovakia ‘only when an extended amount of hesitation and vacillation’.[1] throughout the course of 1968, the steady increase of Dubcek’s reform programme 1st worried and then alarmed Moscow, finally persuading Soviet leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev that Soviet interests were seriously compromised by the threat of ‘counter-revolution’ in Czechoslovakia. above all, Dubcek’s failure to reply to various warnings and ultimatums issued between April and August 1968 appears to have played an important role in influencing Brezhnev’s call to
sanction military intervention.
Alexander Dubcek became the leader of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party on January 5, 1968.
once he assumed the leadership, Dubcek faced the challenge of revitalizing the general public standing of the Communist Party; the previous leader Antonin Novotny had been wide criticised for his inability to redress the ‘political discontent of the people’ and, therefore, the ‘declining activity and interest’ of Communist Party members. On April 5, 1968, Dubcek revealed his Action Programme, a series of planned reforms that aimed toward rising economic conditions in Czechoslovakia and sanctioned a better degree of liberalization, promising greater freedom of speech, movement, association and greater political participation by non-communist organisations. the power of the police, military and judiciary were conjoint to be
curtailed.
Dubcek’s Action Programme was Associate in Nursing experiment in reform from higher than. it absolutely was Dubcek’s intention that the Communist Party would retain its ‘leading role’ in Czechoslovakia, however he hoped that by encouraging an additional open exchange of views and a higher level of political participation, he could narrow the gap between the Party and society, reviving communism and enabling the party to achieve greater legitimacy and public support, therefore creating ‘socialism with a human face’.[2] The Action Programme was few revolutionary document; it meant to strengthen the economic system and exhibit no fundamental challenge to the Soviet Union and its satellite states. whereas Dubcek aimed to redefine the role of the Communist Party, he failed to request to abandon it. particularly, the programme stressed orthodoxy in policy, stressing a continued commitment to ‘fighting the forces of imperialist reaction’ and stating that ‘the basic orientation of Czechoslovak policy ….revolves around alliance and cooperation with the Soviet Union and, therefore, the other socialist states’. Throughout 1968, Dubcek continued to emphasize that Czechoslovakian commitments to the Soviet Union and other warsaw pact countries wouldn't change.[3]

However, Dubcek’s proposals had the potential for considerable movement removed from the orthodox Soviet model, diluting the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party in state and society. Jiri Valenta even referred to the Action Programme because the ‘Magna Carta of Dubcek’s new leadership’.[4] The Action Programme, therefore, sparked Soviet issues, as Moscow began to observe developments in Czechoslovakia carefully.