Alexander Dubček

Alexander Dubček was born in 1921 in Uhrovec, Slovakia. His parents, drawn by the socialist ideal, joined the Interhelpo cooperative in Soviet Kirghizia in 1925, and Dubček spent his boyhood in Frunze and Gorky. Returning to Slovakia in 1938, he joined the illegal Communist Party of Slovakia the following year, fought with arms in the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, was wounded twice, and lost his brother Július. Raised in the Soviet Union and tested against fascism, his was a biography no one could call anti-Soviet.

He rose through the postwar party apparatus, studied at the Higher Party School in Moscow, and as first secretary of the Slovak party from 1963 pressed for the rehabilitation of the victims of the political trials of the 1950s and for Slovakia's equal standing. On January 5, 1968 the Central Committee elected him first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in place of Novotný. The Action Programme of April promised inner-party democracy, freedom of the press, rehabilitation, federalization, and economic reform; censorship was abolished in June. The Prague Spring, under the slogan "socialism with a human face", was presented not as the abandonment of socialism but as its renewal, and it won passionate popular support.

Dubček repeatedly affirmed loyalty to the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, but the Soviet and neighboring party leaderships came to judge that the reforms were eroding the party's leading role and endangering the security of the bloc. The pressure of the summer of 1968, from the Dresden meeting through the Warsaw letter to the Čierna talks, exposed an unresolved question of the whole movement: how equal the relations between socialist states could really be.

In the night of August 20-21, 1968, the armies of five Warsaw Pact states entered Czechoslovakia. Dubček and his fellow leaders were seized in the Central Committee building by Soviet paratroopers and flown to Moscow, where on August 26 they had to sign the Moscow Protocol rolling back most of the reforms; Kriegel alone refused. When Dubček addressed the nation by radio on his return, his voice broke repeatedly. In April 1969 he was replaced by Husák; after a spell as ambassador to Turkey he was expelled from the party in 1970 and spent fifteen years as a mechanical clerk in the Slovak forestry administration, under surveillance.

Post-archive research has shown that the decision to intervene rested on fear of the bloc's unraveling and on the letter of invitation from Czechoslovak conservatives styling themselves the "healthy forces". Yet the intervention failed even by its own declared aims. It halted the reforms, but it also broke popular confidence in socialism and alienated the communist parties of Western Europe. On December 4, 1989 the Warsaw Pact states that had taken part formally condemned the 1968 intervention as an unlawful interference in internal affairs.

On November 24, 1989 Dubček stood beside Havel on a balcony above Wenceslas Square in Prague, appearing before a crowd for the first time in twenty-one years. On December 28 that year he was elected chairman of the Federal Assembly. To the end he considered himself a democratic socialist, joining the Slovak Social Democrats in 1992; he died on November 7 that year of injuries from a September car crash. It was the life of a boy raised in the Soviet Union who attempted the renewal of socialism, and who lived to see the decision that crushed that attempt revoked by its own authors.