People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) Dissident 1908–1979 ○ Expelled 1969; died under police watch

The only Prague Spring leader who refused to sign the Moscow Protocol

In Moscow, standing before Brezhnev, Kriegel said: 'Send me to Siberia or shoot me dead. I will not sign.'

Czechoslovak communist politician and physician. He served as a doctor with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, then rose to become a KSČ Presidium member and chairman of the National Front during the 1968 Prague Spring, where he was among the most radical reformers. Arrested with Dubček on 21 August and deported to Moscow, he was the only one of twenty-six Czechoslovak politicians who refused to sign the Moscow Protocol. Expelled from the party and stripped of his medical license, he became a dissident and was among the first to sign Charter 77 in 1977.

Czechoslovakia Dissident 1913–1993 ○ Natural causes

A diplomat who turned international law into a language of civic rights

At the United Nations in 1968, he protested the Soviet invasion as an “occupation.”

Jiří Hájek was a Czechoslovak politician and diplomat who experienced both the reform promise of the Prague Spring and its defeat. After calling the Soviet-led invasion an occupation at the United Nations in 1968, he lost his offices and Communist Party membership, demonstrating the limits and possibilities of invoking international commitments against state power. In 1977, with Václav Havel and Jan Patočka, he became one of Charter 77’s first spokespeople, presenting the human-rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act as a basis for civic responsibility.

Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) Dissident 1926–2015 ○ Natural causes

The Czech writer who declared 'not one human question has been solved in twenty years' and authored the 'Two Thousand Words' manifesto

When Vaculík declared at the 1967 Writers' Congress that 'not one human question has been solved in the last twenty years,' the party delegation walked out and the audience erupted in long applause.

A Czech writer and Communist Party member who was expelled after his speech at the 1967 Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak Writers openly indicted the Novotný regime, declaring that 'not one human question has been solved in the last twenty years.' In June 1968 his manifesto 'Two Thousand Words' called on citizens to press for deeper reform through their own initiative, becoming a defining text of the Prague Spring and a pretext for Soviet intervention. Banned from publishing after the invasion, he founded the samizdat series Edice Petlice (Padlock Editions), which circulated works by banned writers including Václav Havel and Ivan Klíma for seventeen years. A Charter 77 signatory, he continued his criticism of the regime and, after 1989, wrote a weekly column for Lidové noviny until his death in 2015.

Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) Dissident 1930–1997 ○ Natural causes

A reform communist who sought to democratize socialism

Recalling a 1967 visit in which he laid his reform plans before his old roommate Gorbachev, Mlynář said: 'It seemed to me he understood very well what I was talking about.'

Zdeněk Mlynář was a Czechoslovak Communist politician and lawyer who sought to join socialism to democratic control and active citizenship. During the Prague Spring of 1968, he served as a Central Committee secretary, worked in Alexander Dubček's reform leadership, and helped shape the political and legal team that drafted the Action Programme. After the Warsaw Pact invasion he signed the Moscow Protocols, then confronted the limits of reform and the reality of occupation by resigning his posts and later leaving the party. He signed Charter 77 and emigrated to Austria, where he became a political scientist and an important interpreter of the Prague Spring.