Czechs, Slovaks commemorate victims of 1968 Soviet invasion (Roundup)

Aug 21, 2008, 13:38 GMT

Prague - Czechs and Slovaks on Thursday commemorated 40 years since Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring communist reform movement, a crackdown that has prompted comparisons with Russia's invasion of Georgia two weeks ago.

Laying flowers at a Prague student's grave, leaders of the two countries paid tribute to those killed after Warsaw Pact troops rolled into Czechoslovakia in the early hours of August 21, 1968.

'The Soviet invasion wiped out the dream of democracy in Czechoslovakia,' Slovak President Robert Fico said at the ceremony.

The Soviets, fearing the virus of the 'counter-revolution,' took control of the country, arrested the reformist leaders and brought them to Moscow to renounce their course.

New studies say 108 people died and more than 500 were injured in the invasion. The West made no military move to stop it, helping plunge Czechoslovaks into despair as their short-lived civil freedoms evaporated.

On Thursday, crowds lined up at the National Museum on Prague's central Wenceslas Square for the opening of a new exhibit on the Prague Spring. Old newsreels and a Soviet tank parked outside the building helped revived the memories.

The show includes stories and personal items from Jan Palach, a Prague student who set himself on fire in January 1969 to protest the invasion. He died a few days later, making him a martyr of the fight against communism.

In a 2006 visit to the Czech capital, then-president Vladimir Putin expressed Russia's 'moral responsibility' for crushing the Prague Spring.

However, a recent poll found that 70 per cent of Czechs younger than 20 have 'no opinion' on the events of 1968.

In the run-up to Thursday, Czech leaders, European commentators and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew comparisons between 1968 and Russia's invasion of Georgia.

'The Russian tanks on the streets of Georgian towns remind those of us who experienced it of the 1968 invasion,' Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said in a recent newspaper article.

At an anniversary event in neighbouring Austria, Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik lashed out at Russia for its assault on Georgia.

'A power of the future cannot rely primarily on tanks for its foreign policy,' she said in Vienna. 'We never want to have to fear Russia again.'

Tens of thousands of Czechoslovaks fled to the West via neutral Austria in the months after the Soviet invasion.

While the Prague Spring was doomed, it helped pave the way for the emergence of Czechoslovak dissidents led by writer Vaclav Havel, Poland's Solidarity labour union in the early 1980s and the fall of communism in November 1989.

The Prague Spring's ferment began in early 1968 as a new generation of Communist leaders led by party chief Alexander Dubcek pushed to reform a declining economy and loosen the party's choking grip on civil life. It was dubbed socialism 'with a human face.'

It took another two decades before communism fell and democracy came to Czechoslovakia in the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Havel became president and the last Soviet soldier left in 1991.

Former Communist party chief Alexander Dubcek, the reformist leader of 1968, lived to see the day. He died in 1992 at age 70.