Czechoslovakia Crisis, 1968: The State Department's Crisis Files
The Czechoslovakia Crisis of 1968 was a watershed moment in world politics. The Soviet-led invasion was one of the more significant events in the decades long Cold War between the East and West. The occupation was the beginning of the end for the Czechoslovak reform movement known as the “Prague Spring.” The reform movement had been brewing for years, fed by economic problems as well as growing demands from Communist intellectuals for more freedom and pluralism within a socialist system. But it really gathered steam in January 1968, when the Communist Party's Central Committee replaced its hard-line First Secretary Antonin Novotny with the moderate reformer Alexander Dubcek, who eventually sided more and more clearly with the forces for change. In March, censorship was loosened and Novotny was relieved of his other function, President of the Republic. He was replaced by a career soldier, Ludvik Svoboda, whose last name in Czech means "freedom"-- a purely linguistic coincidence that countless posters and flyers during the invasion made use of, although Svoboda ultimately sided with opponents of reform. The State Department’s Executive Secretariat was responsible for creating a documentary record of various international crises during the 1960s.
The documents in The Czechoslovakia Crisis, 1968: The State Department’s Crisis Files were collected and collated from a variety of State Department sources and represent an administrative history of the crisis. This collection includes almost a day-by-day record of the events, including the U.S. and the West’s response to the Soviet occupation and dismantling of the liberal reforms.