On this day in 1968, Alexander Dubček’s experiments in “socialism with a human face” were met by the force of Moscow. Eliot Wilson tells us about the crushing of the Prague Spring in the latest instalment to City AM’s on this day series

It started with a 56-year-old from Uhrovec in the Trenčín region of Slovakia, where the ruins of a 13th-century castle look down from the Nitricke Vrchy hills. And it ended, as defiance of Russian often does, with the clank of tank tracks, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the blood of unarmed civilians running in the streets.

The Prague Spring is crushed

On this day in 1968, just after 11.00 pm, the first soldiers of a massive Warsaw Pact military force of 165,000 crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, between the Saxon town of Bärenstein and Vejprty, a Bohemian settlement of a similar size. They had jumped the gun – H-hour was supposed to be 1.00 am, but events moved quickly.

Ruzyně International Airport was quickly secured by the invaders, and not long after 1.00 am transport aircraft began landing with more soldiers, soon coming at 50-second intervals: these were the 7th Guards Airborne Division, with their sky-blue berets and striped telnyashka undershirts. In seven hours, 250 aircraft brought an entire division.

Operation Danube, as the Soviet High Command dubbed the invasion, was formally a joint Warsaw Pact enterprise, with Soviet units........

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