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This Minnesota Winter Is the New Prague Spring

I’ve studied Czechoslovakia in 1968. I live in Minneapolis. The similarities between the historic invasion and the current ICE “surge” are scary.

The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion that ended the Prague Spring, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. Warsaw Pact tanks patrol in Wenceslas Square as locals walk by. August 1968.

In Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, radio was the sound of invasion: midnight broadcasts announcing that tanks had crossed the border and were lumbering toward Prague. In Minneapolis, in the winter of 2026, it’s whistles and car horns, sharp and urgent—warnings not about tanks but about SUVs rented from companies like Enterprise, the same cars you might drive on vacation. ICE is here, the whistles say. Stay inside if you’re vulnerable; come out if you can. All eyes, all ears.

The ICE invasion has other sounds: words, for instance. The US government uses the euphemism “surge” for the 3,000 federal agents it sent to Minnesota in January, a metaphor of tides and currents that’s been part of the military-political lexicon since at least the Second Gulf War. In the same way, “brotherly assistance” was sent, in the form of 5,000 Warsaw Pact tanks and 200,000 troops, to weed out the reform socialism that flourished in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring.

I’ve studied Czechoslovakia in 1968; I live in Minneapolis. There are similarities between the two invasions, from the code words used to describe them to how time feels within them, to the sounds and images that define them. And sounds and images from Czechoslovakia, 1968 are as much a prefiguration of what’s happened in the Twin Cities this winter as they are a lesson for us—in Minnesota and the United States—now.

The Prague Spring didn’t begin in 1968. Its seeds were planted years earlier, in the early 1960s, when Czechoslovakia’s economy floundered and its third five-year plan (scheduled to run from 1961 to 1965) was abandoned in its second year. As economists began to look past central management, change accelerated in other spheres. Victims of the Stalinist show trials of the early 1950s were quietly rehabilitated. Citizens were allowed to travel freely, even to the West. By June 1968, censorship had been abolished.

Throughout the reform years, and especially in 1968, many Czechs and Slovaks had the sense that they were in on an exhilarating experiment. As historians Rosamund Johnston and Paulina Bren have written, much of this played out on radio and television, where topics (such as the 1950s) that couldn’t be broached publicly before were suddenly fair game, discussed in documentary programs and live interviews with public figures and people on the street, bringing new voices to the receiver and the screen. But this was nothing compared to the week after August 21, when across the country, people came out in astonishing numbers to protest the invasion. In Prague, everyone was in the streets, and it seemed like everyone had a camera. Photographs and films from that week (like Jan Němec’s documentary Oratorio for Prague, whose footage was repurposed for Philip Kaufman’s 1988 Unbearable Lightness of Being) show a city transformed: people stopping invading tanks in their tracks, clambering on top of them, berating soldiers in the Russian........

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