On the night of August 20, some 200,000 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact soldiers crossed into Czechoslovakia to end Alexander Dubček's liberalizing reforms. Citizens in Prague and Bratislava tried blocking tanks with their bodies and repainting street signs to confuse invaders, but the resistance was unarmed against overwhelming force, and the occupation snuffed out the Prague Spring within days.
Alexander Dubček's government had spent months easing censorship and loosening the Communist Party's grip, a program he called 'socialism with a human face.' Moscow watched nervously, fearing the reforms would spread, and on the night of August 20 into the 21st, Soviet, Polish, East German, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops poured across the borders in a meticulously coordinated invasion.
Czechoslovaks responded with extraordinary, largely nonviolent defiance. Students climbed onto tanks to argue with confused young Soviet conscripts, many of whom had been told they were liberating the country from a Western coup. Radio Prague kept broadcasting clandestinely from hidden locations, and people tore down street signs and repainted them to read 'Moscow,' hoping to disorient invading columns.
At least 108 Czechoslovaks were killed in the first days of fighting. Dubček was flown to Moscow, forced to sign a capitulation, and later removed from power, replaced by the hardline Gustáv Husák. The invasion crushed hopes for reform communism for a generation and hardened Cold War lines, though the memory of 1968 would resurface two decades later when the Velvet Revolution finally ended one-party rule.