TODAY is the 50th anniversary of the election of Alexander Dubcek as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Most historians and observers see January 5, 1968, as the beginning of the Prague Spring, that remarkable few months in the history of Czechoslovakia when reforms and liberalisation threatened the Soviet Communist Party’s dominance of the Eastern Bloc.

It is a myth to say that Dubcek started the reforms that led to the Prague Spring, as even President Antonín Novotný, who Dubcek replaced, had previously tried to bring in some reforms without deviating from the Communist Party’s control of the country and its allegiance to Moscow.

One of the main reasons for unrest in Czechoslovakia was the economic downturn of the 1960s which caused considerable hardship for a great many people, and which then saw the first expressions of revolt against the system strongly suppressed.

Dubcek came to power promising more freedom for the press and more cultural liberalisation in general but he was still a Communist and, ironically, in view of what was to happen, USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev and the Politburo in Moscow at first thought him a safe pair of hands.

WHO WAS ALEXANDER DUBCEK?

IN the years before the Prague Spring, Dubcek followed a classic Communist politician’s career path.

Born in 1921 in Uhrovec – which is now in Slovakia but was then in Czechoslovakia, that country having come into existence after the First World War – as a toddler Dubcek was taken to Russia, where his parents had gone to work. He did not return permanently to his native land until he was 17, and during the Second World War he was part of the Resistance movement against the Nazi-imposed Slovak state. Dubcek was wounded twice and his brother Július was killed.

After the war, having joined the Slovakian Communist Party, Dubcek rose through the ranks in the newly-minted Communist Czechoslovakia, eventually becoming the secretary of the central committee of the party.

In 1963, the Slovakian branch of the Communist Party installed Dubcek as first secretary, and under him the Slovakian Party attempted to reform and liberalise on a much faster scale than the Central Committee in Prague wanted.

In October 1967, Dubcek and his allies struck against President Antonín Novotný, and by January 5, 1968, Novotný was ousted and Dubcek became the leader of the party and the government.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE PRAGUE SPRING?

DUBCEK set out to create “socialism with a human face” as the Prague Spring’s motto stated. He gained great public support for his reform programme which allowed freedom of expression while still maintaining Communist control and adherence to the Soviet Bloc’s systems. Dubcek later wrote that he was convinced that Brezhnev and the Politburo in Moscow would allow internal reforms in Czechoslovakia as long as he did not depart from the Soviet Bloc as Hungary had done in the Uprising of 1956. He was also very well aware of the fate of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader who was executed in 1958 after a show trial.

He had no wish to share that fate. A key issue was that Dubcek allowed non-Communist organisations and movements to thrive, and there really was a flowering of Czechoslovakian culture as writers in particular found new freedom. It was a heady time, and Dubcek was lauded around the world.

HOW DID IT END?

THE problem for Brezhnev and the USSR was that they could not let go of their control of any one part of the Eastern Bloc for fear of a domino effect that would end their empire. The first major revolt against the USSR’s post-war domination of Eastern Europe was the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 which had shown the Soviet powers at their most repressive. More than 3000 people, including 700 troops of the Warsaw Pact forces, were killed in a bloody week-long conflict after the USSR invaded Hungary on November 4, 1956, to put down the October Uprising against the government and their Soviet-derived policies.

The Soviets viciously clamped down on all opposition, executed its leader Imre Nagy and installed a puppet government. To its eternal shame, the supposedly democratic West stood by and did virtually nothing, and they weren’t much different 12 years later.

In 1968, the Soviets set out to do the same thing in Czechoslovakia that they did in Hungary and one Moscow military leader boasted that given their experience in Hungary it would take only four days to conquer all of Czechoslovakia.

It took them much, much longer than that. The world watched on appalled when a massive Soviet-led Warsaw Pact army invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and it was at this point that Dubcek asked citizens not to resist with force, as “a military defence would have meant exposing the Czech and Slovak peoples to a senseless bloodbath” – it was a defining moment in his life.

Faced with passive non-violent resistance, Moscow was flummoxed. It took eight months for the Soviets to take back full control of Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring was over, but Dubcek was still able to be a party leader until he was expelled in 1970. He went off quietly to live as a private citizen and made no comment at all for 18 years.

WHAT WAS DUBCEK’S LEGACY?

THE Velvet Revolution, in three words. When the Eastern Bloc began to implode, Czechoslovakia was at the forefront of events, and Dubcek came out of retirement to assist the writer Václav Havel and his allies in November 1989, when the entire leadership of the Communist Party resigned to bring an end to its rule over the country. The Velvet Revolution had conquered.

The following month, Dubcek’s considerable moral authority saw him elected as chairman of the Czechoslovakian Parliament and in 1992 he moved to become leader of the new Social Democratic Party of Slovakia as Czechoslovakia moved towards the inevitable split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia – the so-called Velvet Divorce.

HOW DID HE DIE?

ALEXANDER Dubcek lived to be lionised as a hero of non-violent resistance and as a patriot of both Czechoslovakia and Slovakia, but he did not live to see the two new countries emerge into complete reform and membership of the European Union as he died on November, 7 1992, of injuries sustained in a car crash in Prague two months earlier.

He has a simple memorial at his grave in Lark Valley in Bratislava, capital of Slovakia.