Twilight of the False Gods
The Prague Spring in Documents
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Most recently, hundreds of previously secret documents on the Prague Spring appeared in print. They shed new light on the experiment of “Socialism with a human face”, Brezhnev’s role in the conflict with Prague’s reform Communists, and the decision-making process that led to the Warsaw Pact’s invasion. Militarily, the intervention was apparently a success. Politically, it was a debacle. It discredited the Socialist idea and deprived the authoritarian Communist parties of their legitimacy, something they temporarily compensated for by means of repression but could not win back – as 1989 was to show.
(Osteuropa 7/2008, pp. 67–70)