Member-only story
Russia’s Occupation of Eastern Europe
On exactly this day 54 years ago, more than 200,000 troops and 5,000 tanks of joint Warsaw Pact and Soviet forces, marched on Czechoslovakia to “free us.”
They stayed for 20 years.
We remember it well.
History has not changed that much. Eastern Europe is still threatened, but this time it is Ukraine that is fighting for democracy.
Back in 1968, Warsaw Pact and Soviet troops justified their invasion because of the presence of “counterrevolutionaries” in Czechoslovakia; today, Putin justified Russia’s invasion similarly because he wanted to “free” Ukrainians of neo-Nazis.
Both justifications were complete fabrications.
But Czechoslovakia has a long history of fighting for its independence.
In 1938, Czechoslovakia was handed over to Hitler as a peace offering. In 1939, German tanks rolled in and continued into Poland.
In 1968, for 8 months prior to the invasion, there was growing dissent in the state, increasingly demanding more independence from the Soviet hegemony.
As mentioned above, this desire of the Soviets to “free us” can be paralleled with Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
And although these events are uniquely different, the imperialism is similar. It is important to remember that history can and often…
