I.

Introduction

Prague Spring, movement to reform the Communist system in Czechoslovakia that took place between January and August 1968. Initiated by Communist Party leaders with the support of intellectuals, artists, and other cultural figures, it represented an attempt to create a political and economic system that would be better suited to Czechoslovakia—an economically developed, Western-influenced country—than the one in place at the time. The reformers who launched the movement came to refer to it as “socialism with a human face”. It represented the most far-reaching effort to reform a Communist system from within prior to that of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the mid-1980s.