Dubcek

The brief tenure of Alexander Dubcek, the charismatic and courageous leader of Czechoslovakia during the heady "Prague Spring" of 1968, rocked the foundations of European communism. Dubcek, who believed in "Socialism with a Human Face," brought what Andrei Sakharov called "the breath of freedom" to the Iron Curtain countries. But the Soviet invasion of August 1968 and Dubcek's removal from power in 1969 led to savage repression in his country, and he disappeared completely from public life - until the autumn of 1989, when the astonishing events in Eastern Europe swept him back onto the world…