Reforms were opposed by conservatives inside the party who benefited from the Stalinist economy, as well as interests in the neighboring Soviet-bloc who feared contagion, western subversion, strategic vulnerability, and loss of institutional power.

[2] In the interim between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, Dubček withdrew from high politics but served as a leading inspiration and symbolic leader for Eurocommunism, maintaining intermittent contact with European communist reformers, especially in Italy and the Soviet Union.

Also in 1989, just before his death, Andrei Sakharov wrote, "I am convinced that the 'breath of freedom' which the Czechs and the Slovaks enjoyed when Dubček was their leader was a prologue to the peaceful revolutions now taking place in eastern Europe and Czechoslovakia itself.

According to Jan Adamec, a historical scholar based in Prague: "I think there is a trend that became apparent around 2009, and became even more visible after Václav Havel's death, which shows certain reconsideration of the period between 1968 and 1989.

There, as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic for Industry,[20] Dubček became intensely involved in the work of rehabilitation commissions (especially Drahomir Kolder's and Barnabit's, 1962–1963).

[26] In 1963, a power struggle in the leadership of the Slovak branch unseated Karol Bacílek and Pavol David, hard-line allies of Antonín Novotný, First Secretary of the KSČ and President of Czechoslovakia.

[32] Though the source of the immediate crisis was the now-pressing economic effects, Dubček's generation had spent the early 1960s engaged in travel, research, and study heavily supported by academia, the state, and the party.

Their body of research and experience convinced the reformers that their self-isolated country had not simply reached a growth impasse but had fallen behind the rest of the world due to a generation of stagnation in all spheres of life.

[37] Following his presentation of grievances the month before, in October 1967 Dubček and Ota Šik challenged First Secretary Novotný's leadership style at a Central Committee meeting.

[32] Faced with lack of support at the central and local level of the party and large public demonstrations the last day of October that were badly mishandled, provoking further opposition, Novotný secretly invited Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to visit to Prague in December 1967.

According to a CIA assessment at the time, Dubček was seen as an adept politician who might pull the balancing act off at home,[50] which if true made Soviet military intervention all the more urgently needed by the anti-reform faction.

Press freedom began as an opening to reassessment of the Stalinist purges and the nation's historic past, but it grew into an abstract ideal as conservative criticism generalized and mounted.

The Pillar Commission set up to investigate the show trials of the 1950s recommended the disbandment of the secret police, and Czechoslovakian security services had already ceased most cooperation with the KGB, having a major impact on the KGBs operational effectiveness and influence.

The day of the invasion, occupying armies quickly seized control of Prague and the Central Committee's building, taking Dubček and other reformers into Soviet custody.

[66] Already the previous month, when officers under General Václav Prchlík, head of the KSC's military department, began preparing contingency plans for a Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion, Dubček had immediately vetoed its implementation.

The presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia asked, "all citizens of the Republic to keep the peace (and remain at their posts but) not resist the advancing armies, because the defense of our state borders is now impossible".

The non-violent resistance of the Czech and Slovak population, which helped delay pacification by Warsaw Pact forces for over eight months (in contrast to the Soviet military's estimate of four days), became an example of civilian-based defense.

A latter-day The Good Soldier Švejk (referring to an early-20th-century Czech satirical novel) wrote of "the comradely pranks of changing street names and road signs, of pretending not to understand Russian, and of putting out a great variety of humorous welcoming posters".

The Czechoslovakian team were told that the Soviets would continue to turn the screws harder, undeterred by the protests of other communist parties; They dismissed them saying, "For the next 30 or 40 years, socialism has no chance in the capitalist West."

Though Cernik tried to placate reformists, the new government's extreme anti-reformist faction, led by Deputy Party Chief Lubomír Štrougal, wanted to put Dubček on trial.

They wanted him reassigned to a position as a senior officer in the Pension Insurance Research Institute to entrap him in a scandal after having failed to pressure Dubček to leave under a cloud as a defector, which would discredit him as a loyal party member.

"[84] While the first news reports during the normalization period, 1970–74, show a man who actively avoided attention and was shifting uncertainly between insecure employment, telling a West German photographer: "Please, sir.

Dubček was described as variously a spy-master, or when proven not to be or when misrepresented by either the regime or others, as a self-absorbed and simple-minded marionette of powerful external forces living a self-indulgent private life insulated from political participation and understanding.

[78] Dubček's public letters to other parties and to the National Assembly were part of a larger international 'campaign' by purged members gradually being joined by many high-profile figures outside Czechoslovakia and other domestic activists.

There were common challenges in the countries of the east and west caught between the superpowers, but seeking to both heal the division of Europe and gain autonomy from the influence of great power politics.

"[89] Dubček's relationship with Italian communists would lead to his first direct public interview, which prodded the University of Bologna into offering him an honorary doctorate as a man who could bridge the differences between the east and west.

[91] In 1989, before the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion, the Slovak members of the Movement for Civil Freedoms (HOS) decided to commemorate the event by laying flowers as the locations of those in Slovakia who had been killed.

True to his past dedication to Eurocommunism, prior to this on 16 December, he welcomed the delegation of the Italian Socialist Party headed by its chairman Bettino Craxi in Prague.

Dubček died on 7 November 1992, as a result of injuries sustained in a car crash that took place on 1 September on the Czech D1 highway, near Humpolec, 20 days short of his 71st birthday.

"[110] Dubček's style of leadership, and the ultimate frustration of his program by Soviet intervention, also had a deep impact on the development and orientation of communist and socialist parties and thinkers in the west.