On August 20th and 21st, 1968, fifty years ago this week, hundreds of thousands of Soviet and allied Warsaw Pact troops poured over the Czechoslovak border from surrounding countries in a massive show of force that quickly deposed the government of Alexander Dubček. As the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party, Dubček had presided over a short-lived experiment in Communist liberalization known as the Prague Spring. Dubček had rehabilitated political opponents, abolished restrictions on travel, erased press censorship, and encouraged freedom of expression; he later remembered being inspired by the French Revolution’s calls for “Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité.” But the artistic and political ferment that resulted—Dubček referred to his program as “socialism with a human face”—proved too much for the doughty post-Stalinist Russian premier, Leonid Brezhnev. In the face of the Soviet invasion, the Prague Spring partisans adopted a policy of nonviolent resistance, which allowed them to hold out for another eight months, but the movement was ultimately crushed. The invasion evolved into an occupation that continued for twenty years, leading to a mass emigration from the country and breaking the spirit of many of those who stayed behind.

Nowhere in New York do the wounds of 1968 feel more fresh than at the hundred-and-twenty-year-old cultural center on East Seventy-third Street known as Bohemian National Hall. There, the Czech Center, part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has put up “August 21, 1968,” an exhibit that painstakingly documents the first twenty-four hours of the invasion. The exhibit, conceived of and mounted by the Czech Center’s programming director, Marie Dvorakova, is focussed on twenty photographs of the invasion that have never previously travelled to the United States. At the opening, on the night of the 21st, the director, Barbara Karpetová, observed with deliberate understatement that her compatriots viewed the Soviet invasion as “one of the most significant moments of our history,” and made it clear that the pain of that period’s failed struggle against authoritarianism is still “topical” for most Czechs.