In GCSE History students will look at the Cold War, which lasted from the end of World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union. One aspect of the Cold War they will cover will be the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In 1968 the Soviet Union led a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, in order to bring to an end the reforms introduced by the new government. They feared that the virus of reform could spread to other communist countries, and that Czechoslovakia could leave the Warsaw Pact and join NATO instead. The invasion guaranteed that that would not happen.
Discover more about the Cold War in Central Europe in this quiz.
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You can find more about this topic by visiting BBC Bitesize - The Cold War and Vietnam
Khrushchev had made mistakes: the so-called "Virgin Lands" scheme in Central Asia and the failure to defeat the United States in the Cuba Crisis of 1962, among them
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Czechoslovakia seemed to be going the way of Hungary in 1956: liberal reforms in a heady atmosphere of liberation and the ousting of previous, more repressive leaders
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The new reforms, particularly relaxation of censorship, permission to travel abroad and the right to create political parties other than the Communists, alarmed the USSR and its other allies
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The Soviet Union and most of its allies believed that members of the Soviet bloc should expect to have their policies, domestic and foreign, criticised and amended by their neighbours
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One member state of the Warsaw Pact believed that all members should be freer to pursue their own policies
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A new leadership contrasted starkly with its Stalinist predecessors which had repressed the Czechoslovak people since 1948
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Czechoslovakia was divided between the industrialised and advanced west, and the more backward and agricultural east
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The Czechoslovak head of state was the President, more of a figurehead than the Party Secretary
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Henceforward the Soviet Union used a compliant, "puppet" President to ensure that there would be no return to the liberal policies of 1968
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Most Warsaw Pact countries did have common borders with Czechoslovakia, which made them even keener to avoid contamination with liberal policies
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