Friday 21st August 2026 is the 58th anniversary of the Soviet led invasion of Czechoslovakia, it’s an anniversary that increasingly passed unnoticed, save perhaps by some people in Prague, although the spectre of Russian intervention in Eastern Europe, remerged following Russias attack on the Ukraine.
While happily the Soviet Union is history, although Russia on the rise in the east, people have lots of other things to be concerned about.
It’s been 58 years since Soviet troops and most but not all of their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21st 1968.
The Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the political and economic reforms known as the Prague Spring, led by the country's then new First Secretary of the Communist party Alexander Dubcek.
The Soviet-led invasion effectively established the Brezhnev Doctrine, which Moscow said allowed the U.S.S.R. to intervene in any country where a Communist government was under threat.
The Soviet backed occupation of Czechoslovakia lasted until the velvet revolution brought an end to the Communist dictatorship in November 1991 as the Cold War ended. It was always contested - the reformist communists were finally defeated in the mid 1970's ironically just as detente created the Helsinki accords which then inspired Charter 77.
Even now Russia’s attitude to the invasions still touches raw emotions, evens in the Czech and Slovak republics. While the thirty fifth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR will largely pass unremembered, in both the West and more understandably in Russia, the reasons for Russia’s desire to forget the past are understandable.
It is worth noting that the Brits lost their Empire over a period of thirty years, over fifty years ago, and some of them have still not got over the losing of it hence the periodic exposure of Brit exceptionalism.
The Russians, by way of contrast lost the core of their Empire in about fortnight, which must still sting a bit, even thirty five years down the line.
The West tends to remain silent when it came to remembering the anniversary of the collapse of the USSR. Perhaps considering the hubris displayed at the time, the wilful glee the came with the botched dismemberment of the old Soviet state industries and assets, the rise of the oligarchs (some of whom were very close and comfortable with New Labour and quire comfortable with the Conservatives and the rise of President Putins new Russia, the silence is perhaps understandable.
When it comes to anniversaries August may well be the month that keeps on giving…
As the 21st of August is also the anniversary of the coup attempt to oust President Gorbachev, which collapsed within a few days, and directly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union…
Sunday 23rd August 2026 will be the 87th anniversary of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact signed by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union in 1939, the anniversary has become the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes.
It was on that day in 1939 that an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union opened the gate to Second World War and all kinds of totalitarian violence: from forced migration through slave labour and war crimes to genocide, including an event unprecedented in world history – the Holocaust.
The 23rd August should rightly brings back the memory of millions those who fell victim to totalitarian regimes, including the inmates of Nazi concentration camps, death camps, Soviet gulags and Stalinist prisons. This anniversary probably passed unnoticed in the Russian Federation save behind closed doors.
It is also worth remembering that 37 years ago, on 23 August 1989, some two million people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania stood hand in hand - literally - for an event itself lasted for 15 minutes, from Toompea in Tallinn, through Riga, to the Gediminas Tower in Vilnius, they formed a human chain. The consequences have lasted much longer than the original event.
The 600km + long human chain, known as the Baltic Way, became a powerful symbol of unity and resistance, as it drew the world's attention to the illegal Soviet annexation of the Baltic States following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
The non-aggression pact was signed exactly 50 years earlier, on 23rd August 1939, by Soviet and German foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. It contained secret protocols, in which the two powers illegally divided the territories of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania between them.
This was one of the key factors that led to the start of World War II in September 1939, with Nazi Germany's attack on Poland, and to the Soviet invasion of the Baltics in June 1940.
The Baltic Way put immense pressure on the Soviet power to acknowledge the existence of the secret protocols and to declare them null and void - and reminded the West that the Baltic republics had been annexed to the Soviet Union since 1944/45.
When a few years ago, the Poles held a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, some Western and World leaders gathered, but the Brits did not go, obviously other important things to do and to remember - wonder who the Foreign Secretary was at the time?
Human history is complex, and remembrance is important part, forgetting is also very human and is also part of life, but, remembrance should be a balanced act rather than selective.
Selectively forgetting the past and erasing our collective history is a more dubious practice ( especially in these islands, in Hungary, in Russia and in the Peoples Republic of China, etc ) but also within these islands, especially when it comes to ‘Brit washing’ the perceptions of and the grim realities of Empire, etc.
Even in the West, the elite can be decidedly selective about the anniversaries and the history they wish us to remember. Creating a rose tinted view of the past, is neither history nor remembrance, nor is it honest, its manufactured / peddled nostalgia - and that is dubious, dishonest and downright potentially politically dangerous.
Simply to reimagine these islands past simply to distract people from the mess the Westminster elite have got us into from the carnage of India’s partition, the shambles of Suez, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the financial collapse of 2008, etc is unacceptable but not quite as unacceptable as blatantly lying through ones teeth and manipulating evidence to justify a war.
Other more awkward embarrassing anniversaries are ignored or effectively selectively airbrushed from history e.g. the Sykes-Picot-Sazanov agreement, the anniversary of Amritsar, various bloody Sundays, etc.
Anniversaries are important to remember as not only can they provide timely reminders of important historical events, they can also remind us how we ended up in this mess and who made those decisions, and what can actually be accomplished when people want change.
