Alexander Dubček (; 27 November 1921 – 7 November 1992) was a Slovak statesman who served as the First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) (de facto leader of Czechoslovakia) from January 1968 to April 1969 and as Chairman of the Federal Assembly from 1989 to 1992 following the Velvet Revolution. He oversaw significant reforms to the communist system during a period that became known as the Prague Spring, but his reforms were reversed and he was eventually sidelined following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968.
Best known by the slogan, "Socialism with a human face", Dubček led a process that accelerated cultural and economic liberalization in Czechoslovakia. Reforms were opposed by conservatives inside the party who benefited from the Stalinist economy, as well as interests in the neighbouring Soviet-bloc who feared contagion, western subversion, strategic vulnerability, and loss of institutional power. For reasons of institutional interests in the Soviet Union such as those of the military and KGB, false reports, and the growing concern among the Soviet leadership that Dubček was no longer able to maintain control of the country, Czechoslovakia was invaded by half a million Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops on the night of 20–21 August 1968. This was intended to enable a coup by conservative forces. That coup, however, could not materialize due to lack of a viable pro-Soviet replacement leadership and the unexpected extraordinary popularity of Dubček and the reformist leadership. Soviet intervention ushered in a period of maneuver between conservatives and reformers where conservatives relied on Soviet influence to shift the balance of power, reversing reforms of the Prague Spring.
Dubček was forced to resign as party head in April 1969, and was succeeded by Gustáv Husák, a former reformer and victim of Stalinism who was ambiguously favored by Moscow. This signaled the end of the Prague Spring and the beginning of normalization. Dubček was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970, amid a purge that eventually expelled almost two-thirds of the 1968 party membership. This mostly purged the younger generation of post-Stalin communists that he represented along with many of the most competent technical experts and managers.
During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Dubček served as the Chairman of the federal Czechoslovak parliament and contended for the presidency with Václav Havel. The European Parliament awarded Dubček the Sakharov Prize the same year. 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." Sakharov credited Dubček and the Prague Spring as his inspiration.
At the time of his death in an automobile crash in 1992, Dubček remained an important political figure. Many saw him as the destined future president of newly-formed Slovakia.
Early life
Alexander Dubček was born in Uhrovec, Czechoslovakia (now part of Slovakia), on 27 November 1921. When he was three years old, the family moved to the Soviet Union in search of job opportunities and better quality of life. He spent most of his childhood living in a utopian Esperantist and Idist industrial cooperative, Interhelpo, in Kyrgyzstan. The settlement was in Pishpek (now Bishkek), in the Kirghiz SSR of the Soviet Union, now the independent state of Kyrgyzstan. Pavol Dubček, Alexander's son, described what his grandfather's family found as "nothing . . . but an old barracks," and said many of the first generation of immigrant children suffered typhus. Despite this, Pavol said it was "impossible" to go back at that time.
In 1938, due to general orders by Stalin, the Dubčeks would have had to renounce their Czechoslovak citizenship in order to stay in the Soviet Union. Instead, the family chose to return to Czechoslovakia. At 17 years old, Alexander joined the then-illegal Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), working to organize resistance at his workplace. It was here, as a factory worker in Dubnica nad Váhom, where he learned his first trade.
Dubček and his brother fought against the wartime pro-German Slovak state headed by Jozef Tiso. In August 1944 Dubček and his brother were ordered to join the partisans. They were members of the Jan Žižka partisan brigade during the Slovak National Uprising. His brother died in the uprising.
Dubček married childhood friend, Anna Dubčeková (née Borseková), in September, 1945. They started a home in Trenčín. but he would return to the Soviet Union in 1955 to attend the University of Politics in Moscow, where he graduated in 1958 before he returned home. While in Moscow, Dubček's Russian friends learned of Khrushchev's 'secret speech' denouncing Stalin in 1956. The speech had been an answer to stories circulating of those who had begun returning from false imprisonment in the gulag. However, Dubček's friends did not tell him about the speech for several months. Dubček was disturbed by the news of what Stalin had done, but he also admired Khrushchev for making the speech over the opposition of most of the Soviet leadership, who were themselves involved.
Education and early political career
In 1948, the party he had joined was reorganized as the Slovak branch of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). Though still outside of the higher circles, Dubček's generation represented the young idealistic rank-and-file of the party that took power in 1948, not a break from it.
The Slovak branch of the party emerged from the war with a smaller membership base and less connection with Slovak institutions than the Czech branches had. To recruit a mass party base for electoral politics, the party's leadership, which was over 60 years old on average, appealed to a broad segment of less ideologically motivated younger people, giving the party a more pragmatic and less orthodox culture. In contrast to the Czech branch of the party, family, regional identity, religious, professional, and inter-personal relationships formed the glue of the Slovak branch of the party. A socially idealistic Dubček, with no rigid ideological destination in mind, rose amid these ranks.
In 1948, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took power. In June, 1949, still in Trenčín, Dubček was promoted from his minor party duties at his workplace to administrative secretary of the OV KSS. He rose through the party ranks as a party functionary, first in Trenčín, then being transferred to Bratislava, and then to Banská Bystrica, while he pursued further education and training. He left for the Soviet Union in 1955, but returned in 1958 after completing his university education there. Shortly after returning from Moscow, in September 1958 he was appointed head secretary of the West Slovak Regional Committee of the KSS, and then transferred to Prague in 1960. There, as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic for Industry,
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.
Meanwhile, cultural weeklies such as Literarni Novinv, Kultúrny život,, and Kulturni Tvorba saw greatly expanded readership. Like many of the Slovak culture institutions, these publications were, however, engaged in a mostly indirect confrontation with the center, such as obvious ironic overstating of the party line. Political conflicts were commonly negotiated. This was complicated by exceptions, such as Kultúrny život, the weekly newspaper of the Union of Slovak Writers, which authorities considered politically unreliable. Such direct confrontations were spreading. In 1967, Václav Havel's play The Memorandum and Milan Kundera's novel The Joke, were seen by many writers as the beginnings of open rebellion.
Prague Spring
The Czechoslovak economy began to plateau in the early 1960s. The one-size-fits-all model of economic planning, better suited to the pre-industrialized Soviet Union of the 1930s, resulted in over-investment in heavy industry at the expense of light industry and consumer goods. Quantity was maximized regardless of costs, leading to poor quality and prices that were twice that of world prices. Along with other economists, Ota Šik condemned the existing system of management as one that made further development impossible. Though production continued to grow, albeit slowly, in 1964 income began to fall. This forced then-president Antonín Novotný to begin making limited concessions to liberalize the strictly planned economy. This included allowing greater freedom to companies in setting prices and wages.
The technocratic economic reformers, such as Radoslav Selucký, who denounced the "cult of the plan", were only slightly less ideologically threatening. Writers and cultural intellectuals began to see themselves as holding the balance of power between the entrenched apparatus and reformers, which for many explains their enthusiasm for joining the party in disproportionate numbers, where their growing power could be expressed.
Regardless, the economic reforms touched on both the nationalities and the political question. Reforming how the economy operated was tied to how the party operated, and thinking evolved to recognize the need for a diversity of interests to be represented. Cultural reform touched on economic reform, as the educated groups saw one of the principle resources the economy neglected was talent. Technical advance required abilities that were neither promoted nor respected among the conservatives, such as Novotný, who were mostly poorly educated and often lacked fundamental competency at their jobs. They did not call, however, for capitalism and class difference but democratic compensation for additional time and expense necessary for their education.
In May 1967, speaking before the Plenum of the Communist Party of Slovakia, Dubček represented this rising conviction among his generation that rejected the dictatorship of a single class of workers or party officials. Instead, he appealed to a universal all-inclusive human principle that had as much in common with sociology as Marxist–Leninism, in origins, practice, and aims, while still embracing both.
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. Dubček said he acted like a dictator. Brezhnev was generally supportive of Novotný, but said he was not there to solve their problems. He was there to help restore party unity, while the KSC Presidium was deadlocked 5-5. In January, 1968, the questions of leadership and reform were turned over to the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee. They voted no confidence in Novotný by splitting the functions of the president and party leader. He remained president but was replaced by Dubček as First Secretary. Novotný resisted, attempting to mobilize elements of the army to prevent his loss of power. Ironically, investigation into this led to Novotný being completely removed from office a few months later. Investigations by officials and a newly freed media of his chief accomplice, General Jan Šejna, exposed a corruption scandal involving his own and his sons' shady business dealings, which was known as the 'Clover Seed Scandal'. Aside from the immediate personal and professional animosity of Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, who refused to acknowledge him directly, other Warsaw Pact leaders sent customary congratulations. Zhivkov received a protest for his snub from Soviet diplomats. Zhivkov's behavior was not motivated by opposition to Dubček's program of reforms but his discomfort at the manner in which his predecessor had been removed. Dubček and his allies’ aim was not a return to capitalism, nor was it an end to the Communist Party's rule or its leading role in society. It was socialism marked by, "internal democracy, unlimited and unconditioned by the party, the strengthening of the faith of the people and the working class, and its transformation into a revolutionary force and the creative power of the party." To that end, the Prague Spring sought to liberalize the existing regime. It continued a series of reforms that granted greater freedom of expression to the press and public, rehabilitated victims of Stalinist purges by Klement Gottwald, advanced economic decentralization, and supported fundamental human rights reforms that included an independent judiciary.
During the Prague Spring, he and other reform-minded Communists enhanced popular support for the Communist government by eliminating its repressive features, allowing greater freedom of expression, and tolerating political and social organizations not under Communist control. "Dubček! Svoboda!" became the popular refrain of student demonstrations during this period, while a poll at home gave him 78-percent public support.
Dubček declared a 10-year program to implement reforms, but as reforms gained momentum he struggled to both maintain control and move with events. Dubček had been a compromise candidate between more radical reformers and hard-line conservatives. In power, Dubček was caught between a powerful hard-line minority in Czechoslovakia and their allies in other Warsaw Pact countries who pressured Dubček to rein in the Prague Spring, and on the other hand, more radical reformers who demanded more far-reaching and immediate reforms. While still stressing the leading role of the Party and the centrality of the Warsaw Pact, Dubček also was open to redefining the duty of party members from obedience to more creative expression. According to a CIA assessment at the time, Dubček was seen as an adept politician who might pull the balancing act off at home, which if true made Soviet military intervention all the more urgently needed by the anti-reform faction. The Soviet politburo may not have shared this view of Dubček, but they interpreted events as demonstrating dishonesty as much as lack of ability. In a phone conversation between Dubček and Brezhnev on 13 August, Dubček complained that he was on the verge of quitting in frustration, having difficulty meeting his promises because he was operating in such a fluid situation that planning was difficult and any new promises could just cause Brezhnev greater distrust when those promises couldn't be fulfilled rapidly.
The Soviet leadership tried to rein in events in Czechoslovakia through a series of negotiations. The Soviet Union agreed to bilateral talks with Czechoslovakia in July at Čierna nad Tisou railway station, near the Slovak-Soviet border. where the Czechs had played the NATO team. This is contradicted by many eyewitnesses, such as Ken Coates. According to Coates, the charge that the party was losing control or that counter-revolutionaries were misusing reforms, including press freedom, to undermine the party position was laughable, saying: "Anyone who was in Prague and lived in Czechoslovakia at that time knew that the Party's authority, the Party's position in the eyes of the nation had improved for the first time." Instead, he said that "The Party discredited itself."
However, the telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Dubček on 13 August suggests that media coverage was given high importance. Brezhnev had instructed Dubček to remove key people responsible for the media, specifically, "Jiří Pelikán, Čestmír Císař, František Kriegel, and other scoundrels". The question had been one more of truth-telling than of press freedom. The issues were more broad. Confusion was common. At the time of the invasion, events caught much of the world by surprise, despite widespread evidence of troop buildups and continued seeming arbitrary maneuvers on the country's borders. In an emergency meeting of the United States National Security Council called by President Lyndon B. Johnson on 20 August, Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, along with the cabinet and president could not explain Soviet actions. The invasion also erupted alongside so many destabilizing changes that some have pointed to 'press freedom' serving as a short-cut explanation.
In a letter written in 1974 to the widow of Josef Smrkovský, a close political ally who died in official political disgrace that January, Dubček said he remained unable to explain why the Soviet leadership believed "distorted reports" about the nature and aims of his socialist reforms. He said that these urgent warnings to the Soviet leadership were the result of party leaders and other conservatives who, "saw all that was happening solely from the angle of the loss of their leading role in the party." Perhaps most significantly, false high-level reports included letters secretly passed directly to the Soviet Politburo by those within the Czechoslovak regime who promoted intervention.
One such message was sent to Brezhnev at the time of the Čierna nad Tisou meeting. These letters and reports were sent by a group of anti-reformist hard-liners in the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), under the leadership of Slovak Communist Party chief, Vasiľ Biľak, working with allies in the StB and Czechoslovak People's Army. Bil'ak later wrote in his own memoirs that what he and his colleagues feared most, right up until mid-August, was that Dubček would reach an accommodation of compromise with Moscow that would forestall or prevent an invasion. Bil’ak himself feared his own imminent departure from office with good reason. His hard deadlines were 26 August, the date of the Slovak Party Congress, and 20 August, a gathering of the reformist leadership. Both had been moved up to allow reformers to secure better positions. The warnings of Bil’ak and his supporters stoked deliberately exaggerated fears of violent "anti-socialist counter-revolution" as an "imminent threat". This was not only to prod the Soviets to quick action but to ensure that Dubček would be removed and not even a moderate reformist government would remain to frustrate their personal prerogatives. Press freedom was only one of many reforms where no compromise at all could be tolerated.
"Fraternal Intervention"
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, military forces from several Warsaw Pact member states (Albania, Romania and East Germany did not participate) invaded Czechoslovakia. Soviet media cited a call for help from unnamed representatives as the cause of the "fraternal intervention", publishing an unidentified appeal as proof on 22 August 1968; However, as it became clear from the first day that virtually the entire responsible leadership of the Czechoslovak government and communist parties, including Dubček, were being blamed as causes of the invasion, and even the Soviet-supported leadership fell into accusations against each other, most allied communist parties around the world rejected the Soviet pretext as a thin disguise for gross violation of national party autonomy. Even President Ludvík Svoboda had publicly issued a statement calling on occupying forces to withdraw and for reforms to continue, while Czechoslovakia's UN representatives were calling for international support against the invasion.
The Soviets were only partly responsible for their confusion. Closely following a long telephone conversation between Bil’ak and Brezhnev on 10 August, two of Bil’ak's most important allies met with the Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia on 14–15 August: Alois Indra, who along with Drahomir Kolder had previously been in direct contact with the Soviet Politburo, was accompanied by another KSC hard-liner, Oldřich Pavlovský, in their meeting with ambassador Stepan Chervonenko. They assured him that as soon as Soviet "troops move into action on the night of 20 August," the "healthy forces" in the KSC would carry out their "plan of action" to oust Dubček, setting up a "provisional revolutionary government of workers and peasants." Indra said he could "guarantee" that a majority of the KSC Presidium, the KSC Central Committee, the National Assembly, and the Czechoslovak government would join with the "healthy forces." He promised six of the eleven members of the KSC Presidium and 50 members of the KSC Central Committee as his supporters. Meanwhile, KGB reports to the Soviet leadership went to lengths to support the official narrative and the claims of anti-reform hard-liners. They blamed everything negative that happened in Czechoslovakia on the Prague Spring, including in some cases traffic crashes, fires, and burglaries. The KGB even manufactured evidence, directing agents to plant caches of American-made weapons near the German border in order to be discovered. They instructed agents to hang posters calling for the overthrow of communism. This was to prove a western-sponsored network was active in Dubček's reform movement as part of an imminent insurrection or coup. The KGB was only further enraged when the Czechoslovak Interior Minister revealed it all to be a deliberate Soviet provocation. This motive is partly supported by the guarantees against reprisals against pro-Soviet Czechoslovaks in the Moscow Protocols. The KGB was also upset when Czechoslovak Interior Minister Josef Pavel revealed the existence of six KGB liaison agents within his office, implying that they would be removed.
Bil’ak would join Indra in reassuring the Soviets, promising that Kolder would be ready to be voted the KSC First Secretary when Soviet troops arrived. When two of their promised allies on the Presidium, Jan Piller and František Barbírek, opposed the invasion and supported Dubček, Soviet plans had to be abandoned. This forced them to retain Dubček and his government until the following year, 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. By making this official declaration before Soviet troops could preempt functioning of the official government, the Czechoslovak leadership ensured that both the invasion and Soviet invitation would be seen as illegitimate but also established the political and strategic framework for the resistance as symbolic and moral, where their opponent would have less control.
Controversy at that time and since has arisen as to whether Dubček knew of the invasion and hid the fact for his own reasons, perhaps explaining some of the world's surprise. Some point to the telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Dubček on 13 August where Dubček is recorded to say, "If you on the Soviet Politburo believe we're deceiving you, you should take the measure you regard as appropriate." Brezhnev is recorded to respond, "Such measures would be easier for us to adopt if you and your comrades would more openly say that these are the measures you're expecting of us." Meanwhile, for a short time government radio stations called for the invaders to return home: "Long live freedom, Svoboda, Dubček".
Dubček was arrested before dawn when 3 security officers, revolvers in hand and accompanied by several soldiers with machine guns bust into his office. One of them cut the telephone wires while another began to cuff him. When Dubček protested, he was beaten. His driver attempted to intervene and was immediately shot. Dubček was told, "We will kill, if necessary, a million Czechs, threatened one of the officers, to put an end to your counter-revolution."
Later on the day of the invasion, Dubček, along with Premier Oldřich Černík, Jozef Smrkovsky and František Kriegel were taken to the Soviet Union. At first, Dubček was taken to a mountain cottage in Ukraine; However, upon encountering massive popular resistance to their planned coup, and President Svoboda and other Czech representatives who were still in Prague refusing to accept any agreement made without approval of the official representatives of the party, the Soviets changed tactics and sent him to Moscow for negotiations. This ended the Prague Spring and set the stage for a Moscow-directed reversal of reforms that Dubček was compelled to sell and implement.
Dubček and most of the reformers were returned to Prague on 27 August. At the time, the Moscow Protocol was intended to be a secret document. It was revealed to party members the subsequent week and then leaked to The New York Times. Throughout the rest of the year, Dubček and other senior leaders were called back to Moscow repeatedly to receive new demands, which they returned home to deliver to their people. This led Dubček to consider quitting under extreme duress at times, but he always recovered. The Soviets made no attempt to hide their contempt. When Dubček protested that he had already met the terms of the Moscow Protocol, he is reported to have been told to 'shut up' by Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny. The Czechoslovak 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." Gustav Husák reported they were treated as "scoundrels"
In January 1969, Dubček was hospitalized in Bratislava complaining of a cold and had to cancel a speech. Rumors sprang up that his illness was radiation sickness and that it was caused by radioactive strontium being placed in his soup during his stay in Moscow in an attempt to kill him. However, a U.S. intelligence report discounted this for lack of evidence. Also that month, following the self-immolation of Jan Palach, reformers renewed their offensive against conservative hardliners. Dubček pledged to hold the line against both reformers and neo-Stalinists, but opposition was moving outside the party for tactical reasons.
Dubček was forced to resign as First Secretary in April 1969, following the Czechoslovak Hockey Riots. The Soviets were not only alarmed by Dubček's failure to contain growing pressure to resume reforms but at their own failures to consolidate a neo-Stalinist regime under Indra or their other allies. Dubček was replaced by former reformer Gustav Husák, beginning a process of 'normalization' that would eventually purge two-thirds of the party and de-politicize the country. At the time, Leonid Brezhnev is supposed to have said: 'If we cannot find the puppets, then we will tie the strings to the leaders.' Despite his continued cooperation, Dubček was removed from parliamentary office on 15 October under Prime Minister Černík's new government. Though Černík 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. Husák, who styled himself as a post-ideological 'realist', as well as Moscow, wanted to avoid a destabilizing return to Stalinism. Some thought that Husák's reluctance to trials and executions was because of his own experiences as a prisoner, though he thought his own imprisonment was wrong, he had no problem with imprisoning state enemies on general principle or personal feeling. Others suggest that it was the hard-liners themselves who wanted Dubček out of the country to isolate him from the public and to prevent him becoming a martyr, as trials had never helped the communist regime either within the country or internationally.
However, in June of that same year, Dubček was dismissed from his ambassadorial post and recalled from Turkey after being suspended from the party pending an investigation by hard-liners. This was read as a signal that Husák had lost a behind-the-scenes power struggle against the hard-line faction led by Štrougal, Indra, and Balik. They had taken control of the Presidium by a margin of 7 to 4, voting to prepare a series of trials against reformers on charges of espionage, sedition, and slander of the republic. At the time, some suggested that Dubček's and his reformer allies' fates may have been spared by the chance drunk-driving crash that saved Husák from removal himself. The resulting investigation uncovered a conspiracy by ultra-conservatives to remove Husák who were themselves removed.
For Dubček and many others, this did not mean a return to private life but a different kind of political life, where in Dubček's case, his career in high politics would be deferred at home while he served as an inspirational symbol of Eurocommunist ideals abroad. Meanwhile, he struggled to personally survive repressions at home. Outwardly, he shifted to menial work that many educated reformers were forced to take. Turning down a post at a Slovak social security agency that could be used to implicate him in the misappropriation of funds, he instead requested to work as a forester. This was refused, but he was eventually given a clerical job with the state forestry agency in Bratislava.
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. Please, sir, if you like to help me come not to me." School girls giggled, saying all they were told at school was that he had done something bad. Other reports saw him as a man living securely but anonymously with his wife and children in a comfortable villa in a nice neighborhood in Bratislava. This seems to have been the official fable, as no evidence suggests this being a wholly accurate picture. When in 1975, authorities turned to prosecute his wife, Anna, she presented evidence of the insecure position of the entire family and personal friends denied proper medical care, her sons denied apartments, the armed guards posted at their home that made them fear its seizure, and her own nervous condition and health problems from constant surveillance and persecution. An entire politics arose around the false portrayal of the stability, security, and privilege of the Dubčeks' "private" life, in part to make plausible that Dubček was at liberty to be heavily involved in counter-revolutionary activities. 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.
Dubček would say he first broke his silence by publishing letters he smuggled out of the country after he was denied the right to bury his mother in daylight in 1974, for fear it would provoke an anti-government demonstration.
Dubček had a long history of contact with not only the Italian Communist Party but with its newspaper l'Unità and its journalists. A highly favorable article about him in l'Unità, on 29 June 1970, reporting his expulsion from the party, portrayed him as a social democratic communist seeking to change the ruling style of the party. He struck a chord with Italian audiences and remained a popular symbol of shared ideals. Under constant surveillance and separated from his domestic contacts, it was in many ways easier for him to make contact with western communist media and parties than with his own party and people. He saw this use of intermediaries as the natural course of action, stating in a letter to the Italian Communist Party:
"Since the matter of the political path in the Communist Party has become international, it cannot remain internal at this time. After the expulsion of almost 600,000 communists from the party and their civil and social disenfranchisement to our laws and the Constitution of Czechoslovakia, the crisis in the party deepened even more. A gradual starting point can only come with the help of other communist parties of socialist countries and other communist parties, especially European ones...Helping other communist parties cannot be understood as interfering in the internal affairs of another communist party, because it has long since become an international matter."
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. His trip to Italy in 1988, and the public recognition he gained from both the timing and prestige of an award he shared with Nelson Mandela, marked his return to high politics. This was at a time when perestroika was finally breaking through to the Soviet bloc nations outside the Soviet Union.
In 1989, he was awarded the annual Sakharov Prize in its second year of existence.
Velvet Revolution
thumb|right|upright=1.2|Dubček (right) and [[Rudolf Chmel at an event in Budapest, July 1990]]
thumb|Plaque commemorating Dubček's service as chairman of the Czechoslovak Parliament 1989–1992, on the wall of the [[National Museum (Prague)|National Museum in Prague]]
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. Five of the organizers signed the letter announcing it. They were promptly arrested and came to be known as the Bratislava Five.
On 14 November 1989, the final day of the trial of the 'Bratislava Five', a crowd gathered in front of the Bratislava Justice Palace. As Miroslav Kusý recollects,
On 17 November, Dubček attended the students' march at Albertov, in the Prague 2 municipal district. Fearing he would give a speech, the StB arrested Dubček, releasing him the next morning. This was said to mark the last arrest of an opposition leader. Martin Bútora, one of the founders of Public Against Violence (VPN) recounted Dubček's appearance at Slovak National Uprising Square on 23 November as,