Traumatically, with some very particular characteristics, the 1968 movement also passed through Eastern Europe where Socialism had been established, Among the decisive countries of this movement: Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, where a strong student movement developed.  POLISH MARCH The spark that ignited the fire in Poland was the decision of the Polish authorities, taken in mid January 1968, to forbid the performance in the National Theatre of Warsaw of the play The forefathers by the greatest Polish romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz. The text of the play written in the eighteen hundreds contained strong anti-Russian accents and some scenes, during the performance, were underlined by the audience with spontaneous applause. Many intellectuals, exponents of critical Marxism, and some thousands of students of the University of Warsaw signed a letter of protest addressed to the Diet (parliament) and then, after the final performance of the play, on 30 January, there was a demonstration which ended with the arrest of 35 students.  On 1 February a subscription against the censorship of the play of Mickiewicz and, on the 16 February, 3,145 signatures were delivered to the president of parliament. Tension was rising. On 4 March two students, Adam Michnik and Henry Szlaifer were expelled from the university, while in an extraordinary meeting of the writers’ association for the first time voices of profound indignation against the regime were heard. Against these repressive measures, for 8 March the students organized a meeting in the courtyard of the University of Warsaw, but during the peaceful protest, in which among other things they confirm their loyalty to Socialism, they are attacked by provokers (agents of the police and workers forces organized by the Minister for the Interior Miecyslaw Moczar). The clashes spread throughout the entire centre of the city and last for several days, while the protest extends to other universities of the country. In the motion approved by the meeting, the students had stated: "We will not consent to being deprived of the right to intervene in defence of the democratic and libertarian traditions of the country. We will be silent before repression". This is the beginning of the movement of March. "Socialism does not mean baton", "Democracy", "Workers with us", "There is no bread without freedom", these are the slogans of the movement that develops in the following weeks and that spreads throughout Poland with occupations of the institutes and universities in Cracow and Lublin. With a qualitative growth of their claims, the students pass from the password against repression and for the liberation of their companions to a global criticism of the system; they demand freedom as an essential moment of Socialism; they prepare a programme of democratization of the society that to the current police regime knows how to oppose a Poland that is "truly Socialist". The repression is fierce with provocations and hundreds of arrests among the students. At the same time, press, radio and television begin a defamation campaign. In the factories, the POUP, the Communist party, which has retaken the initiative, has motions of condemnation of the unrest approved: the students are defined as spoilt children, unsuccessful politicians and, here is the novelty, as "Zionists"; already the day after the demonstration of 8 March the reactionary and Catholic daily Slowo Powszche had launched a firebrand campaign of anti-Semitism, accusing the organizers of the student meeting of being "Zionists" and defining the meeting a "revolt". We thus arrive at the famous meeting held by the secretary of the POUP, Wladyslaw Gomulka on 19 March in Warsaw in the Kongresowa Hall (the same that had seen, in the autumn of 1967, the concert of the Rolling Stones and fierce clashes between young people and the police), in which the Communist leader made his own the campaign against the "enemies of Socialism" dividing the Jews into three categories: those that were loyal to popular Poland and who could remain, those that were loyal to Israel and could leave, those that had double loyalty and who had to choose just one of them. Between March and April the various universities in which there were strikes and demonstrations were normalized, seven professors of the University of Warsaw were dismissed due to "anti-Socialist ideas" and in the following months twenty thousand students were expelled from the Polish universities. Now the country seemed tranquil. It was just necessary to defeat the "threat" that came from nearby Czechoslovakia, an event that did take place in August and as a result of the insistence and pressure of the Polish authorities. The last echoes of the Polish student protest will in fact be the distribution of leaflets against the military invasion of Czechoslovakia. Then, starting from December, the season of the trials against the leaders of the student revolt begin. The sentences vary from a year and a half to three and a half years of imprisonment. But it was not a defeat. The Polish "March" had devastating consequences on society, nothing would ever again be as before. An entire generation had discovered politics, showing that in the country there were people ready to fight, to go to prison, for a transformation of the system, for a process of democratization of the Socialist society, but no longer from within the official machinery of the regime, that revealed its infamy by uniting the neo-Stalinist language to that of Nazism; and discovering finally that in the folds of the Polish Catholic situation there were forces ready to dialogue. THE SPRING OF PRAGUE The year 1968 opens in Prague with the resumption of the plenum of the Central Committee (CC) of the Czechoslovakian Communist party (PCC) of 3 January, the direct clash between Stalinists (Novotny), strongly linked to the USSR of Leonid Brezhnev, and the group of reformists led by Alexander Dubcek, Oldrik, Cernik, Josef Smrkovsky and Zdenek Mlynar. The latter prepared, starting from 1967, a reformist "Plan of action", approved in 1968 that, among other things, aimed at the progressive separation of the role and power of the party from the institutional bodies and from the government, and a definite reform of the economy. The process of destalinization, which began with the XX Congress of the PCUS, in Czechoslovakia is delayed, even if the gigantic statue of Stalin that towered above Prague was taken away in 1962. On 5 January Dubcek replaces Novotny at the secretariat of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party. After a few days the Rude Pravo, the party organ, accuses, without ever nominating him, the former secretary Novotny for the violations of constitutional rights under his administration. The climate gets overheated, also because precisely in January in Moscow there is a trial going on behind closed doors against four dissidents arrested months before during the distribution of leaflets: Ginsburg, Galanskov, Dobrovlski and Vera Lazkova, and for which thirty-one non-dissident Soviet intellectuals asked for the publicity of the trial (the same request will cost the former general Grogorienko his arrest). Meanwhile in Prague the turning point that will reach its apex in the spring is accelerating. And, for the first time in a country of the east, the new presidium of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party presents the public statement of its work. The reformist Josef Smrkovski writes in Rude Pravo: "We must create a new type of Socialism, without having any model and at the level of the problems of an industrial society". Meantime popular consensus grows. It sees in the first line the students and a new generation of intellectuals and artists, protagonists, among other things, of a flourishing renewal of the cinema throughout the East. At the end of January Dubcek, at the invitation of the CC of the PCUS, goes to Moscow and at the beginning of February he also meets the Hungarian leader Janos Kadar and that of Poland Wladislaw Gomulka. On the occasion of the festivities for the XX anniversary of the Communist party coming to power in Czechoslovakia (22 February 1948), Dubcek makes a speech that does not please Brezhnev and the other Communist secretaries of the East present in Prague. He outlines some guidelines of his policy of internal renewal and of independence in the international field. Formally no one of the new trend yet controls the government and institutions of a country, but it is one episode that makes the situation precipitate in favour of Dubcek: the case of general Sejna who, shortly before being formally accused of preparing a putsch in favour of Novotny, flees to the United States taking public money with him. The position of the reigning government becomes unsustainable. On 21 March, after huge popular and student protests, the presidium of the central Committee invites Novotny to resign as president of the Republic and one week later general Ludvik Svoboda is nominated to the role of president of the Republic, in a situation in which alarm in the other countries of the East is growing rapidly. At the Conference of Dresden of the Communist parties of the East, there is strong criticism of the developments of the Czechoslovakian situation. During the same period the central Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party rehabilitates the victims of the 1952 trial against the then Communist secretary, Rudolf Slansky, who was condemned to death and executed. In April the central Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party approves the Plan of action and a vast plan of rehabilitation of the victims of the Stalinist purges; on the 24 April thousands of students demonstrate in Prague in front of the American embassy against the war in Vietnam. At last the government led by Josef Lenàrt resigns and after two days the government of the new trend is formed led by Oldrich Cernik while Josef Smrkovsky becomes president of the National Assembly. In May, after the umpteenth call to Moscow of Dubcek and Smrkovsky, this time in the company of Vasil Bilak, who will turn out to be linked to the old leadership of the party, Luigi Longo, secretary of the PCI, arrives in Prague bringing with him the full support of the Italian Communists to the new trend. At the end of May, the Minister of Defence announces that military manoeuvres of the Warsaw Pact will be held in June in Czechoslovakian territory. The news doesn’t stop the wind of change. For September, the XIV "extraordinary" congress of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party is convoked; the CC reconfirms the governing role of the Communist party and the prohibition to establish other political formations outside the National Front, a small coalition constitutionally connected with the one-party regime. June is the decisive month: in fact in the most important factories such as the Ckd of Prague-Smichov and the Skoda of Pilsen, the first workers councils and the first committees for self-government of the factories are born. And the same period sees the printing of the "Manifest of 2000 words" edited by Ludvik Vaculik and later undersigned by thousands of exponents of the world of culture, art and sport. It asks for an acceleration of the process of democratization that is already underway. The document arouses bitter criticism from the Soviets and is defined by the new government, by the national Assembly and by the party as "politically irresponsible". But July sees the acceleration of events. The manoeuvres of the Warsaw Pact formally finish on 30 June but the Soviet troops decide to remain in Czechoslovakia. In mid-July a sudden new summit of the leaders of the Communist parties is held in Warsaw, again without the Romanian leaders, but this time also without the Czechoslovakian leaders, who refuse to participate and propose rather bilateral relations in Prague "as soon as the Soviet troops have left". The parties gathered in Warsaw judge the situation as "absolutely unacceptable" and send a letter to Prague in which they denounce, for the first time, the presence of "foreign forces that try to make Czechoslovakia leave the wake of Socialism". This occasion sees the first formulation of the "Brezhnev doctrine" on the limited sovereignty of the countries of the East. It is the moment of the clash: the Czechoslovakian Communist Party strongly rejects the accusations. However the Soviet Union surprisingly states that it is ready to begin bilateral discussions and everyone seems to have been pacified: so much so that a summit of the secretaries of the Communist parties of the East is convoked in the Slovakian town of Cierna nad Tisou. In the end everyone states that they are "satisfied" and in a Conference in Bratislava a common document is defined in which it is stated "that the defence of the conquests of Socialism is the international duty of all the Socialist countries", and it reconfirms the principles "of equality, respect of national sovereignty and independence, territorial integrity". Reporting on the negotiations of Cierna, Dubcek invites his fellow citizens not to fear any threats to the sovereignty of the country. On 9 August Marshal Tito arrives in Prague, at the head of a Yugoslavian delegation in support of the new trend and on 15 the Romanian head of state, Nicolae Ceausescu also arrives. Suddenly, on 19 August, Dubcek receives a severe letter from Bresnev, secretary of the Soviet Union Communist party, in which he expresses "dissatisfaction" for the developments of the situation in Czechoslovakia. At 11 pm of 20 August, troops from the Soviet Union, Poland, Eastern Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria invade Czechoslovakia. On 26th August, thinking that they will in this way save the new trend, the Czechoslovakian leaders are forced to sign a secret document in which they accept the military occupation of the country, until the situation is normalized. Again in December, the metal workers trade unions ask for a continuation of the economic reform and a law that recognizes self-government. In this climate of defeat and widespread bitterness, normalization and purging begin. On 16 January 1969 the student Jan Palach sets fire to himself in Wenceslaus Square to protest against the military occupation of the country and normalization, like the Vietnamese Bonzi who denounced American aggression. On 17 April Dubcek is expelled as general secretary; in his place the "normalizer" Gustav Husak is nominated. On 29 September a document of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party officially dissolves the policy of reform. In November the last factory council is dissolved, that of the Skoda of Pilsen. The new trend of Prague lasted for just one spring.