Alexander Dubček led Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968. Though Alexander Dubček was a communist, he erred on the side of reform, which went against what his masters in Moscow would have wanted for Czechoslovakia as they feared the break-up of the Warsaw Pact. Dubček’s fall from grace and power was swift.
Dubček was born in 1921 in Uhrovek, Slovakia. When he was aged four, his family moved to the Soviet Union and he grew up in the solidly communist country where the rule of Joseph Stalin was supreme. Dubček became a product of the Soviet education system and became a loyal communist. In 1938, Dubček returned to Slovakia and secretly joined the Communist Party in 1939. The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the Second World War focussed the attention of the people against a common foe so that internal politics mattered little. In 1944, Dubček joined the Slovak Resistance.
