'Prague Spring' in a hundred shots
Exhibition at the Italian Institute of Culture
20 April, 17:44On August 19, Brezhnev sent a letter to Dubcek expressing "deep dissatisfaction" with what was happening in Czechoslovakia. At 11 pm the following day, August 20, tanks and soldiers from the USSR, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia. The Communist Party succeeded in approving the Program of Action for Reforms at an urgent meeting of the XIV Congress, convened in a large factory on the outskirts of Prague. The USSR crushed peaceful street demonstrations and any attempt to deviate from 'orthodoxy'. The final act of the tragedy happened on October 28, the anniversary of the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Czechoslovakia, when several hundred young people marched with national flags towards the Soviet Union embassy: when the police intervened, thousands of people took to the streets, And they were even more along the Narodni avenue, and the National Theater, where a play in honour of President Svoboda was on stage, hosted a mass demonstration. A long and thunderous applause gave welcome to Svoboda, and an absolute and moving silence followed the national anthem. There would be no more demonstrations in "normalized" Czechoslovakia. But on January 16, 1969, university student Jan Palach reached Wenceslas Square and set himself on fire as a protest against the invasion. He died after three days in agony. The world was moved, but this was not enough. The epic of "socialism with a human face" is a page of history. The photographic exhibition and its catalog allows us to live again this experience, suffused with hope and tragedy. (ANSA).