MOSCOW, MAY 18 -- The last time Alexander Dubcek came to Moscow, he was flown here as a prisoner and interrogated by the Kremlin leadership on why he had dared lead Czechoslovakia astray with his heresy of "socialism with a human face."
Dubcek will spend four days in Moscow, meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and other members of the leadership. Tonight, Dubcek was on Soviet television calmly shaking hands with Soviet officials and not looking much older than he had as the leader of the "Prague Spring" reforms in 1968.
Dubcek, who took an active part in Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution" late last year, has said that it still "makes me sick to my stomach" to think of the Moscow-led invasion of Prague in 1968. But on Soviet television he said there was "no use in crying over spilt milk."
After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, Soviet troops abducted Dubcek and other Czech leaders at gunpoint and flew them to Moscow for "negotiations" with Leonid Brezhnev which put an end to the reforms in Prague. Eight months later, Dubcek was fired as Czech party chief and was expelled from the party.
For some Soviet people, including physicist Andrei Sakharov, the invasion of Czechoslovakia was a final straw, the breaking point in their patience with the system. After 1968, the dissident movement began to grow.
For more than 20 years, Dubcek lived in Bratislava in obscurity working as a minor official in the local forestry ministry. His return to Prague and his first public speech from a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square last year was an explosive, emotional moment that firmly linked the "Prague Spring" of 1968 with the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989.
Gorbachev, who eventually condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia and issued a public apology, has a personal as well as a political connection to the "Prague Spring" reforms. Gorbachev's closest college friend in the 1950s, Zdenek Mlynar, was one of Dubcek's key aides during the "Prague Spring" and one of the officials forcibly flown to Moscow following the 1968 invasion.
In his extraordinary account of the invasion and its aftermath, "Night Frost in Prague," Mlynar writes of the morning in 1968 when he and Dubcek arrived in Moscow: "I was no longer in the Moscow of my youth, I was in the capital of an occupying power. Instead of friends from university, I was surrounded by polite but professionally alert KGB guards, in uniform and plain clothes. The absurdity of that moment epitomized the absurdity of my life up to that point, and very suddenly I was overwhelmed by a wish not to exist at all."
Inside the Kremlin, Mlynar recalled, Brezhnev said to the group, "We in the Kremlin came to the conclusion we couldn't depend on you anymore . . . . We bought that territory of Czechoslovakia at the cost of enormous sacrifices, and we shall never leave it."
Last February, Moscow and Prague agreed that the Soviet Union would withdraw its 73,500 troops from Czechoslovakia by July 1991. Dubcek, who will address a committee in the Soviet parliament, said, "It's time we looked to the future."
