August 20: Today is the anniversary of the painful invasion of Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia) by the Soviet Union, with its Warsaw Pact, to, which crushed the "Prague Spring" in 1968.

On 20 August 1968, 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Dubcek and three other leaders were arrested and sent to Moscow.

The Czeck reformer Alexander Dubcek spoke about a "socialism with a human face"; that is, a socialism in freedom. The reform thinkers dreamed with a reform associated to a rebirth they called the "Prague Spring", because the plants begin to flower after winter.

The Czechoslovakians did not fight the Russians. Instead, they stood in front of the tanks.

The Soviet Union was led by the Marxist-Leninist Communist Leonid Brezhnev, of the "hard line" of Soviet communism, which allowed no different way of thinking from the doctrine of Lenin interpretation.

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The Russians of the Soviet Union split Czechoslovakia into a federation of two republics: the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic.

The theoretical concept supposed that under a federation, social and economic inequalities would be eliminated.

Czech youths holding Czechoslovakian flags stand atop of an overturned truck as other Prague residents surround Soviet tanks in downtown Prague on Aug. 21, 1968. (AP Photo/Libor Hajsky/CTK).

The abrupt termination of the "Prague Spring" was a universal disappointment sensitive to human inequalities that still exist between many academic socialists and intellectual salon socialists.

TIME Magazine Cover: Russian Invasion of Czechoslovakia -- Aug. 30, 1968.

"Socialism with a human face" of the Czech reformer Alexander Dubcek, was bloodily eliminated by the troops of the Warsaw Pact, led by Soviet Russia, on August 19, 1968. There was overall sadness, by the arbitrariness!

Dubcek and his immediate collaborators were captured and took them to Moscow to "make them see reason."

A woman turns away during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in this photo taken by renowned photographer Josef Koudelka and released to Reuters September 5, 2008.

In Moscow on 26 August, Dubcek signed the 15 doctrines of the Moscow Protocol, paving the way for rigid standardization which restored the communist order in Czechoslovakia. When Dubcek returned to Prague one day after the signing of the document, still he served as first secretary.

On August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw pact with the Soviet Union in their helm invaded sovereign Czechoslovakia and mercilessly crushed the peaceful reorganization and cultural awakening of the local Communists.What emerges like a silver lining through the invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979, Chechnya in the 1990s and now Georgia in 2008 is an especially paranoid and aggressive Russian mindset combined with a chronic inferiority complex and the need to show the world what Russia is worth.

Then, on March 21 and March 28, the Czechoslovakia ice hockey team beat the Soviet Union one in the World Cup in Stockholm. Czechoslovak supporters destroyed the offices of the Soviet airline Aeroflot, and other Soviet institutions. Soon after, Dubcek was forced to resign as first secretary.