In the West, the 1968 generation is generally seen in a postive light. But the heroes of the 1968 uprising in Prague see themselves as historical failures.

 The uprising known as the "Prague Spring" was crushed by the Soviets in August 1968. No one remembers now exactly which office the new employee from Prague moved into, that summer day in 1970. He is said to have been very nice, tall and with a friendly smile, and he took up quarters in the second story of a gray administrative building on the outskirts of Bratislava. The communist government had sent him there to oversee forestry equipment maintenance in the Slovak capital.

The nice new employee was a man named Alexander Dubcek, and one year previous he had still been first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Party leaders had stripped him of power in April 1969, and later demoted him to a forestry job. Now Dubcek rode the tram to work; sometimes he would generously offer his seat to the secret service men who followed him conspicuously.

Alexander Dubcek was the hero of the so-called "Prague Spring," the 1968 uprising crushed by the Soviets almost exactly four decades ago. Dubcek was a reformer who wanted to give communism a "human face" -- and he became a Czechoslovak icon as well as the hope of reformers in other socialist and communist countries. But Czechoslovakia's experiment became its tragedy on the night of August 21, 1968, when the armies of fellow Warsaw Pact countries invaded. Students in Prague graffitied on a building wall, "Lenin, wake up, they've gone mad." Images of desperate people standing up defenseless against the tanks drew worldwide attention and widespread sympathy for the rebellion of little Czechoslovakia against the huge Soviet Union.