In Prague, the year 1968 began with a bold attempt to reform and liberalize its creaking Soviet communist regime from within, 50 years later, authoritarianism is again on the rise in Eastern Europe.

In the early hours of an August day in 1968, I was awakened by the continuous thunder of heavy planes flying low overhead – we lived relatively close to Prague’s largest airport. It was about 3:00 a.m ...

FOR DECADES after the Second World War, the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR loomed as the central fact of world politics--an international conflict between apparently polar opposite systems: ...

What would later become known as the Prague Spring began with the ascension, on this day in 1968, of the reformist Alexander Dubček to the post of first secretary of the Communist Party of ...

MINSK -- Forty years ago, Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia. Among the invading forces was a 20-year-old Belarusian tank commander named Valery Finiuk. Finiuk was in charge of tank ...

A movement by an enclave in the communist bloc to grant its people the greater freedoms enjoyed in the West — that’s the drama playing out in Hong Kong today. Yet as youthful protestors wave American ...

Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian troops to separatist areas of Eastern Ukraine as euphemistic “peacekeepers,” with somewhere between 150,000 and 190,000 Russian troops ranged along the ...

One afternoon in early September, the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka was administering a bottle of cognac to a group of well-wishers at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, two placid, spacious rooms on the ...

GOOD MORNNG: Robert Vaughn, emotionally wrung out after standing vigil Friday with Ted Kennedy at the casket of his friend Robert F.K., departed N.Y. yesterday for Prague, to start “Bridge at Remagen.

This year, NPR is looking at the events of 1968 that continue to shape our world. Fifty years ago today, Czechoslovakia's parliament under duress approved a treaty sanctioning the occupation of the ...