With the Tianmen Square Massacre anniversary just a short while ago and pictures of the 'Tank Man' featuring prominently in the media I was reminded of a similar photo of another 'Tank Man' standing up to brutal tyranny.
In this case it was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
1968/1989
In the summer of 1968, a series of liberalizing reforms in Czechoslovakia, including increasing freedoms of the press and the loosening of political censorship, raised concern among Warsaw Pact leaders that the removal of press censorship and surveillance would pose security risks to all of the Eastern bloc countries. Because Czechoslovakia bordered Austria and West Germany, which formed part of the Western bloc, the Soviet Union feared that liberal ideas from the West would filter into the East through the Czech border.
Dubček and other Czech leaders did not believe that the Soviet Union would invade and failed to prepare; they were quickly arrested and sent to Moscow to be interrogated.
Even the ČSSR (Czechoslovakia) Communist Party blasted intentions of invasion and certainly the actual invasion. The Soviet Union jailed/disappeared many of the leaders, including the President and replaced them with their cronies.
Local sympathisers of the invasion are and were pariahs until this day.
Here's a bit of video history, made all the more interesting as most of us here were around at the time of the
brutal and deadly invasion.
The Soviet Union disintegrated and threw the country into chaos from which it still hasn't recovered.