LBJ and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
Official relations between Johnson and Novotny were cordial — the two exchanged semi-regular correspondence on scientific and political matters of the day, as the United States hoped to draw the CSR towards the West. LBJ settled into office in late 1963, a year and change after the collapse of the USSR's third Five Year Plan in the CSR and soon preceding a Czechoslovak leadership crisis, which the CIA considered largely "of [Novotny's] own making" due to his perceived reticence to effectively de-Stalinize. The crisis rendered Novotny's popularity and grasp on power tenuous, and U.S. analysts assumed that the Soviet apparatus would have to find a suitable replacement who could effectively liberalize and de-Stalinize the country. Unexpectedly, however, Soviet leadership "dispatched Brezhnev to Prague" to resolve the crisis, and Novotny was unanimously reelected in November of 1964 by the CSR's National Assembly.
Novotny was forced to resign after public displeasure with his leadership reached a fever pitch in early 1968, and was succeeded as first secretary by the reformist Alexander Dubček. Under Dubček's guidance, the CSR saw great increases in political and economic liberalization and de-Stalinization. Dubček's leadership attempted to counter unimaginative, quantity-focused production practices propagated by the Soviet leadership that were entirely unfit for Czechoslovakia's levels of industrial development, and lessened levels of censorship and secret police oversight, bringing the CSR closer to the contemporary West, and increasingly alienating the Soviet apparatus.
The first eight months of Dubček's regime were characterized by ebbs and flows in Czech-Soviet relations, as the CSR drifted towards democracy, countered by consistent threats of Soviet military intervention. A June 1968 CIA special memorandum speculated that "the related crises in internal Czechoslovak politics and in Soviet-Czechoslovak relations seem to have eased," but concluded that "there is a good change that relations between Prague and Moscow will again become very tense." Tensions continued mounting, and in August of 1968, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was invaded by the Soviet Union and the Polish, Bulgarian, and Hungarian Peoples' Republics, and Dubček was arrested. International reactions were swift, as democratic governments and workers' groups the world over expressed their sympathy for the citizens of the CSR and their pursuit of freedom.
After the invasion, Dubček's reforms were reversed, in a period of Czech history now referred to as "normalization," and the Soviet apparatus installed a more conservative government unlikely to challenge Moscow's dominance. An October 1968 treaty allowed for a decreased Soviet military presence to remain on Czechoslovak territory to "keep the peace" during transition.
