This is a collection of original essays by Czechs, most of whom were chief players in Czechoslovakia's 1969 drama. That brief spring still lives as the drama of the most extensive liberalization of any Communist system and of its crushing defeat in a Soviet-led invasion. Twenty years later, the reflections of the writers gathered in this book assume a special meaning in light of Soviet events, for the Soviet Union is now being invaded by the very same ideas that moved it to invade Czechoslovakia. As at several times in their history, the Czechs-overpowered and on the brink of a seeming assimilation by a powerful neighbor-watch their ideas at work. Though the final results of the reform process in the Soviet Union cannot be predicted, it is certain that the USSR, and with it Eastern Europe, will be different from what they were before Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power. The tremors of that change are the aftershocks of Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring.