August 1969: When a brutal crackdown on protests resulted in killings and a “baton law”

Exactly a year after the Prague Spring was crushed by a Warsaw Pact
invasion, many thousands of Czechoslovaks went into the streets once more
to protest their country’s occupation. The subsequent brutal crackdown on
demonstrators, this time by their own countrymen, resulted in hundreds of
arrests and even five deaths. It crushed the last vestiges of hope and
persuaded the public that “normalisation” was here to stay.