Czech nurses with strollers blocking the Soviet tank column. It took place during the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ostrava, August 21, 1968.



The images provide an intimate and sometimes painfully unheroic close-up view of chaos, confusion and upheaval in the face of military subjugation.
A corpse lies on the street as passers-by walk on seemingly unperturbed; burned-out buses block normally busy thoroughfares; troops in military vehicles display boredom, exhaustion and fear; angry civilians remonstrate beside tanks; a soldier aims his gun, disconcertingly, straight at the camera at point-blank range. Against the backdrop of military might, some incongruous snatches of everyday normality shine through: a man astride his bicycle, well-dressed office workers en route to work, smiling teenagers with trendy haircuts chatting in front of a tank, watched by wary soldiers.
The pictures were taken by a Czech photographer, Milan Linhart, in the hours following the Soviet-led invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces on 21 August, 1968.
They are now on display in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the city prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most dramatic episodes of the cold war.
The then Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, backed by eastern bloc allies, had dispatched a massive invasion force to crush the Prague Spring movement led by Czechoslovakia’s communist leader, Alexander Dubček, whose liberal reforms had won wide domestic support but alarmed Moscow, who feared that they could presage the eventual loss of a cold war ally.
As troops and tanks flooded the streets, Linhart, a 19-year-old telephone engineer and amateur photography enthusiast, found himself perfectly placed to capture history unfolding, after arriving at 6am for his job at the construction of a parliament building in Prague where he was installing the phone lines.
With a normal working shift clearly impossible, Linhart seized the moment. Grabbing his small, Russian-made Zenit 3M camera that he kept in a drawer, he rushed into the streets, taking as many dramatic shots as he could, often at great personal risk.

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