On Friday, August 21, Slovakia commemorated 47 years since the invasion of Warsaw pact troops into the territory of what was then Czechoslovakia. They came here as a reaction from Leonid Brezhnev, the head of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union. Following the Brezhnev Doctrine, the USSR would not allow any Eastern European country to reject Communism. The Soviet Union leader feared that the so called Prague spring of 1968 and its leader Alexander Dubček had started reforms that might have led to the fall of the communist regime. Thus the Warsaw pact allies found it their duty to enter Czechoslovakia and "protect" it from the western type of capitalism. The communist regime in former Czechoslovakia crashed 21 years later, during the 1989 Velvet revolution.
