Eighteen authors contributed to this impressive volume. Despite its diversity, it is at the moment the best collection of international scholarship on Czechoslovakia and the outside powers, which reacted to the unusual phenomenon that blossomed under the name of Prague Spring in that country for several months in 1968. The volume has an elaborate structure as a result, in part, of its complicated creation. Its first predecessor was the massive Austrian project, under the auspices of the Ludwig Boltzmann Society in Vienna, which brought together some eighty scholars and witnesses and resulted in two volumes: one of scholarly articles and testimonies, the other of documents in the original Russian language and in parallel German translation. The result, Prager Frühling. Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968: 1. Beiträge, 2. Dokumente (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), amounted to almost three thousand pages.

The second stage was the conference organized by the Austrian Center of the University of New Orleans in April 2008, during which fifteen earlier papers were again presented and three new ones added. From the latter only Mark Kramer's chapter, “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion in Historical Perspective,” appears highly relevant. Mark Carson's chapter on the Johnson Administration and the Vietnam War was conceived as if Czechoslovakia never existed, and Alessandro Brogi's study of the Prague Spring and the Western Communists is interested exclusively in the French and Italian Communist parties. These eighteen contributions comprise, then, the abbreviated English edition reviewed here. The volume is prefaced by Petr Kolář, then Czech ambassador in Washington, and dedicated to the memory of one of the co-authors, Saki Ruth Dockrill (1952–2009). About half a dozen photos of poor quality are hidden in the middle of the book.

The three Austrian editors divided the volume into four sections. The first and shortest is an introduction by the three editors, balanced by Mark Kramer's new chapter, which offers a masterly survey of connections between the Czechoslovak and Soviet politburos in the light of newly declassified archives and testimonies. In the second part, five papers deal with the more specific aspects of the Czechoslovak-Soviet relationship in 1968, including how the reform program was received in Moscow and how the decision to invade was reached. It also offers a rare view into the perspective of the KGB and a number of unknown details about the post-invasion Diktat imposed on the Czechoslovak party during the Moscow meeting of 23 and 24 August. Contrary to popular Czechoslovak mythology portraying President Ludvík Svoboda as a friend of Alexander Dubček, the former was ready to drop as a risky liability his Slovak colleague whose smiling face was seen as the incarnation, rightly or wrongly, of the Prague Spring (see the documentary section, appendix 8). Part III deals exclusively with the great powers vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia during the crisis year of 1968. In addition to the U.S.-Soviet relationship, these include the stance of the foreign offices of Great Britain and France, as well as the attitude of the French and Italian Communist parties. Five contributions in Part IV concentrate on Yugoslavia and four on Czechoslovakia's neighbors (FRG, GDR, Hungary, and Austria). A fifth neighbor, Poland, should have been included because Polish intellectuals had the closest relationship with the Prague Spring.

Forty pages are dedicated to eight documents, which seem to confirm the main premises of the volume. The secret memorandum by the American Eugene Rostow, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, entitled “Soviet Threat to Czechoslovakia” from 10 May 1968, deserves special attention. When Rostow requested Rusk to give the Russians a deterrent signal against their intended invasion of Czechoslovakia, the latter flatly refused by simply writing: “No action DR,” thus exemplifying the prevailing attitude of the Johnson administration (217 and 447–48). Taken together, the documents seem to confirm Mark Kramer's sober assessment that, in spite of the almost universal acclaim for the Prague Spring idea of “Socialism with a Human Face,” no real opportunity existed in 1968 for truly radical change in Czechoslovakia, though significant reforms on the Hungarian model might have been possible (52). Any fundamental change in Czechoslovakia and in East Central Europe required a fundamental change in Soviet political behavior—such as has occurred only since 1989.