40 years on, Czechs chilled by invasion of Georgia

Vera Machutova woke one August night in 1968 to the thunder of Soviet tanks surging through this Czech city on the East German frontier.

With the invasion on the night of August 20-21, Moscow crushed the Prague Spring, a bid by Czechoslovak reformists to establish "socialism with a human face". At a cost of at least 108 lives, it put its Warsaw Pact ally back on a hardline path, where it stayed until the 1989 Velvet Revolution toppled one-party rule.

Forty years later, with the Czech Republic now a democracy within Nato and the EU, Ms Machutova is troubled by the conflict in Georgia, whose army was routed last week by Russian forces that pushed deep inside its territory.

What is similar, she said, is the clear message from Moscow that it will not accept a dramatic political shift in a country it sees as part of its sphere of influence - what Russia calls its "near abroad".

"It was a huge blow for us, and it changed everything. If it wasn't for the Russians, our lives would have been completely different," said Ms Machutova, now 61. "And in Georgia, it's basically the same. They are invading another country."

The two invasions differ on many points, not least because Georgia, an eager ally of the West, made the first move in the latest crisis by trying to retake its breakaway, pro-Russian region of South Ossetia by force on August 7. "Russian forces need to leave Georgia at once," US. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week.

"This is no longer 1968."

Forty years ago, Moscow justified its intervention as "fraternal help" to Czechoslovakia. In Georgia, it said it was forced to come to the aid of Russian nationals under attack in South Ossetia.

In nearly two decades since the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the West's influence has slowly crept into the Kremlin's former empire.

Now half a dozen of Moscow's former closest allies and its three erstwhile Baltic republics have abandoned their former Soviet overlords in favour of EU and Nato membership.

Svante Cornell, Research Director for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, said Russia sees those events - Nato expansion, revolutions leading to pro-Western governments in Georgia and Ukraine, and plans for a US-based missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic - as unacceptable threats.

Emboldened by an oil-fuelled economic boom and resurgent nationalism under ex-President and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and with the US struggling with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an economic crisis, Moscow is clawing back.

Now the prospects of Georgia joining Nato - a main goal of its president, Mikheil Saakashvili - are very much in doubt, as are those of Georgia's close ally Ukraine. After almost two decades of engagement with the West, Moscow appears to have reverted to a "sphere of influence" world-view in which it tries to exert dominion over its less powerful neighbours.

"The Putin doctrine has been very much about rolling back the Ukrainian and Georgian revolutions and getting back to a position of malleable, semi-authoritarian governments that the Russians are able to control," said Mr Cornell.

"That's the aim in Georgia, regime change. Even if they stop their tanks miles from Tbilisi, they want Saakashvili out."