Svoboda had valiantly and single-handedly won the battle, but the Soviets still had the upper hand in the war. Having conceded the point in releasing the four Czech leaders, they began to apply incredible pressure. The Soviets had a list of points that they wished to force on the Czech group, including a declaration of the legality of the invasion, the dismissal of many of the progressives from the government, and the nullification of the Fourteenth Party Congress' elections held during the early stages of the invasion.

Though the exhausted Czech leaders battled over the details, they knew that the Soviets would not settle for anything less than a crackdown on the new, liberal Czech socialism. The Soviets may have misjudged some of the elements of the invasion, but they had the might and the resolve to get what they wanted. That was a return to hard-line Soviet principles and the elimination of freedom of the press and other basic rights so recently enjoyed in Czechoslovakia for hardly more than six months. In fact, the troops in and around Prague were increased. The Moscow Agreement signed by the Czech leaders under incredible pressure could have been seen as a sell-out, but the Czechs were all too aware of the consequences of resisting the Soviets. The leaders themselves wished to avoid the utter destruction of the country and its citizens, and much of the agreement was not made public immediately or the Czechs might have reacted violently and touched off a bloodbath.

When Dubcek, Smrkovsky, Cernik, and Svoboda finally returned to Prague, they were still the political leaders of Czechoslovakia. The Russian attempt to install a puppet government had failed, but they had been successful in their overall mission. They had created a climate in which the Czech leaders had to submit to Moscow's demands, and during the rest of the year the liberal changes were rolled back in a series of forced concessions. The Czech leadership as well as the citizens fought the changes as best they could, but the hard-liners ultimately had their way. The back-and-forth maneuverings of the functionally defeated liberals and the unpopular but Soviet-backed conservatives produced some final glimmers of resistance, but the die was cast. The progressives were eliminated from political positions, and press censorship increased. The secret police was increased with members who were Soviet supporters. Some political leaders, seeing where things were going, began to back the Soviets in hopes of being rewarded with better positions.

Even in late October Czech crowds cheered Dubcek, Smrkovsky, and Cernik, and there were anti-Soviet demonstrations in Prague. By November the Soviet-backed leaders had managed to regain almost complete control of the top political positions. Cernik himself was becoming associated with the Soviet direction. Men like Dubcek and Smrkovsky were being isolated and harassed, though they were not completely removed from the political scene for almost another year. Although the events in Czechoslovakia during 1968 were reported in the Western press, they seemed pretty remote to the average American. Obsessed with the radical political changes that were happening in the United States, few people were aware of the struggle for basic democratic freedoms in a communist-bloc country in eastern Europe.

The plight of the Czechs in 1968 offers a humbling perspective to some of the events in the United States in the same year. Even now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the effects of their long-term and heavy-handed control of their satellites remain. One can only speculate about the world scene if the Soviets had bowed to democratic reforms in the Warsaw Pact countries instead of crushing them. The orderly transition of power in the United States from Lyndon Johnson's Democrats to Richard Nixon's Republicans highlights some of the strengths of the American system, even in a year of great political upheaval. There were no tanks on America's borders to alter the course of the election, and "freedom of the press" allowed widespread reporting of the issues. Czechoslovakia's story is a fascinating mini-series in the drama of 1968.