AHC/ passive resistence in Czecholovakia effective in 68

In otl there was some such resistence.

Imagine Dubchek is able to hide and broadcast.

Soviet and Polish tank commanders handed flowers and asked to go to the West German border (by people who of course speak Russsian).
 
Then Brezhnev probably gives the order to open fire rather than risk losing all of the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia turns into a bloodbath, like a country-sized Tiananmen. Soviets seen far worse than even Nazis afterwards.

On the off-chance that passive resistance is effective (unlikely since the Soviets are there to take control and they definitely will not want to show weakness) it probably hastens the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, but not necessarily that of Communism in the USSR, which was, economically speaking, still chugging along at this point. The loss of Eastern European puppets would be a political blow to hardliner CPSU functionaries, not the whole Union.
 
It certainly could have been bloody.

Or, the Czech activists could have taken a page from Gene Sharp (who actually didn't write his big book till '73, but the ideas were probably floating around). Sharp's position is that nonviolence works a heck of a lot more often than we might give it credit for, and that nonviolent activism takes the same skill with tactics that we might attribute to armed conflict.
 
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