30 years ago
The agreement to end the Soviet military presence
The occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops that began in August 1968 and was ratified by the treaty of October 16 the same year, would end only twenty-two years later, following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Post-communist Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, which by then were on the verge of disintegrating, signed the new agreement on February 26, 1990, with the signatures of Foreign Ministers Jiří Dienstbier and Eduard Ševardnadze. A month earlier a major demonstration had taken place in Prague requesting that the Russians leave the country. At the time of the signing of the agreement, in Czechoslovakia, there were still about 73,000 soldiers of the more than 750,000 stationed in previous years, a few thousand tanks and several hundred aircraft of the Red Army that were transferred in several stages leading up to the complete conclusion of the operation which took place on 21 June 1991. Since then the Prague government has had to invest large sums to contain the environmental damage caused by the presence of Soviet military bases.
