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He covered the Prague Spring, in 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the �ٳܲ�č��� reforms, and his pictures of the armed, hard-faced occupiers singing and dancing in Prague spoke for themselves.

Previous winners of the Sakharov award include Nelson Mandela, Alexander �ٳܲ�č���, Aung San Suu Kyi and Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani campaigner for female education who barely survived a Taliban assassination attempt.

Alexander �ٳܲ�č���, the leader of the then Czechoslovakian communist party, thought he could allow freedom of speech, democratisation – all the forbidden fruits – while remaining a part of the Soviet empire.

On August 20th and 21st, 1968, fifty years ago this week, hundreds of thousands of Soviet and allied Warsaw Pact troops poured over the Czechoslovak border from surrounding countries in a massive show of force that quickly deposed the government of Alexander �ٳܲ�č���.

As the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party, �ٳܲ�č��� had presided over a short-lived experiment in Communist liberalization known as the Prague Spring.