BOOK REVIEW : One Man’s Story of a Political Dream Deferred, Then Reborn : HOPE DIES LAST; The Autobiography of Alexander Dubcek <i> Edited and translated by Jiri Hochman</i> Kodansha; $27.50, 339 pages

Alexander Dubcek, the man who tried to liberalize Czechoslovakian socialism during the Prague Spring of 1968, was born only three years after the country had been fashioned from fragments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he lived long enough to see its dismemberment amid the general collapse of the Soviet bloc. And so his posthumously published autobiography, “Hope Dies Last,” turns out to be an intimate history of some of the most tumultuous events of our century, including--of course--the brief flowering of democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Dubcek’s life, as we learn from “Hope Dies Last,” was knotted with irony, coincidence and paradox. His mother and father had emigrated from Slovakia to Chicago, and he might have been born and raised in the Midwest had his parents not struggled so hard to put themselves on the cutting edge of history. The family moved first to a cooperative in Soviet Central Asia, then to the Soviet city of Gorky, and finally back to Czechoslovakia.

But it was Dubcek’s own courageous efforts to bring democracy back to Czechoslovakia that earned him a place in world history books. His efforts are especially remarkable because he was the ultimate subversive, a democratic mole who had risen to the highest circles of leadership in a Communist regime guilty of terror against its own people.

“I had for many years believed that the kind of social order practiced in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe was a dead-end enterprise,” Dubcek wrote. “Socialism, or any other modern social system, could not exist without democracy.”

The bulk of “Hope Dies Last”--and its most compelling passages--are devoted to Dubcek’s efforts to bring about an early form of what we would now recognize as a “velvet revolution,” and the crushing of the Czechoslovakian experiment in democracy by an invasion of Warsaw Pact armies under Kremlin command.

The narrative achieves something truly startling when Dubcek shows us what happened behind closed doors while Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. He gives us the very moment when Soviet paratroopers (“or ‘air infantry,’ to use the Red Army term”) broke into his office and placed him under arrest even as their comrades opened fire on the crowds in the streets below his window.

“It was like an armed robbery,” Dubcek recalls. “Without thinking I made a move toward a telephone on my desk, but one of the soldiers aimed his tommy gun at me, grasped the phone, and tore the cable out of the wall.”

Dubcek was spirited away to the Kremlin for a Kafka-esque confrontation with Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and others in the ruling elite of the Soviet Union. Here, too, we are allowed to witness a scene that might otherwise go undisclosed. Dubcek, to his credit, insisted on confronting “the gang of four” with their own crimes against him and his country, and he even scolded them for abducting him at gunpoint. Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet premier, pretended not to understand why their “guest” was so upset.

“I came to Karlovy Vary, and you gave me five bodyguards,” replied Kosygin with a straight face, referring to an earlier state visit to Czechoslovakia. “I wasn’t worried. On the contrary, I was grateful.”

The Prague Spring and Dubcek’s efforts at reform were promptly crushed with the “brotherly assistance” of the Soviet occupiers. The wellspring of democracy in Czechoslovakia (and, significantly, the aspirations of Slovakia toward autonomy) were capped for another generation. And the “quisling” government of Czechoslovakia, in a pointed gesture, dispatched Dubcek to a diplomatic post in Turkey--the very same fate that befell Leon Trotsky at the hands of Stalin.

“But at least,” Dubcek cracks, referring to Trotsky’s killing by a Soviet assassin, “I would never wind up in Mexico, or have to fear an ice pick.”

Dubcek reveals that he rejected the offers of a safe haven in the West, and he contrived to return to his homeland against the wishes of the regime. He ended up as a mechanic in the local forest administration in a town outside Bratislava, repairing chain saws under police surveillance until his retirement in 1989.

Then, gloriously and almost miraculously, he was called to take his place beside Vaclav Havel in the government of a self-liberated Czechoslovakia.

“The powerful roar of the crowd as we appeared still echoes in my ears,” Dubcek wrote. “And that, for me at least, closed the circle of historic events that had started in 1967 . . . when I launched the revolt.”

“Hope Dies Last” ends abruptly with the scene in Wenceslas Square in 1989. Dubcek was injured in an automobile accident in 1992, and he did not survive to complete his book. The work was finished by his earnest and compassionate collaborator, journalist Jiri Hochman, but the last word still belongs to Dubcek.

“ Perestroika was diluted tea compared with our Action Program of 1968, and glasnost could not compare with the freedom of the press we had instituted at the same time,” he wrote of his ultimate vindication. “However, important similarities were obvious to everybody. I savored a joke then making the rounds: ‘What’s the difference between Gorbachev and Dubcek? Twenty years!’ ”