Especially after the Writers' Congress of 1968, Party leaders started to clash with writers; earlier that year Ceaușescu had announced: "the freedom of the individual is not in contradiction with the general demands and interests of society but, on the contrary, serves these interests". Ceaușescu managed to co-opt numerous intellectuals (many of them formerly apolitical or even oppositionist) and bring them into the Party after condemning the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia, but still the Party began to intensify the struggle among writers as a group and between them and the Party. In 1970, awards of literary prizes brought the Party leadership into open conflict with the Writers' Union. This determined the Party to recover the privilege of granting such awards and of determining their standards of value.