Prague Spring

12 Key excerpts on "Prague Spring"

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  Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe

  Challenges to Communist Rule

  • Kevin McDermott, Matthew Stibbe(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Berg Publishers

    (Publisher)

  101 –6– The Prague Spring: From Elite Liberalisation to Mass Movement Kieran Williams Well before the opening of the archives, the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968 – commonly known as the Prague Spring – had already been examined on a scale matched only by the rise of Solidarity in Poland. If we combined even a select sampling of the literature, such as the works of Dawisha, 1 Golan, 2 Kusin, 3 Skilling, 4 Tigrid 5 and Valenta, 6 the reader would be facing almost 3,000 pages of sophisticated analysis and magisterial empirical sweep. Out of this comprehensive investigation into every conceivable aspect of the short-lived experiment in reform communism erupted a few controversies that were still awaiting resolution when the regime crumbled in 1989. In this chapter I shall summarise the answers that new archival materials have provided to outstanding Cold War questions, and also how they have reshaped our understanding of the Prague Spring and the subsequent ‘normalisation’. For general orientation, I should distinguish at the outset between three Prague Springs: the one that happened before the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968; the one that was supposed to happen after August 1968, but was prevented by the invasion; and the one that did happen after August 1968, despite the invasion. The first, initiated by a faction of the party elite led by new First Secretary Alexander Dub č ek as a response to economic and social malaise, was marked by the semi-planned breakdown of censorship; the replacement of discredited officials with younger, more popular figures (many of whom had been Stalinists in their youth, but had since mellowed); the shutdown of political surveillance by the secret police; the appearance of new formations clustering dissident intellectuals and former political prisoners; the first mixing of plan and market; and preparations for conversion of the unitary state into a federation.

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  Promises of 1968

  Crisis, Illusion and Utopia

  • Vladimir Tismaneanu(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Central European University Press

    (Publisher)

  In other words, “social-ism with a human face” was rejected at that point as a political system worth pursuing, but the Prague Spring was still discussed with an open mind by many. Former reform communists, who came to play an im-portant role in post-communist politics, fully accepted the rules of the liberal democracy. In the new system, most of them could be described as center-left liberals. They played an important role in the Civic Forum, the anti-communist umbrella movement that won the first free elections in June 1990. Gradually, however, they were marginalized by people who had 9 The most comprehensive account of the Velvet Revolution to date can be found in Jiri Suk, Labyrintem revoluce (Prague: Prostor, 2003). See also Milan Otahal and Zdenek Sladek, Deset prazskych dnu, 17–27 listopad 1989 (Prague: Dokumentace, 1990). 173 The Prague Spring 1968 neither a communist past, nor a dissident past, as they were part of the “gray zone” during “the normalization era” between 1969 and 1989. This resulted in a major change of discourse with regard not only to the communist past in general, but to the Prague Spring as well. Many new politicians who were not known for their resistance to the normalization regime decided to build democratic credentials for themselves by adopting strong anti-communist attitudes. The easiest way for many of them to do so was to lump together various periods in the development of the communist regime, as well as various former communists, without distinguishing among them. Dealing with the past was reduced for a period of time to the practice of screening the people who wanted to work in government agencies and government-run companies for their collaboration with the former secret police.

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  A History of Czechoslovakia Since 1945

  • Hans Renner(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Four The Prague Spring DOI: 10.4324/9781003440208-4 The reform movement of 1968 was emphatically democratic, both in its impressive measure of consent and in its upsurge of political participation; the only remaining question was that of the institutional guarantees for the newly-won freedoms. The abolition of censorship in May 1968 pointed in that direction, and a further decisive step forward would have been taken at the party congress three months later, which was to legitimize dissent for the first time since the Russian Bolsheviks had ruled it out in principle in 1921. The trend was thus clear at the time the Soviet intervention abruptly interrupted it, leaving open the tantalizing question of whether ‘socialism with a human face’ was a viable promise or a contradiction in terms. Vojtěch Mastný 1978) The New Party Secretary On the night of 4 to 5 January, the Party Presidium decided that the Slovak Alexander Dubček, 46, was to become Antonin Novotný’s successor. Within a few months Dubcek’s name was to be inseparably linked to the Czechoslovak reform process, the Prague Spring. And Dubček himself was to be worshipped as a hero by the population. However, seeing Dubček as the obvious person for succession because of his strong reformist profile and his past as a champion of reforms in the ČSSR, is reasoning with hindsight. Alexander Dubček did not have such a progressive past. Yet this ‘Dubcek-myth’, in which the progressive Dubček figures as the sole conceivable replacement for the Stalinist Novotný stubbornly persists. 1 In reality, the choice of Dubček that night, was an uncertain affair up to the last minute. The recommendation of Dubček to the Central Committee was the result of complex political horse trading between the compromised Novotný and his opponents in the Party Presidium

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  The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered

  International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955-1969

  • Laurien Crump(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part III Crisis and consolidation, 1968–69 Passage contains an image 6    The limits of emancipation: The Prague Spring

  We consider it necessary to put an end to the interference in the affairs of other states, of other parties, once and for all, in order to establish relations among socialist countries, among communist parties, on a truly Marxist-Leninist footing.1

  (Ceausescu’s speech after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, 21 August 1968)

  In the second half of the 1960s the Warsaw Pact threatened to be paralysed by the division between the ‘one’ (Romania) and ‘the six’ (the rest). The dynamics between the ‘six’ on the one hand and Romania on the other took an altogether different turn in the course of 1968. Although Romania was clearly isolated during the PCC meeting in Sofia in March 1968, since it was the only country at that meeting that did not support the non-proliferation treaty, there was another country that tended to develop into an anomaly within the WP: Czechoslovakia. However emphatically the new Czechoslovak leader, Alexander Dubcek, still stuck to the position of the other five at the beginning of March 1968, the Czechoslovak leadership had begun to develop its own idiosyncratic kind of communism from its plenum in January 1968 onwards, which culminated in a process of internal reforms usually known as ‘the Prague Spring’.

  In this chapter the Prague Spring will be analysed from the perspective of the multilateral decision making of the five WP countries that eventually agreed to invade Czechoslovakia to put an end to the reforms on 21 August 1968. This chapter will accordingly distinguish itself from the previous ones, as it deals with most of the protagonists from the Warsaw Pact, but not explicitly with the institution in itself. An understanding of the multilateral decision making during the Prague Spring is, however, essential in gauging the evolution of the WP in the period afterwards, and a detailed examination of the decision making might also serve to debunk conventional wisdoms on the alleged role of the alliance in this critical period.

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  Varieties of Marxist Humanism

  Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe

  • James H. Satterwhite(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3 Czechoslovakia: The Philosophical Background of the Prague Spring The Historical Setting THE YEAR 1956 WAS OF PARTICULAR IMPORTANCE in Czechoslovakia, as it was in all the countries of East- ern Europe. Stalin had died three years earlier, and in 1956 Khrushchev came out at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress with his denunciations of Stalin and Stalinism. This had the effect of giving further momentum to a trend that had begun in part at the death of Stalin-that of disorientation and of the questioning of basic assump- tions about life. Khrushchev's speeches sent a shock wave rippling throughout Eastern Europe, undermining the trust of many people in what they had been led to believe about the world. Compared with the way it registered in Poland or Hungary, this shock was less immediately felt or seen in Czechoslovakia; but even there, it eroded the foundations of the Stalinist order. This erosion first re- vealed itself in the questioning that arose in regard to many of the manifestations of the Stalinist era. This erosion of the most basically believed values was accompanied by an undercurrent of searching for new, more authentic values. In Czechoslovakia, this search was not manifested outwardly, as it was in Poland or 130 Czechoslovakia 131 Hungary, but began quietly. It took the form of a desire to gain more flexibility in everyday endeavors. This meant less control by the Party over the details of everyday work and over the first, tentative attempts to redefine social life. The search was, of necessity, cautious because the Party still retained firm control in Czechoslovakia and was anxious not to participate in the "de-Stalinization" campaign any more than it had to, lest it destroy its own authority in the process. The Party resisted any and all questioning of its position and was extremely reluctant to give up any part of its prero.gatives in any sphere.

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  The Real Special Relationship

  The True Story of How the British and US Secret Services Work Together

  • Michael Smith(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster UK

    (Publisher)

  THE Prague Spring

  The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in response to the political and economic reforms of what became known as the ‘Prague Spring’, was widely seen as a major intelligence failure on both sides of the Atlantic and from the British perspective it certainly was. The arguments in the case of the US agencies are far less persuasive. The NSA warned the US intelligence community that Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces were about to invade Czechoslovakia more than twenty-four hours ahead of time, and that warning was repeated to President Johnson and other key members of the National Security Council by CIA boss Dick Helms. Given the comprehensive intelligence-sharing process GCHQ enjoyed with the NSA – and the key role of various British military teams in West Germany – it is clear that the UK’s lack of warning was a failure of analysis by the relevant British authorities rather than a lack of sufficient intelligence collection.

  The push for more political and economic freedom in Czechoslovakia had been building up since the mid-1960s, with economists arguing that the country should be building closer economic ties with neighbouring West Germany, and the Czechoslovak people, including a substantial number of members of the Communist Party itself, making increasing demands for democratic reform, freedom of speech and the right to criticise the decisions of those in authority, something unthinkable under Soviet-style communism. In October 1967, the pressure for reform led to student protests, followed at the end of that month by attacks on party leader Antonín Novotný at a meeting of the country’s leadership, the Communist party presidium. Three months later, Novotný was forced to resign and was replaced by the more reform-minded Alexander Dubček. Although the Soviet leadership was initially concerned by Novotný’s removal, it was actually reassured by Dubček’s appointment. He was not regarded as a problem. He was seen as a loyal Moscow-trained communist, ‘Our Sasha’, a man who would not rock the boat.

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  The Real Special Relationship

  The True Story of How the British and US Secret Services Work Together

  • Michael Smith(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Arcade

    (Publisher)

  16 THE Prague Spring

  The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in response to the political and economic reforms of what became known as the ‘Prague Spring’, was widely seen as a major intelligence failure on both sides of the Atlantic and from the British perspective it certainly was. The arguments in the case of the US agencies are far less persuasive. The NSA warned the US intelligence community that Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces were about to invade Czechoslovakia more than twenty-four hours ahead of time, and that warning was repeated to President Johnson and other key members of the National Security Council by CIA boss Dick Helms. Given the comprehensive intelligence-sharing process GCHQ enjoyed with the NSA—and the key role of various British military teams in West Germany—it is clear that the UK’s lack of warning was a failure of analysis by the relevant British authorities rather than a lack of sufficient intelligence collection.

  The push for more political and economic freedom in Czechoslovakia had been building up since the mid-1960s, with economists arguing that the country should be building closer economic ties with neighbouring West Germany, and the Czechoslovak people, including a substantial number of members of the Communist Party itself, making increasing demands for democratic reform, freedom of speech and the right to criticise the decisions of those in authority, something unthinkable under Soviet-style communism. In October 1967, the pressure for reform led to student protests, followed at the end of that month by attacks on party leader Antonín Novotný at a meeting of the country’s leadership, the Communist party presidium. Three months later, Novotný was forced to resign and was replaced by the more reform-minded Alexander Dubček. Although the Soviet leadership was initially concerned by Novotný’s removal, it was actually reassured by Dubček’s appointment. He was not regarded as a problem. He was seen as a loyal Moscow-trained communist, ‘Our Sasha’, a man who would not rock the boat.

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  Unsettled 1968 in the Troubled Present

  Revisiting the 50 Years of Discussions from East and Central Europe

  • Aleksandra Konarzewska, Anna Nakai, Michał Przeperski(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  continuity . In the context of the Prague Spring commemorations, it is demonstrated by Robert Fico who manifestly cherishes the memory of Alexander Dubček. For Fico, the Prague Spring proved that freedom and socialist policies are not irreconcilable and survive as an alternative to the capitalist system in his own political project. Effectively, therefore, the symbol of 1968 serves as a means of boundary-work – politicians use it to distinguish themselves from others and to contextualize their identity within distinctive political as well as moral traditions.

  The parliamentary opposition, however, harbours a different concept of history, that of radical disruption . Their understanding of the possibility of their own political projects is closely tied to the conception of abrupt and consensual rejection of socialism after 1989. In this interpretation, there can be no true freedom in socialism. The freedom and plurality of 1968 were not a part of Dubček’s conscious effort. Rather, the liberalizing steps were a forced concession. Pressed hard by the nation’s yearning for liberalization, Dubček’s administration began reforming a system that could not have been reformed – thus embarking on an unavoidable track to collapse or change to liberal democracy. The Soviets, however, promptly sensed the threat and reacted.

  These two interpretations of the Soviet crackdown demonstrate that relation to the former political regime remains an important aspect of political identity and one of the dividing lines of the political discourse. Although Smer-SD had emancipated itself from its previous party, SDĽ (The Party of the Democratic Left), an heir to the communist discourse, in 1999 as a ‘third-way’ alterative,47 its representatives still tend to maintain some degree of symbolic continuity between the pre-1989 Czechoslovakia and the present. As Fico famously remarked, he did not really notice the 1989 revolution and Pavol Paška, the late vice-chairman of the party, recalled that instead of joining the protests, he was renovating his bathroom. This sense of continuity may indeed resonate with a certain ‘Ostalgia’ felt by parts of the electorate, which remains quite salient, as recent surveys have demonstrated that, almost 30 years after the fall of socialism, 42.6% of respondents think that the country was better off before 1989.48

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  Russian Liberalism

  • Paul Robinson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Northern Illinois University Press

    (Publisher)

  As Robert English comments, “Soviet liberals were absolutely galvanized by the Prague Spring. … When it seemed to be succeeding, liberals were ecstatic.” 2 The Soviet authorities took note, and in August 1968 ordered the Soviet army to occupy Czechoslovakia, depose the communist party leadership, and impose a new one. The hopes of would-be Soviet reformers were crushed. “Czechoslovakia shook me up,” said Aleksandr Yakovlev (1923–2005), who would later act as adviser to the USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022). 3 Roughly speaking, one can identify three groups of Soviet intellectuals who sought to change their society in a more liberal direction. The first worked within the communist system, including in the CPSU itself. Heirs of the “enlightened bureaucrats” of the imperial era, they proposed cautious reforms while not challenging the fundamentals of the system itself. In some cases they enjoyed the protection of senior officials. In the mid-1960s, the future head of the CPSU, Iury Andropov (1914–1984), employed a group of such “systemic liberals” as consultants on foreign affairs. 4 Many of Andropov’s consultants would go on to play leading roles in Gorbachev’s government. The second group also worked within the system, and consisted of intellectuals at academic journals, universities, and research institutes, as well as at scientific cities such as Akademgorodok in Siberia. 5 These intellectuals noted deficiencies in Soviet economic and social life, but like the enlightened bureaucrats kept their criticisms within the boundaries set by the authorities. The third group, the dissidents, went further. They published and distributed their works underground, a form of publishing known as samizdat (self-publishing)

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  Breaking Down Bipolarity

  Yugoslavia's Foreign Relations during the Cold War

  • Martin Previšić(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  ⁶ In the spring of 1969, the Yugoslav elite looked at the culminating dramatic stage of development in Czechoslovakia and the future of this state without much sentiment. However, in the framework of a highly rationalised approach, it did not abandon the previously stated public positions on the Prague Spring. It did not forget to remind its own and the international audience that the events of 1968 were a Czechoslovak attempt to break away from Stalin ’ s unfortunate her-itage – as Yugoslavia had done soon after 1948. It repeated from time to time that the communists would have managed to stabilise the situation in Czechoslova-kia by their own forces, and that the Soviet military intervention would therefore not only have been unnecessary, but indeed damaging from the perspective of the interests of the communist movement. However, in the same breath, Tito and his associates hastened to add that they did not want to resolve the prob-lems that they were now facing themselves. This statement was often expressed by the repeated sentence that they did not want to be bigger Czechs than the Czechs themselves. ⁷  Zdravko Vukovi ć , Od deformacija SDB do maspoka i liberalizma. Moji stenografski zapisi 1966 – 1972. godine (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1989), 314.  For example, Edvard Kardelj expressed such a tendency in his speech in September 1969. Tito ’ s close associate said if Yugoslav leadership after 1948 did not stand against Milovan Đ ilas and other pseudo-liberals as well as social ultra-radicals decisively, Yugoslavia would have shared the fate of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Vukovi ć , Od deformacija SDB do maspoka i liberalizma , 314.  AJ, 507, CK SKJ, IV, Izvr š ni biro Predsedni š tva Saveza komunista Jugoslavije. The transcription of the audio recording from the 3rd Session, Mijalko Todorovi ć ’ s speech, 8 April 1969; Ivo Gold-stein and Slavko Goldstein, Tito (Zagreb: Profil, 2015), 723. In the Aftermath of the Prague Spring 127

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  Messengers of the Free Word

  Paris Prague Warsaw, 19681971

  • Bartosz Kaliski, Yelizaveta Crofts(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Kultura Team Toward the Prague Spring Describing Kultura’s political stance, historian Janusz Korek emphasized that in the 1960s its editorial team generally promoted political evolutionism in conjunction with a benevolent observation of revisionist phenomena in communist ideology. After the Prague Spring, Jerzy Giedroyc, disappointed by the passive attitude of the West toward the invasion of Czechoslovakia, did not totally reject evolutionism but placed his bet on revolution. He counted on revolt, on a grassroots overthrow of the system, which was supposed to be effected by opposition groups together with the societies of communist states slowly regaining subjectivity. 359 Giedroyc did not mean a bloody revolution aimed at the liberation of the Polish nation from Soviet dependency but rather a fundamental reconstruction of internal relations among the Eastern Bloc, not between states but foremost between nations, averting histor- ical and territorial conflicts. Communist internationalism on the contrary tended to uphold old conflicts. Such a programme was indeed revolutionary. Giedroyc was convinced that decentralising trends in the Eastern Bloc were on the rise (the example of Czechoslovakia strengthened his belief, even after invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies it remained a turbulent country). So, he began to prepare himself for radical and rapid changes; he did not give up leftist phraseology and such symbols as Karl Marx. 360 Already by the February 20, 1968 Giedroyc had written to his London co-operator Juliusz Mieroszewski that the period for improving communism was finished. In the following month (March 28, 1968) he informed “Londoner” that the situation was developing “in a fas- cinating way” in Czechoslovakia and persuaded him to deal with this subject.

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  The Last Utopia

  Human Rights in History

  • Samuel Moyn(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  For a while in the early 1970s, Eurocommunism looked very promising, to the point that Czech opposition figures pursued connections with it before turning to human rights after 1975. But where Eurocommunism attempted to transcend a Cold War logic, its explicitly political way to do so collapsed. There was also a great deal of attention to so-called Western Marxism, amid a wave of intellectual ferment on the left after 1968 unprecedented in the postwar era. The search for dissident versions of socialism betrayed by history spawned a generation’s labor of intellectual re-covery, only to face the passing of their moment of inspiration. And some pilgrims, Leszek Ko ¿ akowski most notably, were dropping the revisionist schemes that had helped make them icons of the new left. In 1968, the year of his departure from Poland, Ko ¿ akowski still in-sisted that utopianism remained essential, in spite of the now self-evident ease of its perversion, but soon responded to the efflores-cence of human rights with the curt argument that no socialism in power would ever respect them. 89 That some found in human rights The Purity of This Struggle 167 not a new utopia but rather a response to a god that failed is without doubt, and allowed for deeply conservative interpretations of the idea to find a hearing from the beginning. As the rise of human rights on the French scene shows, it was nevertheless the transformation of the left that proved the most vital agent of change, since there human rights triumphed due to compe-tition within the left rather than with its rivals, and it transpired through the substitution of utopias. In Paris, as in Latin America in the 1960s, the collapse of the plausibility of Soviet communism did not lead to the demise of revolutionary aspirations: it sparked the search for a better, purer form of communism.

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