The Rise and Fall of Communism by Brown Archie

Author:Brown, Archie [Brown, Archie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

To the more intelligent boys and girls, it was hard to understand that, in the history of other nations, it was possible and permitted to pay homage even to tsars and tyrants, while in our own country, there was no place in history for a man who was the founder of our democracy, who was neither a usurper nor the murderer of his own children but an educated, democratic and highly moral man.30

The wide range of opinion and the reformist tendencies within the Communist Party which had struggled for recognition before 1968 were expressed as never before during that year. From the highest party organs to the lowest, there was real debate, and pressure from below played a significant part in influencing higher party appointments. Draft party rules, published shortly before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, were designed to ratify officially the new reality whereby, for instance, individual party members not only had the right to their own opinion but the right to attempt to convert others to their point of view. That was a considerable inroad into the doctrine of democratic centralism. Another was the development of horizontal links between party organizations. Thus, in 1968 links were established between the party organization in the university district of Prague and the organization in the industrial district of Prague 9. In a further glaring contravention of party norms–in this case of the nomenklatura system of appointment–the party organization in Prague 1 went so far as to advertise in the city’s evening newspaper for a secretary responsible for ideology. This last sin was drawn to the attention of Brezhnev, who declared that it showed the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was becoming social democratic. The Prague city party organization played an exceptionally important role in 1968. In the post-invasion period it was to be described by the conservative Communists, who had regained control thanks to the Soviet invasion, as having been a ‘second centre’ within the party. The charge was not without foundation, for the Prague organization set the pace in advocating radical reform. They shared a building with the Central Committee, and through the connecting doors there was regular contact between reformists within the Central Committee apparatus and the Prague City Committee.31

For conservative Communist leaders in Eastern Europe, the most alarming document to be produced during the Prague Spring was the Action Programme of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which was published on 5 April. This was not because it was the most radical publication of 1968, for it was far from that, but because it marked a break with the past and with current Communist orthodoxy by the party leadership itself. The main author of the section on the political system was Mlynář. The programme itself was a compromise document and fell far short of advocating fully fledged political pluralism. It still envisaged a ‘leading role’ for the Communist Party, but argued that this should not be understood as a monopolistic concentration of power in party organs. It criticized the ‘unthinking

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