The Cold War by Bridget Kendall

Author:Bridget Kendall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

‘They didn’t want to live in the dark any more’

The Prague Spring (1968)

THE PRAGUE SPRING was a brief burst of reform in Czechoslovakia, which reached its peak during the government of Alexander Dubček in 1968. It was brought to an abrupt end in August of that year, when a Kremlin-led invasion of tanks and troops moved in to crush it.

The de-Stalinisation process begun by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the mid-1950s had raised hopes that the Kremlin would also allow political reform in its satellite states in Eastern Europe. While Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ had ended with his ousting by conservatives in 1964, however, the reform process in Czechoslovakia had a different trajectory. The course of liberalisation began more slowly, continued for longer and intended to go further, to build on the democratic traditions the country had enjoyed before Klement Gottwald and other Communists seized power in 1948.

For some, an early hint of a new easing of controls came in May 1963, when the Czechoslovak Communist Party reluctantly sanctioned a writers’ conference devoted to the prominent Prague writer Franz Kafka, a figure who until then had been shunned as too ‘bourgeois’. Another impetus came in the mid-1960s, when the failing economy forced the government into reforms that empowered local managers and gave greater priority to goods wanted by consumers. In June 1967 the political waters were tested again when members of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers suggested that literature should be independent of party doctrine and argued the case for democratic government.

By the end of 1967, Czechoslovakia’s hard-line Communist leader, President Antonín Novotný, was in trouble. He was being blamed for half-hearted reforms that had failed to stem economic decline, and he was facing a possible mutiny from reformers within his own party. Hoping to bolster his position, he invited the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, to visit Prague. But when Brezhnev saw the extent of dissatisfaction among the top echelons of the party, he refrained from endorsing the Czech President, paving the way for Novotný’s removal in January 1968. He was replaced as head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party by a bold reformer from Slovakia called Alexander Dubček.

With Dubček at the helm, the ‘Prague Spring’ began in earnest. Unlike Hungary in 1956, it was not intended to be a rebellion against Soviet rule. The push for reform came not from anti-Communists but from leading intellectuals inside the Communist Party apparatus. Their vision was to replace the repressive Stalinist model with a more moderate version of a socialist state, still under Communist Party oversight, but with more political diversity and freedom of expression. It became known as ‘socialism with a human face’.

In April 1968 Dubček and his reformist colleagues launched an Action Programme, which called for the easing of censorship, a curb on the powers of the secret police, a ten-year transition to democratic elections, and for Czechoslovakia to be turned into a federation of two equal Czech and Slovak nations. It also proposed that close ties to the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries should be balanced by better relations with Western countries.

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