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Communist Czechoslovakia - 1968 - The Prague Spring

Fear diminished and political and artistic freedoms increased in Czechoslovakia in the 1960's. Changes took place in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as well.

The post of First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was taken away from Antonin Novotny and given to Alexander Dubcek, a Slovak Communist who was not very well known at that time (much like Mikhail Gorbacev, who was also relatively unknown when named to the top Soviet post decades later).

Key officials connected with the Novotny government were gradually replaced and Novotny himself resigned on March 28, 1968. Ludvik Svoboda (the post-war Defense Minister) became the Czechoslovak president, and on April 8 a new government, headed by Oldrich Cernik, was appointed.

A bit like Gorbachev would do decades later in the Soviet Union, Dubcek set out to reform all aspects of life in the country. In effect, he was doing little more than giving a legal stamp of approval to the grassroots changes that were already taking place. The government platform, approved by the Communist Party Central Committee in April, criticized the policies of the past - especially those that had done such damage to the economy. For the first time since 1948, the government proclaimed the legitimacy of basic human rights and liberties in Czechoslovakia, and objected to the persecution of people for their political convictions.

Around this time, the public was greatly influenced by a text called "2,000 Words," which was written by Ludvik Vaculik and published in the literary weekly Literarni noviny, and in the dailies Prace and Zemedelske noviny. The piece called on the people to struggle against everything they considered to be bad, and appealed to them to take control of their own lives.

The people listened, and it wasn't long before jazz music, rock clubs, pop culture, miniskirts and other symbols of Western imperialism were to be spotted all over the place, but most especially in Prague. Bohumil Hrabal, Josef Koudelka, Ivan Klima, Josef Skoverecky, Milan Kundera, Arnost Lustig, Milos Forman, Jiri Menzl and many other writers and artists were all living and working at this time. Culture thrived, and the Czechs are especially well known for the films they produced at this time. They also invented a percursor to the modern-day music video, which they called "television songs," and experimented with multimedia, and Laterna Magika and other forms of Black Light Theater date from this time.

The reforms that enabled this growing freedom were - in the words of Alexandr Dubcek - an attempt to create "Socialism with a human face," and came to be known as the "Prague Spring." They were also considered to be terribly threatening by those in power in the Soviet Union, as they compromised the uniformity of the Soviet bloc.

The Soviet Union and its satellites began to more vocally criticize the renegade Czechoslovak Republic. This political pressure from around the bloc peaked in the summer of 1968. The Czechoslovaks didn't listen.

Over the night of August 20-21 1968, Warsaw Pact forces (with the exception of Romania, which refused to participate) invaded Czechoslovakia, beginning a 20-year period of occupation and "normalization." The Soviets insisted they had been invited to invade the country, as loyal Czechoslovak Communists had told them that they urgently required "fraternal assistance against the counter-revolution." (After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, a letter of invitation was, indeed, discovered to exist). Alexandr Dubcek and the other Prague Spring leaders were whisked off to Moscow.

Ludvik Svoboda, the President of the Republic, left for Moscow on August 23. The results of his talks there, which were not concluded until August 28, were summed up in a defeatist Moscow memorandum in which Czech and Slovak signatories agreed with the temporary presence of Soviet troops on the territory of the CSSR. Only one member of the delegation, Frantisek Kriegel, refused to sign the memorandum.