Communist Czechoslovakia - Post-Spring "Normalization"
After the failure of the Prague Spring, Czechoslovak reformists tried to preserve at least some of the achievements of their reform efforts. One of these was the constitutional issue, which gave more autonomy to Slovakia. On October 28, 1968, the Czechoslovak National Assembly approved a new constitutional law on the creation of a Czechoslovak Federation. It was signed into law by President Svoboda at Bratislava Castle on October 30, and it decreed that Czechoslovakia be divided internally into two separate Czech and Slovak Republics. The federal setup took effect on January 1, 1969.
But just two months later, the Federal Assembly adopted three more new constitutional laws curtailing and in fact undermining the previous amendment, meaning that the new federation existed in name only. State administration was again strictly centralized. About 150,000 Czechs and Slovaks fled to the west as a result of all this hubbub. Many of those who stayed continued to protest the invasion. In the most famous of the individual acts of protest, a young philosophy student, Jan Palach, self-immolated himself on Wenceslas Square in January, 1969. In the political purges of late 1969 and early 1970, thousands of people were removed from their jobs (and, since it was illegal to be unemployed, most of the country's intellectual elite spent the next 20 years washing windows or floors, stoking coal furnaces or selling vegetables or newspapers) and half a million people were expelled from the Communist Party.
The easygoing leaders of the 1960's were banned (Dubcek spent the next 20 years in the Slovak forestry service), and replaced by hardnosed hardliners. The new communist government was one of the most repressive in all of the East Bloc - surpassed only by East Germany and Albania. The ensuing period of "normalization" during the 1970's and about half of the 1980's - like the Counter-Reformation - was a bleak and unhappy time for the nation. The architecture of the time reflects this: most of the construction during this period was focused on building largescale "pre-fabricated housing" districts on the outskirts of cities. These neighborhoods today are still grey and depressing, with block after block of identical cement housing (the Czechs call them "rabbit hutches") and little or no greenery.
Ludvik Svoboda was still the President of Czechoslovakia, but by this time he was already rather old and becoming forgetful. He used to walk around Prague Castle asking where Dubcek was. This grew to be rather embarrasing, and Svoboda was forced to resign due to "illness." Gustav Husak, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, was elected as President in his place - thus holding down both top functions in the country. (The last change in Party power before the fall of Communism took place with the 1987 election of Milos Jakes as Secretary General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.) Active opposition to the policies of normalization had begun to form during the initial Warsaw Pact occupation of August, 1968. They grew into underground movements during the bleak 1970's.
In 1976, the members of the underground rock band called "The Plastic People of the Universe" were arrested and charged with crimes against the state for holding a rock concert. This was one of the catalysts for the creation of the well-known "Charter 77" movement, which was formed to monitor and to internationally report human rights abuses within the country. Its first spokesmen were Vaclav Havel, Jan Patocka and Jiri Hajek. They and many other groups actively resisted the Communist regime, and many of them endured long jail terms for their efforts.
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