1968 in Prague and Bratislava

On the night of August 21st 1968, half a million soldiers from the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia with tanks and planes to end the experiment that was called the Prague Spring. About 150 people lost their lives and hundreds were sentenced to prison. Photo: Public Domain (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

In the early 1950s, there had been political show trials in Czechoslovakia in which the former party leader, Rudolf Slansky, and ten other leading communists were sentenced to death on false accusations. Their rehabilitation only came in 1962. That broke a taboo, because until then it was perceived that the party could not be wrong. The party is always right. Now it was officially admitted that the “infallible party” had made some serious mistakes. In addition, radical economic reform was in the making. Both decisions – open criticism of earlier political mistakes and economic reform – led to the country’s political awakening five years later.

Change in leadership

Why did the reform process begin within the ruling party? It had to do with the logic of the communist dictatorship: against its steely power, effective change could only start at the top. Otherwise, it would have failed due to the instruments of power that would be deployed against any protest. However, in 1968 – the year of the Prague Spring – the ministry of the interior and the powerful political police (the “State Security”) was under the control of a reformer.

In January Alexander Dubček, a Slovak, was elected as head of the party. He grew up with his parents in the Soviet Union. Dubček was an opponent of the former party leader Antonín Novotny, and had some new ideas on how to develop the country. Other leading figures in the party at that time were subject to repression as early as the 1950s, such as Josef Smrkowský and František Kriegel. The change within the leadership was a result of the rehabilitation processes. However, not only reformers were advanced. Gustav Husak, the future leader of the anti-reform forces, was also set free. In the 1950s he was convicted of “bourgeois nationalism”.

Academics like economist Ota Šik conceived the economic reform, in which state enterprises should be relieved from bureaucracy. One important aim was to give market forces more space. In April 1968, the leadership of the communist party adopted a political programme promising more democracy and greater opportunities for people with different political convictions. “Socialism with a human face” was to gradually emerge from reforms. This new socio-political order was to serve as a model for societies that were more economically developed and more closely linked to Western European cultural development than Russia had been in 1917. The Czechoslovak reformers regarded the socialism of the Soviet Union as a product of low-level economic, social and cultural development. In the new type of socialism, each citizen would have more opportunities to achieve their individual goals. It was hoped that the new socialist model would be more attractive to people in Western Europe and elsewhere. Some communist parties, including those in Yugoslavia, Italy and Japan, welcomed this effort.

While the generation of 68ers in the West protested against the predominance of out-dated social customs, as well as against the US-war in Vietnam, the reform attempts in Czechoslovakia were directed against the outdated model of socialism in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. It aimed to return to the traditions of Czechoslovakia before February 1948 (a communist coup d’état). The country was a democracy before the Second World War and it should become one again. However, the view was it should be based on another societal foundation. Democracy should be connected with public ownership in infrastructure and organisations. It was an attempt to combine the social advantages of state socialism with the freedom of post-war capitalism.

The Prague Spring was originally the name of a music festival that took place in the city in every spring. In the year 1968, it became the symbol of political hope. However there was strong resistance against the reforms from other communist leaders within the Eastern Bloc. The party leaders of the Polish and East German communist parties – Władysław Gomułka and Walter Ulbricht, respectively – were particularly active. Todor Zhivkov, the Bulgarian party leader, was also an opponent of the reforms. Hungary’s leader János Kádár was also part of the group, but less convinced.

Leonid Brezhnev, head of the communist party of the Soviet Union since 1964, was initially hesitant as well. He trusted Dubček. Of course, among other Soviet leading functionaries many were open opponents of the reforms and put pressure on the sceptical Brezhnev. Nevertheless, the Prague Spring was tolerated longer than other reform attempts in the socialist camp – for example the 1956 insurgency in Hungary. In the fall of 1956, reformers had been violently overthrown in less than a month. In 1968, on the other hand, Czechoslovak reformers had more than six months to develop their schedule and to demonstrate their plans.

Reformers vs hardliners

The reform agenda was long. One of the very first steps was the abolition of media censorship. Starting in March 1968, media and the press became more open and freer. Topics that had been taboo were now openly discussed. The reformists took up leading posts in newspapers and on television. Jiří Pelikán, for example, was appointed TV-director and remained there until the troops marched in.

Notwithstanding the rise of the reformers, many supporters of the old system had remained within the leadership. Due to the ongoing disputes between the two groups, the pace of change slowed down. Additionally, pressure from outside the country also started to take effect. Representatives from the Eastern Bloc were gathering in various places – Dresde (in March), Moscow (in May), Warsaw (in July) and Bratislava (in August).

Since April, however, the reform movement within the communist party became stronger and stronger. It included many Czechoslovak writers and academics from the party’s university. From within the group of reform-oriented scholars, some came to the party leadership, including Michal Reiman. He was born into a communist family. His father, Pavel, was part of the communist leadership between the 1930s and the political trials during the early 1950s. He survived the trials, but was also politically degraded. Michal had moved to Moscow together with his mother during the German occupation of the country. He studied in Moscow in the early 1950s. During the Prague Spring, he was working as a historian in the party college and had just published a critical study on the 1917 Russian Revolution. Together with Jan Křen and other colleagues, he supported Dubček and Smrkowský with their expertise.[1]

When the reforms stalled due to outside pressure and from the conservatives within the party leadership, another group of reform-oriented party members intervened. Ludvík Vaculík, a journalist and writer, himself a long-time member of the party, published an appeal to the party leadership, the famous “Dva tisíce slov” (Two thousand words). He called for the reforms to be continued. Important was his call to the leadership to admit its responsibility for the crimes and detriments of the past and to promote social rejuvenation. This appeal added to the growing pressure on the party not to let up on the reforms.

When the communist party began to move, non-communist groups also had an opportunity to emerge and to express their demands. Former political convicts organised themselves in the association “K 231”. Citizens who did not support the communists founded the Club of Active Non-Party (KAN). Former members of social democrats re-established their party. Václav Havel, known to us as the country’s president after the 1989 revolution, was the chair of the Club of Independent Writers during the Prague Spring. He contributed to the democratisation of the country during this time and more so after the occupation in August.

In this way, thanks to the communist reformers, society was now in motion and it led to greater pluralisation. The communists, of course, could only do this because they were leading the state. Among other things, it was important to reduce censorship and police control. Non-communist viewpoints were now widely present, even within parliamentary debates. Various civil society groups had used these beginnings for their own interests. They demanded free elections, for instance. However, it never came to that.

The end of the Prague Spring

In the summer of 1968 it was unknown if things would move towards democratic socialism with a mixed economic system or shift back to state socialism with Soviet characteristics. When the pressure of other communist leaders did not work, the opponents decided to intervene militarily. On the night of August 21st, half a million soldiers invaded Czechoslovakia with tanks and planes. About 150 people lost their lives and hundreds were sentenced to prison.

The Prague Spring lived on for a while. In January 1969, a student named Jan Palach burned himself to death in protest against the withdrawal of the reforms. The communist reformers were expelled from the party. Over 400,000 members were affected. Many also lost their jobs. Some, like Michal Reiman and his wife, Tamara, were forced into exile. A few years later, resistance against the dictatorship became visible because of the civic initiative, Charter 77. Former communist reformers and non-communist opposition activists worked together in the protest movement. Finally, in the fall of 1989, a new phase in the country’s history began with the Velvet Revolution. The election of Václav Havel as president of the state and Alexander Dubček as the speaker of the Czechoslovak Parliament marked the beginning of this development.

Dieter Segert is Professor Emeritus at the University of Vienna. He has published widely on such topics as the transformation of political systems in Eastern Europe, history and legacy of European state socialism, party development in Eastern Europe and threats and changes in democracy.

[1] Fore more details see my interviews with Michal Reiman, in Dieter Segert: Prager Frühling. Gespräche über eine europäische Erfahrung [Prague Spring. Conversations on an European experience], Wien: Braumüller 2008.

1968, Czechoslovakia, Prague Spring