Contemporary witnesses of change
Despite individual points of light from the 1968 Prague Spring, when Michal Reiman was a companion of Alexander Dubček, the path to democracy and freedom was not a straight one, but paved with control and arrests by the Soviet regime. Nevertheless, the contemporary witnesses were important carriers of the cycles of change.
With the coup of the Bolsheviks in October 1917, the communist party seized power in the Russian Empire for the first time. The revolutionary spark of the party in power in the Soviet Union did not, as Lenin and later Stalin intended, spread across Europe to shape societies. Instead, contacts to Moscow via Berlin to Vladivostok were continued as an instrument ranging from equality to state terror. The so-called great terror in 1937/38 was marked by excesses of socialist violence.
September 12, 2021 -
Iris Kempe
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History and MemoryIssue 5 2021Magazine
Key actors became victims of terror, whose fate was concealed and whose existence spread throughout the Soviet Union and through the member states of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. As part of the Soviet regime, contemporary witnesses were condemned to silence. Positive exceptions were individuals like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who in his Nobel Prize for The Gulag Archipelago managed to capture the terror of the regime for the public.
The most lasting turning point in the communist system of party rule was triggered by the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent 20th party congress in 1956 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev sent a signal of change in a five-hour secret speech about the crimes of Stalin. As a result, the party wanted to prepare for de-Stalinisation and gain room for manoeuvre for a cautious reform policy. This opened up domestic political opportunities for representatives of democracy and freedom to publicly formulate their goals
Social actors such as Michal Reiman and Tamara Reiman as well as Tomas Venclova witnessed attempts at democratic development and their failure. Günter Hänsel, the pastor of the Johanneskirche Lutheran Church in Berlin Schachtensee, has taken up these ideas for a commemorative event held on August 21st 2021 in a future-oriented manner. During that event, Tamara Reiman’s previously unpublished report (which follows this introductory text) was read out to commemorate the Prague Spring of 1968. Tamara Reiman worked as an interpreter during the conference of the Soviet and Czechoslovak Politburo, chaired by Alexander Dubček and Leonid Brezhnev, at the end of July and first days of August in 1968 in Čierna nad Tisou. The Soviet-Czechoslovak summit took place on the railroad. During the day the delegations met to discuss the situation in Czechoslovakia. In the evening, the Soviet delegation would return to Ukraine.
With her contribution in the following text, Tamara Reiman documented like no one else the failure of socialism with a human face and with it the escalation of the Prague Spring on August 21st 1968. Based on these realities, Tomas Venclova formulated the cycles of change every 12 years. He mentioned the 20th party congress in 1956, the Prague Spring 1968, the establishment of the democratic trade union Solidarność in Poland in 1980, followed by the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Contemporary witnesses of this change were increasingly able to publicly discuss their experiences with the communist system. Nonetheless, carriers of change repeatedly ran the risk of falling victim to state control against reforms. One of the key moments of change was the Prague Spring. However, the policy of creating socialism with a human face ended with the pressures of the Soviet regime. After the Prague Spring there was renewed state control and repression.
Despite individual points of light from the Prague Spring, when Michal Reiman was a companion of Alexander Dubček, the path to democracy and freedom was not a straight one but paved with control and arrests by the Soviet regime. Nevertheless, the contemporary witnesses were important carriers of the cycles of change. Dubček liberalised society by developing a Czechoslovak Road to socialism based on dialogue and co-operation. In the case of the Reimans, this meant in the medium term the loss of jobs and an escape to West Berlin. There they were able to report on the developments in Prague to the students of the Free University of Berlin. The reformers and Tomas Venclova were pioneering contemporary witnesses of the change. Michael Thumann describes in his contribution the continuation of this development through the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the myth of the meeting in the Belovezha Forest on December 8th 1991, which led to the end of the Soviet Union. Wim van Meurs describes the processes of reforms and change in the region of Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe that can lead to the building of bridges from the Prague Spring to a new European Eastern policy. These reports by eyewitnesses of regional development make clear to the reader how difficult that path to a democratic Europe truly was.
This introduction as well as Tamara Remain’s accounts are a part of a wider forthcoming publication titled Europäische Zeitenwende: Prager Frühling (Turning point in Europe: Prague Spring), edited by Iris Kempe and Wim van Meurs and published by Ibidem Verlag.
Iris Kempe is a non-resident fellow of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. Previously she was a senior advisor at the Council of the Baltic Sea States and regional director at the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation South Caucasus.
