An Unexpected Dawn: The Prague Spring and the Mechanism of Change in State Socialism

Abstract

From the perspective of post-1989, Soviet-style state socialism is seen as a historical dead end. This account of the attempt to reform state socialism in the Prague Spring of 1968 attempts a different interpretation. The reforms in Prague were a remarkable attempt to live up to the original Marxist ideal of a just and politically free modern society. What were the policies of the reformers around Alexander Dubček? How were these reforms at all possible in the first place? Why were they carried out and who were the main actors? When did this development begin that later blossomed into the Prague Spring? Finally, what does the emergence of this practical transformation have to say about state socialism and its power structure: in view of the reforms that actually happened, is it meaningful to describe it still as a totalitarian dictatorship?

Notes

¹ My views are expressed at greater length in a book about the Prague Spring that arose from a long interview with the Czech historian and political scientist, Michal Reiman (born 1930), who was himself a reform intellectual and participant in the events of 1968 (Segert).

² Actually five states were actively involved but Brezhnev didn’t want troops from the GDR to enter Czechoslovakia. Since the uniforms of the National People's Army (NVA) were very similar to those of the German Wehrmacht in 1939, it was feared that the Czechs would see the parallels. The NVA remained in readiness at the border and only a few dozen NVA officers in civilian clothes entered the country (Wenzke).

³ Antonín Novotný (1904–75) had been First Secretary and therefore leader of the party since 1953 and President of Czechoslovakia since 1957.

⁴ This demand had already been raised at the Writers’ Union Congress in June 1967 and had provoked a hard reaction from the party leadership.

⁵ Brezhnev described the situation as extremely dangerous and spoke of “the advance of counterrevolution” (133). The other party leaders present agreed with his assessment but the Hungarian leader, János Kádár, had reservations: “Our Politburo has considered the situation in Czechoslovakia many times. Our conclusion is that there is no counterrevolution on the way in Czechoslovakia” (137).

⁶ The phrase “socialism with a human face”, according to Mlynář (177), came from one of Dubček's co-workers, Radovan Richta.

⁷ Once again, this was linked to events in Moscow under Khrushchev. The Twenty-second Conference of the CPSU renewed the debate about Stalin in a way that caught the Czechoslovak leadership under Novotný on the wrong foot. The leadership in Prague had been criticising those in the party who sympathised with the Yugoslav model of socialism, among them Jiři Pelikan, later an actor in the Prague Spring. But after the Moscow congress the party had to do a U-turn and promised to overcome the consequences of the “cult of personality”, including a revision of the political trials of Communists in the 1950s.

⁸ Of course some people learned different lessons, as was the case with Gustáv Husák, who was also rehabilitated at the time. He had been accused of being a “bourgeois nationalist”. As party leader in the “normalisation” period after the fall of Dubček he persecuted the reformers of the Prague Spring.

⁹ See the report of Přzemysl Janyř, who was in his final year of secondary school in 1968, in Segert (ch. 3.7).