Prague Spring

Photograph

By: Anonymous

Date: August 21, 1968

Source: © Bettmann/Corbis.

About the Photographer: This photo was taken by an anonymous Czech photographer and smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. It now resides in the archive of the Bettmann Archive of the Corbis Corporation.

INTRODUCTION

The arrival of Communism in Czechoslovakia differed from other countries in Soviet Eastern Europe. Whereas Communism elsewhere followed some form of Soviet occupation after World War II, from December 1945 there were no Soviet troops on Czechoslovakian soil and the country was democratic with full parliamentary elections. How it came to adopt Communist rule in 1948 has been dubbed the 'elegant takeover,' but it was hardly a takeover at all. Rule was effectively handed over to the Communist Party, the country's largest political organization, after a string of parliamentary crises brought the collapse of the liberation government of Edvard Benes.

Although Czechoslovakian Communism had popular roots it was soon discredited. The democratic system was dismantled and the country underwent a harsh period of Sovietization in the 1950s, which was marked by purges, summary arrests, and repression. Economic problems also arose, which, by the late 1960s, were crippling the country and further undermining Communist Party rule.

In an attempt to rectify these problems, the Slovak Alexander Dub?ek was made the Communist Party's First Secretary on January 5, 1968. Aged forty-six, he was seemingly the model Soviet apparatchik, having spent thirteen years of his youth in the USSR and another three as an adult student of Moscow's Soviet Higher Party School. Yet Dub?ek, for all his apparent immersion in the ways of the Communist Party, was by Soviet standards a progressive leader brought in to mitigate reformist pressure from within Czechoslovakia.

The task facing the new leader was complex, since he had to please Moscow and the Czechoslovakian people simultaneously. Dub?ek had to revitalize the Czechoslovakian economy, but needed to do so within the rigid parameters imposed by Marxist economics. He needed to earn public confidence by loosening the stifling party control of state and social institutions, but had to accomplish this without provoking a negative Russian response, such as occurred in Hungary twelve years earlier.

Dub?ek quickly set about reviving the ranks of the Communist Party. A stream of dismissals and resignations (as well as several suicides) purged senior party ranks of many of the hardliners so despised by the Czechoslovakian people. Dub?ek appointed known reformers to key positions within the government, including the Defense and Interior Ministries. He helped restore the credibility of the party by denouncing the terror of the 1950s and rehabilitating its victims, both living and dead.

Although Dub?ek would profess and maintain his commitment to Marxism-Leninism and the rule of the Communist Party, he authorized a vast public debate in the spring and summer of 1968. Officials met the people and engaged in discussions about the country's future. Interest groups were formed and flourished, and students and intellectuals debated Czechoslovakia's future. This period became known in the West as the Prague Spring (although it lasted long into the summer).

This debate was never seriously directed against Communism or Socialism, and a return to capitalism or the decollectivisation of agriculture were never formally or substantially broached. Nor did it assume an anti-Russian tone, despite the grievances against the USSR nursed by many Czechoslovakians. Rather it was seen by Communist Party bosses in Prague and initially Moscow as an experiment in 'Socialism with a human face' and a way of renewing the Communist system.

PRIMARY SOURCE

PRAGUE SPRING

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

It was not long before the momentum behind the Prague Spring moved beyond Dub?ek's control and provoked deep concerns in Moscow. In particular, Dub?ek's rehabilitation of purge victims gave way to a paroxysm of revulsion against the preceding two decades of Communist rule. Rather than revitalize the Communist Party, it diminished its credibility, even if it added to Dub?ek's growing stature. On June 27, 1968, a group of Czechoslovakian intellectuals issued a statement entitled "Two Thousand Words." It was an indictment of two decades of Communist dictatorship and mixed ringing endorsements of Dub?ek and demands for a faster pace of reform with veiled criticisms of Moscow. Dub?ek distanced himself from the statement, but it gained enormous popularity amongst his countrymen.

Before the publication of the "Two Thousand Words" statement, Moscow had looked at developments in Czechoslovakia with restraint. The USSR did not intervene in Czechoslovakian affairs, despite clamoring from its East German and Polish client states, who viewed the developments just over their borders with concern, fearing that the reform movement could bubble over and compromise their own regimes.

However, the "Two Thousand Words" statement seemed to tip the balance against Dub?ek. On July 3, the Soviet President, Leonid Brezhnev, warned that "we cannot remain indifferent to the fate of socialism in another country" and Pravda, the newspaper and Soviet Communist Party mouthpiece, began comparing the situation in Czechoslovakia with that of Hungary in 1956, when Soviet tanks were sent in to quell reformists. On July 15, the Warsaw Pact members collectively demanded Dub?ek reimpose censorship; a demand he rebutted three days later.

The final straw for Moscow seemed to come on August 10 with the publication of a draft of new party statutes, which were to be formalized at an Extraordinary Party Congress the following month. Key among these was a statute calling for the election of party officials by secret ballot. This notion was regarded as heretical by adherents to Marxism-Leninism, for whom unity and discipline were their central tenets. This statute would also likely lead to the removal of conservatives from the political offices they still retained, further loosening Moscow's grip on the country.

On the night of August 20, 1968, 7,500 Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to suppress what it now deemed a politically and ideologically dangerous renaissance. They were joined by up to 500,000 troops from the USSR and Soviet client states. About eighty Czechoslovaks were killed and hundreds were wounded as the invasion met huge non-violent civil resistance and attracted global criticism. Moscow, for its part, claimed that the invasion had been 'invited' by concerned Czechoslovakian Communist Party members.

Dub?ek was arrested and sent to Moscow for "negotiations." These so-called negotiations resulted in the Moscow Protocol of August 26, an arrangement forced upon the Czechoslovakian leader, which banned all organizations that violated Socialist principles and restored censorship. A later treaty was signed that allowed for the "temporary" stationing of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia to oversee the "normalization" of the country. Dub?ek was replaced as Communist Party Secretary the following year and given the ambassadorship to Turkey, apparently in the hope that he would defect. When he didn't he was recalled and banned from the Communist Party in 1970.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was justified under the terms of what became known as the "Brezhnev Doctrine." This doctrine held that if Socialism was threatened in any state, then other Socialist governments had an obligation to defend it. For most of the next two decades, it was this doctrine that supported the edifice of Communism in Eastern Europe, even when the region suffered chronic economic crises in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although Soviet tanks were not dispatched in the same way again, the threat of invasion by Russian and Warsaw Pact forces stymied reformism across the region and served as the impetus for the imposition of martial law in Poland after Solidarity's emergence in 1980–1981. Not until the rule of President Mikhail Gorbachev would the Brezhnev Doctrine be abandoned. This was the first step leading to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Rather than strengthen the hold of Communism on Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion undermined the ideology and dissipated any Russophilia that had lingered after the USSR's liberation of the country from Nazi Germany. The economic difficulties that the reforms of the Prague Spring intended to rectify were never properly addressed, leaving Czechoslovakia teetering towards stagnation. Moreover, as one reformist pointed out, Moscow's intervention "proved something most Czechoslovak reformers… did not even dare to believe at the time, namely, that the established Marxist-Leninist theory is incompatible with a genuine, modern, democratic, economic and political system and, what is more, that it is not even open to reform." [Radoslav Selucky, Czechoslovakia: The Plan that Failed.]

On his return from Turkey, Alexander Dub?ek was sent into internal exile with an appointment as a "forestry official." In reality he lived under severe restrictions and for years was not permitted to associate with anyone beyond his immediate family. In 1989, he re-emerged into public life, this time as a key ally of Vaclav Havel, who led Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution." He was elected speaker of the country's Federal Assembly and, when Czechoslovakia was poised to split into two countries in 1993, he was positioned to become a leading figure in post-independence Slovakia. Just two months before Slovakia became an independent country, Dub?ek was killed in a road accident at the age of sixty-eight.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Crampton, R. J. Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century—and After. London: Routledge, 1997.

Rothschild, Joseph, and Nancy M. Wingfield. Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II. 3rd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Selucky, Radoslav. Czechoslovakia: The Plan that Failed. London: Nelson, 1970.

Gordon-Skilling, H., Jaromir Navrotil, Antonin Bencik, Vaclav Kural, Marie Michalkuva, Jitka Vondorova, and Vaclav Havel. The Prague Spring 1968. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998.