Czech History
The Prague Spring
Fear diminished and political and artistic freedoms increased in
Czechoslovakia in the 1960's. Changes took place in the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as well. The post of First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
was taken away from Antonin Novotny and given to Alexander Dubcek,
a Slovak Communist who was not very well known at that time (much
like Mikhail Gorbacev, who was also relatively unknown when named to
the top Soviet post decades later). Key officials connected with the Novotny government were gradually
replaced and Novotny himself resigned on March 28, 1968. Ludvik
Svoboda (the post-war Defense Minister) became the Czechoslovak
president, and on April 8 a new government, headed by Oldrich
Cernik, was appointed. A bit like Gorbacev would do decades later in the Soviet Union,
Dubcek
set out to reform all aspects of life in the
country. In effect, he was doing little more than giving a legal
stamp of approval to the
grassroots changes that were already taking place. The government
platform,
approved by the Communist Party Central Committee in April,
criticized the policies of the past - especially those that had done
such damage to the
economy. For the first time since 1948, the government proclaimed
the legitimacy of basic human rights and liberties in
Czechoslovakia, and objected to the persecution of people for their
political convictions.
Around this time, the public was greatly influenced by a text called
"2,000 Words," which was written by Ludvik Vaculik and published in
the literary weekly Literarni noviny, and in the dailies Prace and
Zemedelske noviny. The piece called on the people to struggle
against everything they considered to be bad, and appealed to them
to take control of their own lives. The people listened, and it wasn't long before jazz music, rock
clubs, pop culture, miniskirts and other symbols of Western
imperialism were to be spotted all over the place, but most
especially in Prague. Bohumil Hrabal, Josef Koudelka, Ivan Klima,
Josef Skoverecky, Milan Kundera, Arnost Lustig,
Milos Forman, Jiri Menzl and many other writers and artists were all
living and working at this time. Culture thrived, and the Czechs are
especially well known for the films they produced at this time. They
also invented a percursor to the modern-day music video, which they
called "television songs," and experimented with multimedia, and
Laterna Magika and other forms of Black Light Theater date from this
time. The reforms that enabled this growing freedom were - in the words of
Alexandr Dubcek - an attempt to create "Socialism with a human
face," and came to be known as the "Prague Spring." They were also
considered to be terribly threatening by those in power in the
Soviet Union, as they compromised the uniformity of the Soviet bloc.
The Soviet Union and its satellites began to more vocally criticize
the renegade Czechoslovak Republic. This political pressure from
around the bloc peaked in the summer of 1968. The Czechoslovaks
didn't listen. Over the night of August 20-21 1968, Warsaw Pact forces (with the
exception of Romania, which refused to participate) invaded
Czechoslovakia, beginning a 20-year period of occupation and
"normalization." The Soviets insisted they had been invited to
invade the country, as loyal Czechoslovak Communists had told them
that they urgently required "fraternal assistance against the
counter-revolution." (After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, a letter
of invitation was, indeed, discovered to exist). Alexandr Dubcek and
the other Prague Spring
leaders were whisked off to Moscow. Ludvik Svoboda, the President of the Republic, left for Moscow on
August 23. The results of his talks there, which were not concluded
until August 28, were summed up in a defeatist Moscow memorandum in
which Czech and Slovak signatories agreed with the temporary
presence of Soviet troops on the territory of the CSSR. Only one
member of the delegation, Frantisek Kriegel, refused to sign the
memorandum.
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
on January 16th 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 neighbourhoods today are still grey
and depressing, with block after block of identical cement housing.
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.
In 1976, the members of a silly rock band called "The Plastic People
of the Universe" were arrested and charged with crimes against the
state for holding a rock concert. This led to 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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