\u00a0\u201cToo good to be true\u201d, the Czechoslovak people\u2019s dream of freedom, brought about by liberal reforms of the new 1968 government, came crashing to a dramatic end with the Warsaw Pact invasion of the \u010cSSR, just half a year after the Prague spring had begun.
Though the Soviets\u2019 reaction was forceful, one question remains: was Czechoslovakia even trying to break away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Khrushchev\u2019s destalinization campaign in the USSR[1]<\/a>sprouted dreams of freedom in the civil society. Hungary\u2019s revolution and Polish reforms further stoked the hopes for freedom, including calls to end censorship.Departments of Marxism-Leninism in also voiced alternative ideas.[2]<\/a>\u00a0However, the Soviet\u2019s brutal response to the Hungarian revolution finally crushed any remaining openly voiced hopes for democracy in the \u010cSSR.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Anton\u00edn Novotn\u00fd\u2019s succession by Alexander Dub\u010dek in January 1968 suddenly placed a reformist as the general secretary of the Communist Party, and it appeared that the internal power struggles and indecisiveness about Czechoslovakia\u2019s future were overcome. A key factor contributing to the escalating speed at which reforms were demanded and subsequently delivered was the appointment of Eduard Goldst\u00fccker as the chairman of the Czechoslovak Writer\u2019sUnion and editor-in-chief of \u201cLiter\u00e1rn\u00ed noviny\u201d. In February, he appeared on television, openly criticizing Novotn\u00fd\u2019s policies and so testing the new regime\u2019s tolerance. Goldst\u00fccker faced no repercussions. Rather than oppressing differing opinions in the media, Dub\u010dek hoped to create a sense of trust between himself and the media. This attitude that allowed for the \u201cLiter\u00e1rn\u00ed listy\u201d[6]<\/a>to turn from a hardcore communist medium to the reformers\u2019 mouthpiece, publishing the 2,000-word manifest and reaching a circulation of over 300,000by August[7]<\/a>.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dub\u010dek was at heart a reformer. Just a month after being appointed[9]<\/a>,he delivered the passionate \u201c20th<\/sup> anniversary of the \u2018VictoriousFebruary\u2019\u201d speech, in which he admitted mistakes in the party\u2019s leadership style and highlighted the importance to build a \u201ca socialism that corresponds to the historical democratic traditions of Czechoslovakia\u201d.[10]<\/a>To achieve this, he would implement an \u201cAction Program\u201d, which would shift the economy towards consumer goods production, but further promised freedom of movement, speech and the press. Dub\u010dek\u2019s personal belief was that \u201cSocialism \u2026must make more provisions for a fuller life of the personality than any bourgeois democracy\u201d \u2013 reflected in the preamble of the Action Program and later quoted in Dub\u010dek\u2019s autobiography, evidencing the importance it must have had to him personally. It is an understatement to say that the Brezhnev\u2019s USSR did not share these sentiments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Portisch claims it was not initially Dub\u010dek\u2019s intention to introduce far-reaching reforms to the Czechoslovak system.Instead, the comparatively minor reforms catalyzed the public\u2019s resentment and to Dub\u010dek adapting to the given circumstances, turning him from a mild reformer to a committed challenger of the old-established Soviet-style system that was imposed on Czechoslovakia.[11]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Though reforms were increasingly drastic, it was not intended to break away from the USSR\u2019s sphere of influence or turn away from Czechoslovakia\u2019s socialist brother states. The action program emphasizes that \u201cthe development of international economic relations will continue to be based on economic co-operation with the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries\u201d.[12]<\/a> Further recognizing that\u201cthe basic orientation of Czechoslovak foreign policy [\u2026] is in alliance and co-operation with the Soviet Union and the other socialist states. We shall strive for friendly relations with our allies \u2013 the countries of the world socialist community\u201d. [13]<\/a>Furthermore, the KS\u010c[14]<\/a>\u201cshall place special emphasis on friendly ties, mutual consultations and exchange of experiences with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the communist and workers\u2019 parties of the socialist community.\u201d[15]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Contrary to this portrayal of Czechoslovak -Soviet friendship stands the Soviet Union\u2019s viewpoint. Considering the tensions between East and West in the Cold War, it is unlikely that the Soviet Union would have risked provoking a confrontation with the West unless they saw a sufficiently significant reason to do so. It can be argued that the USSR\u2019s& Warsaw Pact\u2019s troops would not have invaded Prague had Moscow not interpreted the Czechoslovak position to be unquestionably hostile and Czechoslovakia wishing to break away. The Soviets must have perceived a more fundamental shift inCzechoslovak leadership than the socialism \u201cwithout\u00a0<\/em>self-proclaimed leaders, grey work places and unemotive bureaucracy\u201d.[16]<\/a>The divisions within the KS\u010c may have aided this, the hardline communists begging for help from Moscow, including through their letter to Brezhnev. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Arguably, invading Czechoslovakia would not have been necessary had the KS\u010c been on official Soviet line; for then the leadership in Prague would have imposed the measures that Moscow commanded and not resisted, thus eliminating the need for armed intervention. The Warsaw letter, delivered to the KS\u010c 37 ahead of the invasion, stated that \u201cWe[17]<\/a>cannot agree to the fact that hostile forces push your country off the course of socialism and pose a threat of separating Czechoslovakia from the socialist community. Now, these are not just your affairs.\u201d The letter states that the political course of Czechoslovakia is the business of all socialist brother states.[18]<\/a>Thus, the Brezhnev doctrine began. There would be no \u201cCzechoslovak path to communism.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cLetter to Brezhnev<\/em>\u201d by the Stalinist opposition of the KS\u010c provided the SovietUnion with propagandistic material (it was stylized as a \u201ccry for help by a socialist brother party\u201d to which the USSR graciously responded), but it also strengthened the position of those who were calling for a forceful resolution Czechoslovakian liberalism. Dub\u010dek\u2019s reforms were initially intended to bring limited change but spiraled out of his control. He ended up leading an involuntary revolt against Soviet control, much to their disliking and that of the \u201csocialist brother states\u201d \u2013 brothers which ended up invading and killing almost100 civilians and injuring nearly 1,000 more. Miscommunication and differences in ideas, within the party and communist bloc, on what it meant to be an internationalist socialist meant that some saw reforms as essential to ensureSocialist survival not just in the \u010cSSR, but due to socialism\u2019s international nature, the entire socialist world. To the others, including the USSR, however, it was a dangerous trend that was leading Czechoslovakia away from socialism and towards western imperialist fascism; in the eyes of the Warsaw five, there was no greater service to the socialist cause than to provide military assistance to those Czechoslovak communists loyal to Moscow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/a> 1956<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/a> Kusin, Vladimir V.\u00a0The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: the Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956-1967<\/em>. CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/a> Janek, Istv\u00e1n. \u201cCzechoslovakia and the Hungarian\nRevolution in 1956.\u201d West Bohemian Historical Review VII<\/em>, Jan. 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [4]<\/a>\nCzechoslovak Communist Party\u2019s official newspaper<\/p>\n\n\n\n [5]<\/a> Navr\u00e1til Jarom\u00edr. The Prague Spring\n1968: a National Security Archive Documents Reader<\/em>. Central European University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [6]<\/a> Re-named\nfrom Liter\u00e1rn\u00ed noviny<\/p>\n\n\n\n [7]<\/a> Making it\nEurope\u2019s most-read magazine<\/p>\n\n\n\n [8]<\/a> Hol\u00fd Ji\u0159\u00ed.\u00a0Writers under Siege: Czech Literature since 1945<\/em>. Sussex AcademicPress, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [9]<\/a> February,\n1968<\/p>\n\n\n\n [10]<\/a> \u201cPrague Spring Remembered.\u201d THE VIENNA\nREVIEW<\/em>,\nwww.falter.at\/the-vienna-review\/2008\/prague-spring-remembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [11]<\/a> Portisch, Hugo. Aufregend War Es Immer<\/em>. Ecowin, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [12]<\/a> \u201cThe Action Programme of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Prague, April 1968 : Komunistick\u00e1 Strana \u010ceskoslovenska : FreeDownload, Borrow, and Streaming.\u201d\u00a0Internet Archive<\/em>, Nottingham, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation,archive.org\/details\/actionprogrammeo08komu\/. (Page 16)<\/p>\n\n\n\n [13]<\/a> See\nabove, page 22<\/p>\n\n\n\n [14]<\/a> Czechoslovak Communist Party<\/p>\n\n\n\n [15]<\/a> See above, page 23<\/p>\n\n\n\n [16]<\/a> Pustejovsky, Otfrid. In Prag Kein Fenstersturz<\/em>. DTV, 1968.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [17]<\/a> COMECON \/\nUSSR<\/p>\n\n\n\n [18]<\/a> \u201cWarschauer Brief an Das Zentralkomitee Der KP Der Tschechoslowakei Vom 15. Juli 1968 Und Dessen Antwort.\u201d\u00a0Herder-Institut:Themenmodule<\/em>,www.herder-institut.de\/no_cache\/bestaende-digitale-angebote\/e-publikationen\/dokumente-und-materialien\/themenmodule\/quelle\/1363\/details.html.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [19]<\/a> USSR, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, GDR<\/p>\n\n\n\n [20]<\/a> Sputnik.\u201cPrag 1968: Was Moskau Angst Machte Und Breschnew Bauchschmerzen Bereitete.\u201d\u00a0Sputnik Deutschland<\/em>, 19 Aug. 2018,de.sputniknews.com\/politik\/20180819322000405-prager-fruehling-regelung\/.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [21]<\/a> \u201cEnde Eines Fr\u00fchlings – Prag 1968.\u201d \u00d6sterreichischer Rundfunk (ORF).<\/p>\n\n\n\n [22]<\/a>\nhttps:\/\/www.ksta.de\/forscher–ddr-draengte-auf-einmarsch-bei-prager-fruehling-13361108<\/p>\n\n\n\n Title image taken by\u00a0Franti\u0161ek Dost\u00e1l and is licensed under the\u00a0Creative Commons<\/a>\u00a0Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International<\/a>\u00a0license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u201cToo good to be true\u201d, the Czechoslovak people\u2019s dream of freedom, brought about by liberal reforms of the new 1968 government, came crashing to a dramatic end with the Warsaw Pact invasion of the \u010cSSR, just half a year after the Prague spring had begun. Though the Soviets\u2019 reaction was forceful, one question remains: was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,54,22,96,9,78,83,10,55,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-czechia","category-dictatorship","category-europe","category-history","category-human-rights","category-ideology","category-long-read","category-oppression","category-protests","category-slovakia"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":681,"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions\/681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-uncensored.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Initial reforms were slow and mainly focused on the federal structure ofCzechoslovakia. Rud\u00e9 Pr\u00e1vo[4]<\/a>published an article titled \u201cWhat Lies Ahead\u201d, emphasizing that Dub\u010dek would\u201cfurther the goals of socialism\u201d and \u201cmaintain the working-class nature of the party\u201d. However, it also drew criticism from the Soviet ambassador for announcing a \u201cCzechoslovak path to Socialism [\u2026] on the basis of tested equal rights principles\u201d. [5]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eastern European buffer states were a direct consequence of Russia\u2019s historically rooted insecurities, and therefore in the USSR\u2019s eyes it was essential to maintain control over these regions to ensure Moscow\u2019s security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nonetheless, there was great dispute about the approach towards Prague amongst the Warsaw five[19]<\/a>. New research shows that Brezhnev was long opposed to militarily invading Czechoslovakia, having had phone calls with his personal friend Dub\u010dek begging him to re-establish the KS\u010c\u2019s control. [20]<\/a>[21]<\/a>Meanwhile, it was particularly the hardliners GDR and Bulgaria and members of the Soviet military pushing for military intervention, trying to create a sense of urgency in Moscow.[22]<\/a>East Germany had experienced an uprising in 1953, leaving Ulbricht\u2019s SED traumatized; he feared that happenings in Czechoslovakia could spill over the border and challenge his own party. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Czechoslovak reformers\u2019 stated aim was to reform socialism, not to turn their back on their Socialist brothers and especially not Moscow. They did this, but in the process showed the underlying flaw of Soviet-led communism: it was imposed by force.
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