The Prague Spring, 1968

Background

In 1964, the Soviet Presidium dismissed Khrushchev, and in his place a team of three dominated the Soviet government – Leonid Brezhnev (Foreign Minister), Alexei Kosygin (Premier) and Yuri Andropov (Head of the KGB – the Soviet Secret Police). 

As in 1953 with Stalin’s death, the replacement of Khrushchev in 1964 led to instability in the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe, particularly as the Communist leaders tried to claw back the freedoms people had got used to:

• Albania, which had left the Warsaw Pact in 1961, formed strong links with China under its hardline Stalinist head Enver Hoxha – and it flourished; by 1985 Albania was self-sufficient in food, electricity in every household, no taxes, and no inflation.

• Romania, under its dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, formed links with China, refused to join the communist bloc economy, and refused to take part in Warsaw Pact manoeuvres.

• The Soviet leadership was worried that there was too much freedom in the Soviet Union itself, and after 1966 were gradually re-imposing controls.

In 1968, therefore, the USSR was “a weak hegemon: its leadership was divided, pressured by its Polish and East German counterparts, seriously troubled by Romanian dissent and worried about domestic developments” writes Scottish historian Maud Bracke (2003)

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Basic accounts from BBC Bitesize and from History.com

Set of images from Radio Free Europe

YouTube

The Prague Spring - clear narrative

Journeyman TV - amazing footage; watch the first 5 minutes.

Podcast:

- Giles Hill on the Prague Spring

CAUSES

In Detail:

[i.e. Handbell Ringers of Great Britain]

1.  A revolution of the Intelligentsia?

American sociologist Jerome Karabel (1990) saw the Prague Spring in traditional Marxist terms as a conflict between the ‘reformist’ intellectuals and the ‘conservative’ apparatchiki (Communist officials) over the best future for socialism. 

There was a strong history of ideological opposition to hardline communism in Czechoslovakia. 

• Although it did not lead to revolt in Czechoslovakia as it did in Poland and Hungary, in 1956, the Second Congress of the Union of Writers 1956 had spoken out against censorship. 

• When the Czechoslovak government led by Antonin Novotny tried to clamp down on ‘cultural moderrnism’ in 1961, it failed.  The three Czechoslovak weekly newspapers — Literarni Noviny, Kulturnv Zivot, and Kulturni Tvorba — had a combined circulation of 300,000, and they continued to share popular complaints with their readers. 

• In 1963 a conference was held in Liblice to celebrate the work of banned Czech novelist Franz Kafka. 

• In July 1967 the Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers demanded freedom of expression and democracy, and openly criticised the Communist government. 

• In February 1968 Eduard Goldstücker, editor of Literarni Noviny, became chairman of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers and he openly demanded reform.

There was thus general popular ideological pressure for reform. 

2.  Economic collapse and low living standards? 

The Communist takeover in 1948 had damaged the Czechoslovak economy:

• ¼ million small businesses closed down. 

• A devaluation in 1953 reduced the koruna to one-fiftieth of its value – i.e.  someone who had 10,000Kcs in savings suddenly only had 200Kcs.  (This provoked a series of riots.)

• While the economies of every other country in Europe were growing, in 1962 the government was forced to admit that its Five-Year Plan had failed.  In 1963 the Czechoslovak economy shrank by 2%. 

• For ordinary people, there was inflation, shortages and queues.

The first sector in Czechoslovakia therefore to start reform was the ‘New Economic Model’ launched in 1965 by reformist Deputy Premier Ota Sik; it allowed cheaper imports, and encouraged private enterprise.  It was a disaster because it encouraged people to ask for political reform.

3.  Hostility to the Soviet Union?

There was resentment of the Soviet Union.  In the midst of the economic crisis, large amounts of goods were being sent to the Soviet Union without payment.  Most of the uranium mined in Czechoslovakia went to the USSR, which steadily reduced the price it paid. 

4.  Repression?

The Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948 had been followed by a fierce repression:

• In 1952 eleven former government politicians were hanged, accused of pro-Yugoslavian tendencies. 

• The Czech Secret Police, the STB (Státní bezpečnost - ‘State Security’) were terrifying; homes were bugged, kindergarten children interrogated about their parents. 

• “By 1951, the atmosphere in Prague was almost as bad as it had been during the war.  No one dared to speak out loud, and hardly a week passed without news of someone’s arrest," remembered the Czech writer Heda Kovaly in 1986.

Many people alive in 1968 remembered that, between the wars, Czechoslovakia had been a democracy. 

5.  Government weakness?

Although he was a hard-line communist, by 1968 President Novotny was discredited as a failure, and many politicians in the Czechoslovak Central Committee were writing to Brezhnev that he needed replacing. 

It needs to be pointed out that not everyone in Czechoslovakia wanted reform.  Many Slovakian politicians – aware that the Slovak economy was weaker than the Czech economy – were opposed to the freeing up of competition.  And there were powerful conservative voices who in April-May 1968 almost stopped the reform movement. 

All this made for a weak government which was unable to control the reform movement when it got started. 

6.  Brezhnev's Mistake?

In December 1967, seeking his support, Novotny invited Brezhnev to Prague.  Instead, Brezhnev supported his removal, leaving it to the Czechoslovaks to choose his successor.  On 5 January 1968 they chose Alexander Dubcek … a decision Brezhnev later regretted.

Source A

This British cartoon (1969) shows Brezhnev as a Russian solider.
He has stomped Czechoslovakia into the ground, and is about to stomp on Berlin. 

Source B

This West German cartoon (1 September 1968) is entitled 'Right of Way'.
It shows Dubcek, his car crushed by a tank, saying: “OK — I drove too far to the right!”’

EVENTS

In Detail:

1.  In April 1968, Dubcek announced an Action Programme of reform

He called it ‘socialism with a human face’.  The reforms included:

• a free-market economy and the right to set up businesses

• individual freedom of speech to criticise the government

• freedom of religion

• the right to join a trade union

• freedom of travel to the West

and he also promised:

• a reduction of press censorship and the powers of the secret police

• elections, and to set up a new National Assembly (Parliament) where the Communists would not be the only Party.

2.  The Czechs liked Dubcek’s reforms 

In Prague (the capital city of Czechoslovakia) people talked openly about politics for the first time in years.  Films, songs and books were written which have become classics.  “There was no other time in Czechoslovakian history that would be richer in cultural production of any kind” (Natalie Babjukova, 2015).  Many young Czechs copied the ‘hippies’ of the West, played their guitars in the streets, and sang about love and peace; this time was called ‘the Prague Spring’. 

3.  Events in Czechoslovakia alarmed Soviet leaders 

As early as March 1968, comminst leaders and the KGB were complaining to Brezhnev that events in Czechoslovakia risked unsettling people in other communist countries.

On 6 May Brezhnev declared it could cause “the complete collapse of the Warsaw Pact." 

On 17 June Ludvík Vaculík's Two Thousand Words was published, criticising the Czech Communist Party and calling for democracy and reform.

On 3 August 1968, therefore, at a meeting of the Warsaw Pact, the USSR, East Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria signed the Bratislava Declaration, in which Czechoslovakia:

• declared that the reforms were merely a modern form of loyal Marxism–Leninism,

• promised to suppress any ‘anti-socialist’ movements, and

• stressed that Czechoslovakia did not intend to leave the Warsaw Pact

Brezhnev agreed to the reforms; he withdrew Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia.

4.  On 13 August, Brezhnev phoned Dubcek

He expressed his "alarm" that the Czechoslovak press was still attacking Communism and the Soviet Union (see Source C); what was Dubcek doing to “restore order in the mass media”? 

He wanted the matter resolving before the end of August.  Dubcek could only tell him that it was a ‘complex situation’ and that he intended to hold a meeting of the Central Committee, perhaps in October, to discuss it. 

5.  On 18 August the Soviet government decided on the invasion of Czechoslovakia

• The Bratislava agreement had failed to calm eastern bloc fears, especially when Albania and Yugoslavia offered Dubcek their support. 

• Particularly East Germany and Poland were worried that the reforms in Czechoslovakia were destabilising their countries. 

• The KGB and the Soviet military were strongly in favour of invasion. 

• A group of five pro-Soviet members of the Czech government sent a letter inviting the USSR to intervene: “The very existence of socialism in our country is threatened.”

• Modern studies of the Politburo discussions show a general ‘groupthink’ support for intervention, with only Brezhnev hesitant (he wanted to wait until after the summit with the USA, which had been planned for October).  They show that the decision was NOT to expand Soviet power or secure a strategic military advantage, but overwhelmingly to calm disquiet in the Warsaw Pact countries and to secure Czechoslovakia’s loyalty to the Soviet bloc.

6.  On the night of 20-21 August 1968, 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 200 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia 

RESULTS

1.  Few Czechoslovakians fought back.  Dubcek ordered the Czechs not to resist; only 72 people were killed.  They put up barricades in the streets and took down road signs to confuse the soldiers, but it was hopeless.  Brave students stood in front of the tanks; some put flowers in the barrels of the soldiers’ rifles.  A few students (e.g.  Jan Palach) set fire to themselves and burned to death as a protest. 

2.  Dubcek was flown to Moscow in handcuffs (he was not executed, but demoted to a woodsman).  Hard line communist Gustav Husak replaced Dubcek, and freedoms were suppressed. 

3.  Romania criticised the invasion, and Albania left the Warsaw Pact.  Overall, however, the suppression of the Prague Spring confirmed the Soviet hold over Eastern Europe. 

4.  In November 1968, Brezhnev formulated the Brezhnev Doctrine, that socialist countries had the right to suppress counter-revolutionary forces in any other socialist country.  (In 2003, the American historian Michael Ouimet argued that, until the 1980s, the Soviet Union defined "any political threat to socialism in Eastern Europe as a threat to its domestic security").  The Doctrine marked the end of the ‘thaw’.  Long-term this damaged Communist solidarity, not strengthened it. 

5.  The invasion did not stop the moves towards cooperation between the Soviet Union and the West:

• Britain labelled the invasion: “a misfortune for the Soviet system”

• The USA tried to downplay the Soviet intervention in hope of proceeding toward a summit.

6.  Was 1968 a ‘watershed year’ - did it mark the beginning of the end for Soviet hegemony? 

Recent studies have seen the 1968 Prague Spring in its wider perspective, as half-way between the Communist takeover in 1948 and the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1989:

• The ideas of ‘socialism with a human face’ never went away, and influenced Gorbachev’s reforms in Russia;

• 'The invasion of Czechoslovakia saved Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe temporarily, but it helped guarantee the system’s ultimate demise” (American director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University Mark Kramer, 1993)

7.  Maud Bracke has written of the power of ‘mystification’ (i.e.  the romanticising) of the Prague Spring in popular consciousness – it still resonates today. 

Source E

This British cartoon from 1987 is entitled ''Prague Spring'.
It shows reforming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev placing a flower in the tank of Gustav Husak.’