The Prague Spring belongs to 1968
The Prague Spring is not a 1967 event. It began in January 1968, when Alexander Dubcek replaced Antonin Novotny as head of the Communist Party, and it ended with the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968. The year 1967 was the prelude: a period in which pressure inside the country built up until the old leadership could no longer hold. Writers were among the first to say openly what many people thought.
The idea of “cultural freedom” in the title is therefore best read as a description of what writers were demanding, not of what the state allowed. In 1967 Czechoslovakia was still run by Novotny, who combined the posts of party First Secretary and President, and censorship was still in force.
The setting under Novotny
By the mid-1960s Czechoslovakia was an unusual communist state. It had been one of the more industrialised countries in Europe before the war, and its economy had stagnated in the early 1960s, which led to talk of economic reform. Culture had loosened a little, too. Films of the Czechoslovak “new wave” were attracting attention abroad, and magazines carried livelier writing than in the 1950s.
Novotny, however, resisted deeper change. Tensions were also present between Czechs and Slovaks, since many Slovaks felt that Prague treated them as junior partners. Reformers inside the party were waiting for an opening, and the cultural sphere was one place where the argument could be conducted in public.
The Fourth Writers Congress, June 1967
The key event was the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers Union, held in Prague at the end of June 1967. These congresses were meant to be formal occasions at which delegates endorsed party policy. This one became something else. Several speakers questioned the role of censorship and the party’s right to dictate what literature could say.
Among those who spoke were the novelist Ludvik Vaculik, the young writer Milan Kundera, the dramatist Pavel Kohout and the author Ivan Klima. Their speeches differed in tone. Vaculik delivered a sharp reflection on the relationship between citizens and power, arguing that the problem was a lack of ordinary public control over how power was used. Kundera, in a more literary speech, defended the idea that a small nation’s culture should not be restricted by political caution, and criticised the limits placed on writers. Kohout reportedly read out the letter that Solzhenitsyn had sent to the Soviet writers’ congress a month earlier, which called for an end to censorship in that country.
Some accounts of the congress differ on details, such as who spoke on which day and what was read aloud. What is not in dispute is the overall effect: the congress made it plain that a large part of the country’s literary world was no longer willing to accept censorship quietly, and that some officials present did not know how to respond.
The party hits back
The party reaction was swift. Within weeks, some of the most outspoken participants were punished. Vaculik, Klima and the critic Antonin Liehm were reportedly expelled from the party, and others, including Kohout, faced lesser disciplinary action. The weekly newspaper of the Writers Union, Literarni noviny, was taken out of the union’s control and handed to the Ministry of Culture, with a new editorial team installed.
This was meant to restore discipline, but it had the opposite effect on opinion. Many in the party saw the clamp-down as clumsy, and it fed the view that Novotny’s approach had become a liability. The newspaper’s staff and writers did not disappear: when the political climate changed in 1968, a successor title appeared under the name Literarni listy.
The Six-Day War and the rest of the year
Other developments in 1967 ran alongside the writers’ dispute. The Six-Day War in June led Czechoslovakia, like the rest of the Soviet bloc apart from Romania, to break off diplomatic relations with Israel. That was a policy of solidarity with Moscow, but it did not settle the domestic debate.
Later in the year the pressure became more intense. On 31 October police used force against students from the Strahov dormitories, and the Strahov protest was soon cited by critics of the leadership. In December the party Central Committee met in a series of tense sessions, and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited Prague. It was in those weeks that the decision was taken to separate the post of party chief from that of president. Dubcek took over the party leadership on 5 January 1968.
Why the congress matters
The June congress is useful for historians because it shows how a protest could take place inside official institutions. Compare Poland and the Soviet Union in the same year: in Moscow, Soviet dissidents had to circulate their work privately and face prison, while in Prague a state-approved union congress allowed some of the same arguments to be spoken to an audience of professional writers and party observers. That does not mean Czechoslovakia was free. The disciplinary actions show how limited the room was. The contrast with China is also stark: while Prague argued over censorship in print, the Cultural Revolution was turning writers and artists there into targets of mass campaigns.
It also helps to avoid a common mistake. The writers did not bring down Novotny alone, and they did not create the reform programme of 1968. Economists, Slovak party figures, students and reform-minded officials all played roles. But the debates of 1967 gave the party’s reformers an argument and a public that was ready to listen. When censorship was effectively loosened in 1968, many of the same names reappeared in print, and Kundera’s and Vaculik’s voices became more widely heard. Vaculik’s manifesto “Two Thousand Words” of June 1968 was the best-known later result.
After the invasion of August 1968 and the long period of “normalisation” that followed, many of the participants were silenced, forced out of their jobs or pushed into exile. Kundera later settled in France. That sequel is a reminder that the culture of 1967 was precious precisely because it was fragile.