A reform movement from inside the party
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalisation in Czechoslovakia that began in January 1968 and ended in August of the same year. It is called a spring because it was short and hopeful; it is called a reform movement because it was led, for most of its life, by the Communist Party itself. Its leaders did not try to abolish socialism. Alexander Dubcek’s slogan, usually remembered as socialism with a human face, expressed the aim of keeping the system while ending its worst abuses.
The conditions that led to it were laid in 1967, with a stagnating economy, discontent among Slovaks and open criticism from writers and students. This article begins in January 1968.
January to March: Dubcek replaces Novotny
On 5 January 1968, the party’s Central Committee elected Alexander Dubcek First Secretary, replacing Antonin Novotny. Dubcek was a Slovak communist, then in his mid-forties, who was seen as a compromise candidate: loyal to the party, but open to change. Novotny remained President for a short time, but the pressure on him continued. Newspapers began to write about the abuses of the 1950s, including the show trials, and about the need to rehabilitate victims.
In March 1968 Novotny resigned the presidency. On 30 March the National Assembly chose General Ludvik Svoboda, a respected war hero, as president. By then the press was already operating with far less supervision. Censorship was not legally abolished at once, but officials stopped enforcing it in many places, and it was formally dismantled by law in the summer.
April: the Action Programme
In early April 1968 the Central Committee approved the Action Programme, which laid out the party’s plans. Its main points included:
- freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly;
- the legal rehabilitation of people unjustly punished in the 1950s;
- greater autonomy for enterprises, building on the economic reforms associated with the economist Ota Sik;
- a federal arrangement that would give Slovakia a more equal position;
- the idea that the party should lead by persuasion and example, not by command.
The programme was a document of compromise. It did not propose a multi-party system or leaving the Warsaw Pact. It still went well beyond what other Eastern bloc leaders thought was safe, especially in dropping the assumption that the party’s authority was unquestionable.
Spring and summer: a public conversation
During those months Czechoslovak society seemed to wake up. Newspapers and magazines, including the revived Literarni listy, ran uncomfortable stories. Clubs and organisations formed outside party control, including groups of former political prisoners. Radio and television discussed topics that had been taboo. People in cafes and trains talked about politics in a way that foreign visitors found remarkable.
A well-known text from the period is “Two Thousand Words”, written by the author Ludvik Vaculik and published in late June 1968. It urged citizens to support the reform and warned against conservative forces; some party officials and Moscow regarded it as an incitement. Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership became more anxious. Hardline leaders in Poland and East Germany worried that the ideas might spread. Warsaw Pact troops carried out exercises in Czechoslovakia in June and some remained in the country afterward.
In July the leaders of the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria sent a joint letter from Warsaw urging the Czechoslovak party to rein in its critics. Dubcek’s leadership refused to accept that the situation was out of control. Direct talks between the Soviet and Czechoslovak leaderships took place at Cierna nad Tisou on the Slovak border at the end of July and beginning of August, followed by a larger meeting in Bratislava on 3 August. Those meetings appeared to produce a truce, though many observers were unsure of it.
The invasion of 20-21 August
During the night of 20 to 21 August 1968, forces from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria crossed the border. East German units were kept largely out of the operation. Romania refused to take part. The total number of troops is often given as several hundred thousand, though sources differ on the figure.
The Czechoslovak army was ordered not to resist. Civilians did, in other ways. People argued with soldiers, painted slogans, removed or turned street signs to confuse the invaders, and kept radio stations running from improvised studios. A number of civilians were killed, with different sources giving figures of around a hundred in total, and many more were wounded. Dubcek and other leaders were detained and taken to Moscow, where they were pressed to sign an agreement known as the Moscow Protocol. They returned to Prague, but the reforms had effectively ended.
Normalisation
The period that followed is called “normalisation”. Soviet troops remained in Czechoslovakia. In the months after the invasion, parts of the reform were gradually reversed. Censorship returned, party members were reviewed and many were expelled, and a large number of people lost their jobs. In April 1969 Dubcek was replaced as First Secretary by Gustav Husak. The self-immolation of the student Jan Palach in Prague in January 1969, in protest against the loss of freedom, became a lasting symbol of the mood.
The Soviet justification for the invasion later became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that the Soviet Union and its allies had a right to intervene when socialism in a fellow state was thought to be threatened. The invasion also split communist parties elsewhere, and in the Soviet Union itself it prompted the small Red Square protest of 25 August 1968 by a handful of Soviet dissidents. The movement’s international context was a turbulent year: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January, the Johnson withdrawal from the American race on 31 March, the King assassination in April and the May 1968 strikes in France, though the Prague reform was driven primarily by local conditions.
Why it is remembered
The Prague Spring is remembered because it showed that a communist state could attempt to change itself peacefully, and because of the way it ended. The idea of a more humane form of socialism did not die entirely. Some of those involved became leaders of the dissident movement, including the signatories of Charter 77, and in 1989 the Velvet Revolution brought down the communist government. Dubcek himself returned to public life that year. Historians still debate whether the reforms could have succeeded if Moscow had allowed them, or whether the party’s dual aims of democratisation and one-party control were incompatible.