by Tony Judt
Like the French Communist leader Maurice Thorez, First Secretary Antonin Novotný waited many years to be sure which way the wind was blowing before following Khrushchev’s example and denouncing the Soviet dictator. The Czech experience of high Stalinist terror was so recent and so extreme that the Party leaders were reluctant to risk any admission of ‘error’—lest the consequences of doing so dwarf the ’56 upheavals in Poland or even Hungary. De-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia was thus deliberately delayed as long as possible—even the monumental statue of Stalin on the heights overlooking Prague, like the rather smaller copy in the Slovak capital Bratislava, was left untouched until October 1962.182
The consequences of the Communist social revolution had been felt more dramatically in Czechoslovakia than elsewhere, in large part precisely because, as we have seen, it really was a developed, bourgeois society—in contrast with every other country subjected to Soviet rule. The leading victims of Stalinist terror in Czechoslovakia had all been intellectuals, usually of middle-class origin, many of them Jews. Other classes of Czechoslovak society had not suffered as much. Upward social mobility for workers—or, more precisely, downward social mobility for everyone else—was a distinguishing feature of the 1950s in the Czech and Slovak lands. The percentage of working-class children in non-vocational higher education in Czechoslovakia rose from under 10 percent in 1938 to 31 percent by 1956, nearly 40 percent in 1963. Income distribution in Czechoslovakia by the early Sixties was the most egalitarian in Soviet Europe.
The Communist leadership had thus indeed advanced Czechoslovakia to ‘full Socialism’, as the new Constitution of 1960 proclaimed. However, this achievement had been accomplished at the price of a level of stagnation that was unacceptable even by Soviet standards. Hence the decision of the Party authorities, at the 12th Party Congress in December 1962, to ‘adapt the national economy’ to the country’s advanced stage of socialist development—i.e. to accept the inevitable and allow a minimum of non-socialist reforms in order to invigorate the stagnant economy. However, the changes proposed by Ota Sik and other Party reform economists—such as linking worker incentives to a share of factory profits rather than the fulfillment of official Plans or norms—were not popular with Party hardliners and were only finally endorsed at the 13th Congress four years later.
By then, as the leadership had feared all along, the combination of public rehabilitations, cautious acknowledgement of Stalin’s faults, and the prospect of even mild economic reforms had opened the way to much more serious questioning of the Party’s stranglehold on public life. The economic reforms begun in 1963 might not be universally welcomed by shop-floor employees; but among writers, teachers, filmmakers and philosophers the prospect of a loosening of the Stalinist shackles released an avalanche of criticisms, hopes and expectations.
Thus a writers’ conference in Liblice in 1963 was devoted to Franz Kafka. Hitherto this was a taboo subject: in part because Kafka had been a Prague Jew writing in German, and thus a reminder of Bohemia’s lost history; but mostly because of the embarrassingly penetrating anticipation in many of Kafka’s writings of the logic of totalitarian rule. And thus the authorization to discuss Kafka appeared to presage a much broader liberalization of public debate: from the discussion of forbidden writers to the mention of murdered leaders was a small step. In April 1963, Ladislav Novomeský, a rehabilitated Slovak writer, made open and admiring mention at the Slovak Writers’ Congress of his ‘comrade and friend’ Clementis, a Slánský trial victim. The desire to speak—to talk about the past—was now taking center stage, albeit still couched in carefully ‘revisionist’ language: when the young novelist Milan Kundera contributed an article to the Prague cultural periodical Literární Noviny in June 1963, his criticisms were cautiously confined to the Stalinist ‘deviation’ in Czech literature and the need to tell the truth about it.
The relatively liberal mood of these years was a belated Czech echo of the Khrushchev thaw. Despite the changed tone in Moscow following Brezhnev’s coup, the artistic renaissance in Czechoslovakia continued to unfold, impeded only by sporadic censorship and pressure. To foreigners, the best-known symptom was a rash of new films, cautiously addressing subjects that would have been forbidden a few years before—Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (1966), gently debunking the core Communist myth of wartime anti-Nazi resistance, was co-written by Josef Škvorecký (author of The Cowards, a novel whose similar theme, gingerly adumbrated, had established his reputation a few years before). But playwrights, poets and novelists—many of whom, Kundera included, doubled as screenwriters in these years—played an even more important role.
In 1966 Ludvík Vaculík published The Axe, a fictional account drawing on his own father’s Communist ideals—and the son’s subsequent disillusionment. In 1967 another writer, Ladislas Mňačko, published a biting critique of Novotný and the Party nomenklatura, loosely disguised in novel form, under the transparent title The Taste of Power. In the same year Kundera himself published The Joke, a neo-existentialist and avowedly autobiographical novel of the Stalinist generation in Czechoslovakia. Those years, ‘the era of building socialism’ as they were officially known, were now fair game for intellectual condemnation, and at the Fourth Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress in the summer of 1967 Kundera, Vaculík, the poet and playwright Pavel Kohout and the young playwright Václav Havel attacked the Communist leadership of the time for the material and moral devastation it had wrought. They called for a return to the literary and cultural heritage of Czechoslovakia and for the country to take up once again its ‘normal’ place in the center of a free Europe.
The implied attack on Czechoslovakia’s current leadership was obvious to all—certainly, as we now know, the Kremlin leadership was already watching the situation in Prague with some misgivings: Brezhnev had long regarded Czechoslovakia as the least ideologically reliable element in the Warsaw Pact. It was because they knew this that the aging Stalinists in Prague Castle had tried for so long to hold the line. If they did not clamp down firmly on the intellectual opposition emerging in 1967 it was not for want of trying. But they were held back by two constraints: the need to pursue the recently implemented economic reforms, which implied a degree of openness and tolerance of dissenting opinion along Hungarian lines; and the emerging difficulties in Slovakia.
Czecho-Slovakia (as it was initially known) had always been an uneasy and unbalanced state. The Slovak minority in the south and east of the country was poorer and more rural than the Czechs to the northwest. Released from Hungarian rule in 1918, Slovaks were the poor relations in multi-ethnic inter-war Czechoslovakia and were not always treated well by Prague. Many Slovak political leaders had thus welcomed the breakup of the country in 1939 and the Nazi-sponsored appearance of an ‘independent’ puppet state with its capital in Bratislava. Conversely it was the urban and heavily Social Democratic Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia who had backed Communist candidates in the post-war elections, while the Catholic Slovaks remained indifferent or opposed.
All the same, Slovakia had not done badly under Communism. Slovak intellectuals fell victim to Communist purges, accused of bourgeois nationalism or antiCommunist plotting (or both). And the small number of surviving Slovak Jews suffered along with their Czech confrères. But ‘bourgeois nationalists’, Communists, Jews and intellectuals were fewer in number in Slovakia and much more isolated from the rest of society. Most Slovaks were poor and worked in the countryside. For them the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the first post-war decade carried real benefits. In contrast to Czechs, they were by no means displeased with their lot.
The mood in the Slovak region of the country changed sharply after 1960, however. The new ‘Socialist’ Constitution made even fewer concessions to local initiative or opinion than its predecessor and such autonomy as had been accorded Slovakia in the post-war reconstruction of the country was now taken back. Of more immediate consequence for most Slovaks, however, was the stagnation of the economy (by 1964 Czec
hoslovakia’s rate of growth was the slowest in the bloc), which hit the heavy industry of central Slovakia harder than anywhere else.
In January 1967 Novotný had been due to begin implementing the overdue economic reforms recommended by his own Party experts. The reform economists’ proposals for decentralization of decision-making and increased local autonomy had been welcomed in Bratislava—though some of the reforms, such as profit-related wage incentives, were hardly calculated to appeal to the unskilled workers in Slovakia’s inefficient industrial plants. But all Novotný’s instincts told him to resist such loosening of Party control, and instead he encouraged amendments to the proposed changes, with the goal of shoring up the institutions of central planning. This not only sabotaged the proposals of Sik and other Party economists; it further alienated Slovak opinion. Slovak Communists themselves now began to talk of the need for federalization and of the difficulties of collaborating with the aging Communist apparatchiks in Prague. Echoing a longstanding complaint of Slovak cleaners, building workers, teachers and shop assistants, they felt slighted and ignored by the Czech majority. There was talk of long-forgotten pre-war indignities, as well as the Stalinist purges of Slovak Communists.
Meanwhile, and for the first time in years, there was a hint of troubles of yet another order. On October 31st 1967, a group of students from Prague’s Technical University organized a street demonstration in the district of Strahov to protest electricity cuts at their dormitories: however, their calls for ‘More light!’ were rightly interpreted as extending beyond local housekeeping difficulties. The ‘Strahov Events’, as they were later dubbed, were efficiently and violently suppressed by the police; but they added to the charged atmosphere of the moment, all the more so because they seemed to suggest that a Communist state might not be immune to the student mood in the West.
Novotný , like Gomułka in Poland, was uncertain how to respond to such challenges. Lacking the anti-Semitic option, he turned to Brezhnev for help in dealing with his local critics. But when the Soviet leader arrived in Prague in December 1967 he offered only the rather obscure recommendation that the Czechoslovak President do as he saw fit: ‘It’s your business.’ Novotný’s colleagues seized the opportunity: on January 5th 1968 the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party elected a new First Secretary, Alexander Dubček.
The new man was young (at 47 he was sixteen years Novotný’s junior), from the reform wing of the Party and, above all, a Slovak. As leader of the Slovak Communist Party for the past three years he appeared to many to be a credible compromise candidate: a longstanding Communist apparatchik who would nevertheless support reforms and appease Slovak resentments. Dubček’s early moves seemed to confirm this reading: a month after his appointment the Party leadership gave its unstinting approval to the stalled economic reform program. Dubček’s rather artless manner appealed to the young in particular, while his indisputable loyalty to the Party and to ‘Socialism’ reassured for the time being the Kremlin and other foreign Communist leaders looking anxiously on.
If Dubček’s intentions were obscure to observers, this is probably because he himself was far from sure just where to go. At first this ambiguity worked in his favor, as different factions competed for his support and offered to strengthen his hand. Public rallies in Prague in the weeks following his election demanded an end to censorship, greater press freedom and a genuine inquiry into the purges of the fifties and the responsibilities of the old guard around Novotný (who remained President of the country even after being ousted from the Party leadership). Carried on this wave of popular enthusiasm, Dubček endorsed the call for a relaxation of censorship and initiated a purge of Novotnýites from the Party and from the Czech army.
On March 22nd Novotný reluctantly resigned the presidency and was replaced a week later by General Ludvík Svoboda. Five days after that, the Central Committee adopted an ‘Action Program’ calling for equal status and autonomy for Slovakia, the rehabilitation of past victims and ‘democratization’ of the political and economic system. The Party was now officially endorsing what the Program called ‘a unique experiment in democratic Communism’: ‘Socialism with a human face’ as it became colloquially known. Over a period of time (the document spoke of a ten-year transition) the Czechoslovak Communist Party would allow the emergence of other parties with whom it would compete in genuine elections. These were hardly original ideas, but publicly pronounced from the official organs of a ruling Communist Party they triggered a political earthquake. The Prague Spring had begun.
The events of the spring and summer of 1968 in Czechoslovakia hinged on three contemporary illusions. The first, widespread in the country after Dubček’s rise and especially following publication of the Action Program, was that the freedoms and reforms now being discussed could be folded into the ‘Socialist’ (i.e. Communist) project. It would be wrong to suppose, in retrospect, that what the students and writers and Party reformers of 1968 were ‘really’ seeking was to replace Communism with liberal capitalism or that their enthusiasm for ‘Socialism with a human face’ was mere rhetorical compromise or habit. On the contrary: the idea that there existed a ‘third way’, a Democratic Socialism compatible with free institutions, respecting individual freedoms and collective goals, had captured the imagination of Czech students no less than Hungarian economists.
The distinction that was now drawn between the discredited Stalinism of Novotný’s generation and the renewed idealism of the Dubček era, was widely accepted—even, indeed especially, by Party members.183 As Jiří Pelikán asserted, in his preface to yet a third report on the Czech political trials (commissioned in 1968 by Dubček but suppressed after his fall) ‘the Communist Party had won tremendous popularity and prestige, the people had spontaneously declared themselves for socialism’.184 That is perhaps a little hyperbolic, but it was not wildly out of line with contemporary opinion. And this, in turn, nourished a second illusion.
If the people believed the Party could save Socialism from its history, so the Party leadership came to suppose that they could manage this without losing control of the country. A new government headed by Oldřich Černík was installed on April 18th and, encouraged by huge public demonstrations of affection and support (notably in the traditional May Day celebrations), it relaxed virtually all formal controls on public expressions of opinion. On June 26th censorship of press and media was formally abolished. The same day it was announced that Czechoslovakia was to become a genuinely federal state, comprising a Czech Socialist republic and a Slovak Socialist republic (this was the only one of Dubček’s reforms to survive the subsequent repression, becoming law on October 28th 1968).
But having relaxed all controls on opinion, the Communist leadership was now pressed from every side to pursue the logic of its actions. Why wait ten years for free and open elections? Now that censorship had been abolished, why retain formal control and ownership of the media? On June 27th Literárny Listy and other Czech publications carried a manifesto by Ludvík Vaculík, ‘Two Thousand Words’, addressed to ‘workers, farmers, officials, artists, scholars, scientists and technicians.’ It called for the re-establishment of political parties, the formation of citizens’ committees to defend and advance the cause of reform, and other proposals to take the initiative for further change out of the control of the Party. The battle was not yet won, Vaculík warned: the reactionaries in the Party would fight to preserve their privileges and there was even talk of ‘foreign forces intervening in our development’. The people needed to strengthen the arm of the Communists’ own reformers by pressing them to move forward even faster.
Dubček rejected Vaculík’s manifesto and its implication that the Communists should abandon their monopoly of power. As a lifelong Communist he would not countenance this crucial qualitative shift (‘bourgeois pluralism’) and anyway saw no need to do so. For Dubček the Party itself was the only appropriate vehicle for radical change if the vital attributes of a Socialist system were to be preserved.
The more popular the Party, the more changes it could safely institute. But as Vaculík’s manifesto made cruelly clear, the Party’s popularity and its credibility would increasingly rest upon its willingness to pursue changes that might ultimately drive it from power. The fault line between a Communist state and an open society was now fully exposed.
And this, in turn, directed national attention in the summer of 1968 to the third illusion, the most dangerous of all: Dubček’s conviction that he could keep Moscow at bay, that he would succeed in assuring his Soviet comrades that they had nothing to fear from events in Czechoslovakia—indeed, that they had everything to gain from the newfound popularity of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the renewed faith in a rejuvenated socialist project. If Dubček made this mortal miscalculation it was above all because the Czech reformers had crucially misinterpreted the lesson of 1956. Imre Nagy’s mistake, they thought, had been his departure from the Warsaw Pact and declaration of Hungarian neutrality. So long as Czechoslovakia stayed firmly in the Pact and unambiguously allied to Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues would surely leave them alone.
But by 1968, the Soviet Union was worried less about military security than the Party’s loss of monopoly control. As early as March 21st, at a meeting of the Soviet Politburo, Ukrainian Party leader Petro Shelest was complaining of contamination from the Czechoslovak example: rumors from Prague were having an adverse impact on the mood among young Ukrainians, he reported. Polish and East German leaders made similar remonstrations to their Soviet colleagues at a meeting in Dresden the same month (Gomułka, with his own troubles at home, was especially angered by public criticism in Prague at Poland’s turn to anti-Semitism). Unbeknownst to Prague, the KGB chief Yuri Andropov was already speaking of a possible need for ‘concrete military measures’; and in April Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko was quietly authorized to draw up a contingent plan for military operations in Czechoslovakia—a first draft of what would become ‘Operation Danube’.