For me the section on Prague spring and the student/intellectual uprising in Czechoslovakia is one of the most valuable sections of Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: the Year that Rocked the World. With the distressing level of FBI and police repression occurring in the US, I find it heartening to learn that organized resistance occurred even in the brutal totalitarian regimes of cold war Eastern Europe. Moreover I feel it’s important to understand the circumstances in which resistance developed – a well as it’s significance in the ultimate collapse of the Soviet bloc.

It’s quite common for the US power elite to attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which ultimately bankrupted their economy. In, fact some of them take credit it:  Zbigniew Brzezinski brags that the US ingeniously “lured” them into Afghanistan. Hopefully American intellectuals are too sophisticated to be taken in by this simplistic and jingoistic view of world history.

Prague Spring and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire

1968 author Mark Kurlansky believes the Soviet’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia marks the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. The student/intellectual protest movement that brought Alexander Dubcek to power in January 1968 became less public but didn’t disappear in the government repression that followed the Soviet invasion in August. It also served to strengthen reform movements in other Soviet Bloc countries – especially Romania and Poland – where government leaders were under pressure to condemn the invasion. In Kurlansky’s view the appearance of Soviet tanks on Czech streets killed the dream of eastern block reformers that socialism could be made more democratic. Without that dream, they had no choice but to turn to capitalism when they ultimately took power in the late eighties (which many deeply regret at this point).

I was especially fascinated by Kurlansky’s description of the background and personality of Alexander Dubceck, the father of “Prague Spring.” Dubcek was clearly no wild-eyed radical seeking to overthrow communism. In every respect Dubcek was the ultimate communist bureaucrat:  blindly loyal, dutiful, honest, and somewhat bumbling. Dubcek, who had always believed in democratic reform, never spoke openly about it because he was also very pro-Soviet. In fact, he never imagined the Soviets would invade. Dubcek and his subordinates considered the Soviets their friends and protectors. In this respect, Czechoslovakia was unique among eastern bloc countries in voting in a communist government at the end of World War II (rather than having it forced on them).

Alexander Dubcek

Parallels Between Dubcek and Nixon

Dubcek was clearly more moderate than the students and intellectuals in the street. As Kurlansky describes it, he was actually somewhat dismayed at being suddenly thrust into power in January 1968 – owing to his predecessor’s inability to contain the student protest movement and the Slovak nationalist movement that exploded simultaneously in late 1967. At the same time Dubcek was deeply principled, unlike many Communist Party officials, and viewed violent suppression of the protests as unthinkable. Aside from his refusal to invoke military force against the students, his situation parallels that of Richard Nixon’s in some ways. Nixon was also forced to enact a number of progressive initiatives (The Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Security Supplemental Income) in response to a large and vocal protest movement. There are some interesting essays in the Nixon Library regarding the political pressures that led Nixon to embrace to these reforms: 

http://www.nixonera.com/library/domestic.asp

In fact Dubcek had no real platform until April 1968, when he issued an Action Program with three planks: 1) commitment to Czechoslovakia’s socialist political/economic system, 2) ending secret police repression of personal and political beliefs, and 3) ending the monopoly of power by the Communist Party.

The immediate result was liberalization of foreign travel, increased access to foreign periodicals in Czechoslovakia, as well as an increase in media exposes about Czech and Soviet corruption and Stalin’s notorious purges. Freedom of artistic expression also increased, and everywhere Czech students wore blue jeans and long hair, listened to rock and jazz, displayed psychedelic posters and even held an international film festival.

Soviets Forced to Keep Dubcek in Power

Brezhnev, the Soviet prime minister, had been one of Stalin’s henchmen in several purges. For obvious reasons, he put extreme pressure on Dubcek to crack down on these “excesses.”  Dubcek, however, was also profoundly antiwar. Even as Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, he explicitly ordered a robust, well-trained and armed Czech military not to fire on them. As in Tienanmen Square in China, the main opposition to the tanks was tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, making it clear the Soviet invasion was extremely unpopular and placing them in an extremely awkward position.

Czech civilians surround Soviet tanks

Kurlansky writes at length about an unsung hero of this period named General Ludvik Svoboda, who the Soviets attempted to install in a puppet government after imprisoning Dubcek and three members of his cabinet. Though forced to agree to Soviet demands to gradually reinstate censorship and foreign travel restrictions, Dubcek was released and remained in power until April 1969, when he was forced to resign following the Czech Hockey Riots. In 1970 he was expelled from the Communist Party, which cost him his seat in the Slovak Parliament and Federal Assembly.

General Ludvig Svoboda