Crisis and Change in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The removal of Antonin Novotny as first secretary of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968 ushered in a period of change unparalleled in any Communist country since the 1956 days in Poland and Hungary. A leader who had ruled without serious challenge since 1952 was toppled from power by factional resistance at the pinnacle of the party and by widespread opposition among the €lite groups of society. His successor, Alexander Dubcek, launched a process of change which was designed to remove the accumulated evils of decades of Stalinism and to lay the foundations for a socialist democracy. These dramatic developments came almost two decades after the February seizure of power in 1948 and the establishment of a thoroughly Stalinist system of rule which had continued long after the death of Stalin and had survived, largely unaltered, the crises of world communism in 1956 and 1961. A country which had always been regarded as a loyal and docile satellite of Moscow began to embark on its own path to socialism and to manifest mounting signs of independence of attitude. A Communist system which had deservedly been treated as one of the most dogmatic and rigid became in a matter of weeks the freest in the Communist world. Although the ideas of Masaryk and Benes and the Czech and Slovak traditions of democracy and nationalism appeared to have been completely erased, they now rose to the surface and seemed to be exerting a substantial influence on the consciousness of the people. Yet in essence this was an effort by Communists, working within the Communist party, to transform the Novotny dictatorship into a new model of democratic and humanist socialism, and to do so without violence, in a careful and self -controlled fashion. Most extraordinary of all, unlike earlier instances of national communism, the Czechoslovak case was a product of entirely indigenous forces begun without stimulus from Moscow, as in the first stages of Polish and Hungarian de-Stalinization, or Soviet pressure, as in the cases of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Rumania and did not, at least at first, present an open challenge to the Soviet Union or the world communist movement.