Youth and Politics in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

It would be inaccurate to see the 'revival' in Czechoslovakia in terms of a conflict of generations, or to attribute to this the radical changes of those startling eight months, for the issues were not specifically generational; more important, the forces in the struggle for power and leadership were not the young versus the old. Such a characterization was vigorously denied by Ota Sik in an interview immediately after the crucial central committee meeting which brought the liberals to power.1 He pointed out that many of those who pushed hardest for change were among the oldest members of the party, including people like Frantisek Vodslon and Frantisek Kriegel. Indeed it was actually some of the youngest men in the Czechoslovak party such as Lenart, once regarded as promising 'new blood', who stood by Novotny in many of the presidium and central committee battles. This is not to say that there was no generational problem in Czechoslovakia, or that it played no role in the movement for democratization. The problem was complex and constantly changing both in importance and function, and for this reason may be more easily understood within the context of three different periods: the pre-1968 liberalization; the period of the 'revival', i.e., January to August I968; and the invasion and post-invasion period. Following the twelfth congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in December 1962, destalinization was at last undertaken in Czechoslovakia. This period, from early I963 until 1967, might be called the pre-revival revival, during which certain elements within the party principally liberal intellectuals, economists, and Slovaks struggled to introduce thoroughgoing reforms, and when almost every area and aspect of Czechoslovak society