Prague spring Media

This entry touches on the years preceding the 1968 Prague Spring, when Czechs and Slovaks—in their then single nation-state under Soviet domination—saw themselves as taking purely pragmatic steps to redistribute power away from the top, but not to challenge Soviet control. It mainly addresses the events of 1968, up to the Soviet invasion of August 21, and the extraordinary week that followed.

Western commentators saw the Czechs and Slovaks as reinstating parliamentary democracy; some Western leftists subjected them to suspicious [Page 420]scrutiny, in case they really were restoring capitalism, and the Soviet bloc oligarchs regarded them with genuine panic. Reforming Czechs and Slovaks found it incomprehensible and frustrating that their perfectly reasonable discussions should be given such loaded interpretations, particularly when their own consensus was for organizing a self-managed socialist order.

The historical character of Czech culture was a factor here. From the 15th-century revolt of Jan Hus and his followers against established religious and political authority, Bohemia and Moravia had represented an island of commitment to religious tolerance and to some degree even democracy, in a Europe of sectarian strife and absolutist kingdoms. These powerful democratic and pluralistic traditions, although repressed under the Nazis from 1938 to 1945 and under Stalinism from 1948, were very far from dead.

The country's emergence from Stalinism was pioneered in the main by filmmakers, economists, sociologists, writers, and certain magazine journalists. Film, especially animated film, was organized in small workshops, which made them hard to supervise closely, and cartoons can concentrate political critique very effectively. When the economy stagnated, economists' views had to be taken seriously. Sociologists, studying actual life, became willy-nilly spokespeople for everyday experience, as contrasted to government definitions of reality. In particular, the Writers' Union played a significant part. Its publishing house, by a historical quirk was not state owned, and it also administered a Literary Fund which allowed the Writers' Union limited autonomy.

The Writers' Union's first big victory against their sovietized state had been in 1963, to rehabilitate Franz Kafka as an eminent national writer. Given his meticulous dissection of unaccountable state power in The Trial and The Castle, the vote was politically vital in context.

The two key magazines were the Czech weekly Literární noviny (Literary News) and the Slovak weekly Kultúrny Život (Cultural Life). Magazine writers enjoyed a little more freedom than journalists. Indeed, Literární noviny came to be under virtual self-management during 1967, as a result of disputes between the Party and the Writers' Union about who should fill its leading posts. Routinely at that time, up to a third of the material in Literární noviny would be confiscated—an index of its writers' continually bucking against censorship.

Matters came to a head in the fourth Writers' Union Congress of June 1967. Speaker after speaker rose to attack censorship. The powers that be banned Literárni noviny, threatened to abolish the Writers' Union and seize the Literary Fund, and put a colonel in charge of a new, safe Literární noviny. The Slovak Writers' Congress publicly denounced the changeover.

The power structure was terrified that the plague might spread to the daily press. In the period leading up to 1968, journalists began engaging in unprecedented public question-and-answer sessions. They were often a great deal more forthcoming on air or in print.

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