obvious to most Czechs. Yet today, half a century later, with Communism long dead and western liberal-democratic ‘normalcy’ in crisis, Kundera’s plea for the ‘Czechoslovak possibility’ in 1968 acquires perhaps a new resonance.
A second reading of the Prague Spring highlights its European dimension and calls us to interpret it through the prism of the rebellions that shook the political establishments throughout the continent in ’68. There was May ’68 in France, the Polish events of March ’68, Berlin, Belgrade …
The common denominator of these movements was the search for alternative models of society with contrasting, confusing, and often contradictory references to ‘Socialism’: from self-management in the workplace to the Christian-Marxist dialogue or to discussions about the impact of science and technology on the evolution of modern societies in both east and west. Moreover, there were not insignificant Czech contributions to all of the above. Karel Kosik’s Marxist humanism (influenced by Jan Patocka’s phenomenology) and a civilizational pessimism related precisely to the dehumanizing role of science and technology, or on the contrary, Radovan Richta’s civilizational optimism based on the “scientific and technical revolution.”7 The former proved incompatible with the “normalization” Gleichschaltung of the 1970s, while the latter’s technocratic faith in the progress of sciences rather easily blended in. Both were among the most influential Czech thinkers of the late 1960s in Europe and both were thus part of what Jan Patocka had in mind in attempting to frame the Prague Spring reforms in a European context and calling for a dialogue between intellectuals east and west. Patocka’s contribution was a piece entitled “Inteligence a opozice,” based on a lecture given during the Spring of 1968 in Germany, where he states that “the position of intellectuals in the East is better because ‘they do not consider basic democratic rights as a mere means towards an end but an end in itself’.”8
This proved to be the main contrast between 1968 in Prague (or Warsaw) and Paris (or Berlin). To be sure, there is a whole aspect of 1968 that can be interpreted mainly in terms of generations. There is now even a term for this: “Youthquake,” declared in 2017 as the “Word of the Year” by the experts at the Oxford English Dictionary. It is defined as “significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people.” The most interesting thing about the Prague Spring was that there was indeed youth participation, particularly the student movement as its radical wing, but its driving force was the previous generation, which experienced (supported or was at the receiving end of) state actions in 1945–48 and their aftermath. A.J. Liehm, the editor of Literarni listy in 1968, elaborated on this concept of political generations precisely in 1968 in the introduction to a splendid volume of his interviews with the leading intellectual figures of 1968 (from Ludvik Vaculik to Josef Skvorecky, and from Eduard Goldstücker to Václav Havel, to mention only a few), among the best guides to the cultural politics of the Prague Spring.9 Many—by no means all—of those who turned twenty after World War Two and had backed the communist takeover in 1948 found themselves frustrated and disappointed with the revolution from above, and thus helped in the 1960s to bring about a revolution from below, which culminated in 1968.10
As much as the political context, this generational aspect accounts for the contrasts and misunderstandings of 1968 between east and west, Prague and Paris. The driving force of the Prague Spring was the aspiration to freedom, whereas in Paris the moment of emancipation combined with the myth of revolution. Milan Kundera described the contrast as follows:
Paris’s May ’68 was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague Spring was the explosion of post-revolutionary skepticism … May ’68 was a radical uprising whereas what had, for many a long year, been leading towards the explosion of the Prague Spring was a popular revolt by moderates.11
While western radicals beset by post-colonial guilt looked to the Third World, European identity was part of the Spring of 1968 in Prague. Again, in Kundera’s words:
Paris in May ’68 challenged the basis of what is called European culture and its traditional values. The Prague Spring was a passionate defense of the European cultural tradition in the widest and most tolerant sense of the term (a defense of Christianity just as much as of modern art—both rejected by those in power). We all struggled for the right to maintain that tradition that had been threatened by the anti-western messianism of Russian totalitarianism.”12
The contrast and misunderstandings highlighted here, however, should not make us forget the intellectually and politically important convergence between the western ’68ers who in the following decade abandoned Marxism and became anti-totalitarian liberals of different shades, and the post-’68 Czech dissidents around common issues and concerns: human rights, civil society, and overcoming the partition of Europe.
Finally, there is another dimension to the Spring of 1968 as the “supreme stage” of reformism in the Soviet bloc and its implications for a divided Europe. Zdenek Mlynar, one of the architects of the political reforms and in 1968 the youngest member of the Politburo, has described the way Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership spelled out the reasons for the invasion to Dubček and his colleagues:
Precisely because the territorial results of the last war are untouchable to us we had to intervene in Czechoslovakia. The West will not move, so, what do you think will be done on your behalf? Comrades Tito, Ceausescu, Berlinguer, will make speeches. Well, and what of it? You are counting on the Communist movement in Western Europe? But that has remained insignificant for the last fifty years.13
That part is familiar enough. Indeed Tito and the “Eurocommunists” in the west protested and claimed to continue the legacy of the Prague Spring as a way to enhance their democratic credentials in western Europe.
The real legacy, however, returned with a vengeance twenty years later. Gorbachev, Mlynar’s friend and roommate from their student days in Moscow, became leader of the Soviet Communist Party and sought inspiration for his perestroika in the Prague Spring of 1968. Asked what was the difference between his reforms and those of Dubček, the spokesman for Gorbachev replied simply: “Nineteen years” …
That certainly was not good enough to rehabilitate “socialism with a human face” in the eyes of skeptical Czechs and Slovaks twenty years later. It is not easy to identify with a defeated project that carries the price tag of another twenty years in a post-totalitarian dictatorship. It did matter, however, for what was unfolding in Moscow and its relationship with its most western dependencies. Jiří Dienstbier, a prominent Czech journalist from 1968 and a dissident turned prisoner turned stoker, became Minister of foreign affairs in December 1989. On his first meeting with Gorbachev, he referred to the hopes of 1968 and their crushing by Moscow, to which Gorbachev replied: “We thought that we had strangled the Prague Spring while in reality we had strangled ourselves …”14
Gorbachev and his entourage saw the Prague Spring as a chance to save the system. Its crushing thus prevented reform at the very center of the empire and accounts for its delayed but intractable crisis. In other words, the August 1968 invasion, by preventing structural change in Czechoslovakia, prepared the ground for the unraveling of “actually existing socialism” (Brezhnev dixit). To be sure, there is tough competition for the title of “who contributed most” to the demise of the Soviet empire. The Hungarians point to the revolution of 1956, the Poles see Solidarity (Solidarność) in 1980, the largest social movement in post-war Europe, which, despite being put down by Jaruzelski’s
