F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

SPRING IN PRAGUE —
40 YEARS AGO
A WITNESS TO THE SHORT-LIVED CZECHOSLOVAK REFORM MOVEMENT’S TRAGIC
DENOUEMENT IN AUGUST 1968 ASSESSES ITS LEGACY.
By dark of night on Aug. 20, 1968, armed
forces of the Soviet Union and four of its
allies entered and occupied Czechoslovakia,
putting an abrupt end to the sevenmonth
era known as the “Prague Spring.”
After months of tergiversation, the
Kremlin decided that Alexander Dubcek’s
self-styled “socialism with a human face” posed an
intolerable challenge to Moscow’s vital interests and had to
be terminated by military force. The action-forcing event
was an extraordinary Communist Party congress scheduled
to begin Sept. 9, 1968, in Prague, a session the Soviets rightly
feared would lead to an even more progressive
Czechoslovak leadership.
Dubcek, a Slovak who had grown up in the Soviet Union
and received special training there, had been elected first
secretary of the central committee of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party on Jan. 5, 1968. An unlikely leader in a
state long dominated by Czechs, he was a compromise candidate
to resolve an internal party crisis. Dubcek was selected
to replace dictator Antonin Novotny, who had ruled the
country for nearly 20 years and was on the verge of launching
a new and predictably harsh purge to protect himself
from his critics. The latter included the country’s brilliant
intellectuals, economic reformers, students and, especially,
Slovaks angry about the extreme centralism and despotic
Kenneth N. Skoug, a retired FSO, was the economic/commercial
officer in Prague from 1967 to 1969. He is the
author of Czechoslovakia’s Lost Fight for Freedom: An
Embassy Perspective (Greenwood, 1999).
BY KENNETH N. SKOUG
intolerance with which Novotny had governed the country.
Ironically, at the climax of the party struggle — the critical
nature of which was known to few outsiders — Leonid
Brezhnev, secretary general of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, came to Prague at Novotny’s invitation. The
dreaded Czechoslovak security service and the military
stood ready to rescue Novotny by force if he gave the signal.
But Novotny did not get the Soviet imprimatur he
needed.
Brezhnev could have decided to leave in place a tyrant
who had long been a faithful Soviet lackey, but instead he
heeded the bilingual Dubcek and another Czechoslovak
leader who hoped to replace Novotny. He left the matter
to the Czech and Slovak comrades to decide. They promptly
ousted Novotny in favor of Dubcek. But in mid-August
1968, Brezhnev and his colleagues in the Kremlin reached
a different conclusion.
An Explosion of Spontaneity
The explosion of spontaneity that began on Jan. 5, 1968,
had little to do with anything Dubcek said or wrote. It was
touched off by the shock felt within senior Communist
Party ranks at how close they had come to a new purge.
They vowed at once and publicly to strive for “democracy,”
by which they meant greater openness in party ranks, but
which was understood in broader terms by the nation. The
other primary source was the mass media that had been
totally docile in 1967, but that now sensed the lid was off as
far as what could be published.
By permitting and welcoming the unforeseen and
unprecedented expression of public opinion, Dubcek won,
JULY-AUGUST 2008/FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 53