Czechoslovakia: Revival and Retreat

Abstract

Any comprehensive attempt to understand political change within Czechoslovakia in the Communist period, and, in particular, the reformist trends of the nineteen-sixties, which culminated in the events of 1968, would involve a study of developments within Czechoslovak society and a detailed examination of the tendencies and conflicts within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.¹ To appreciate the preconditions of these changes, however, we must delve deeper into Czechoslovak history and culture than that. The two major contexts in which changing attitudes and practices within the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and the constraints upon them, have to be understood are, on the one hand, the political cultures of Czechs and Slovaks and, on the other, the geopolitical environment in which Czechoslovakia is situated. While it is thus clear at the outset that we are not suggesting that political change in Czechoslovakia can be explained entirely in terms of political culture, we shall argue that analysis of the political culture is an essential part of an adequate explanation of change in Czechoslovakia after 1956 and especially in the period from 1963 until the late summer of 1968 when the trends were arrested by outside intervention.²