Abstract
The attempt made to reform the communist system from above in Czechoslovakia was more far-reaching, and had a better prospect of success, than anywhere else in Eastern Europe either before or since. In order to explain the depth of the movement towards change within the party itself, one must bear in mind that Czechoslovakia had hardly undertaken any de-Stalinising reforms at all in the late 1950s. The thorough and dramatic character of the changes of the Dubček era resulted from their belatedness.
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Notes
Petr Pithart quotes with approval a statement by the philosopher Karel Kosík, who was prominent in the intellectual movement of the 1960s: ‘the Slovak question forms the essence of the Czech question.’ (P. Pithart, Osmašedesatý, (London, 1987), p. 83).
Quoted in J. Batt, Economic Reform and Political Change in Europe, (London, 1988), p. 187.
P. Tigrid, La chute irrésistible d’Alexander Dubček, (Paris, 1969), p. 42;
P. Tigrid, Kapesní průvodce inteligentní ženy po vlastním osudu, (Toronto, 1988), p. 26.
See an interview given by Smrkovský shortly before his death, quoted in H. G. Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, (Princeton, 1976), p. 879.
Z. Mlynář, Night Frost in Prague, (London, 1980), p. 97.
An English translation (without the section on science) is printed in R. A. Remington, ed., Winter in Prague, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969), pp. 88–137.
In Práce, (Prague) 11 April 1968, printed in translation in P. Tigrid, Le Printemps de Prague, (Paris, 1968), pp. 217–20.
A. Pravda, ‘Some aspects of the Czechoslovak economic reform and the working class in 1968’, Soviet Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, July 1973, p. 112.
A. Oxley, A. Pravda and A. Ritchie (eds), Czechoslovakia, The Party and the People, (London, 1973), p. 170; Batt, op. cit., p. 197.
G. Golan, Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia, (Cambridge, 1973), p. 142.
P. Tigrid, La chute irrésistible d’Alexandre Dubček, (Paris, 1970), p. 88.
As quoted in J. Skála, Vom Prager Frühling zur Charta 77, (Berlin, 1978), p. 61.
J. Kavan, ‘From the Prague Spring to a Long Winter’, in J. Pehe (ed.), The Prague Spring, (London, 1988), p. 109.
V. V. Kusin, From Dubček to Charter 77, (Edinburgh, 1978), p. 85.
M. Šimečka, The Restoration of Order, (London, 1984), chs 3 and 4.
Quoted in B. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, (London, 1988), p. 201.
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© 1995 Ben Fowkes
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Fowkes, B. (1995). Czechoslovakia in 1968. In: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24218-4_7
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