Reform Attempts

Abstract

For Czechoslovakia — and not only for this country — the historical period of 1956 to 1969 was a time of great hopes and great frustrations. The hidden social tension characterising the situation in 1954 and 1955, when the potentially politically active part of society awaited new signals from the Soviet Union (the first critique of Stalinism having already begun), was interrupted by information on the progress and results of the XX Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. It was at that very time that the courageous groups of the rather democratic and more intellectual part of the Czechoslovak Communists first presented their ideas for the future reform programme of the state socialist society. Some initial positive political changes and, hot on their heels, the radical, fear-inspired prevention of any pro-democratic initiative — provoked by parallel developments in Poland and especially in Hungary, and even the (relatively moderate compared with the 1950s) persecution of the most openly criticising members by the leadership — these were the immediate consequences of the reluctant and contradictory impulses issued from the East. The hardline reaction suppressing the reform attempts continued throughout the last third of the 1950s with the liquidation of the last individual agricultural farmers (the completion of collectivisation in a second wave) and the remaining small businessmen — both through the renewed application of administrative instruments, although not in the same drastic forms as in the late 1940s and early 1950s.