Alexander Dubček v Itálii. Symbol „pražského jara“ po dvaceti letech

• Authors: Luciano Antonetti

Title variants

EN

Dubček in Italy: The Prague Spring as a Symbol Twenty Years Later

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The Slovak politician Alexander Dubček (1921–1992), the First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1968, was expelled from the Party and public life after the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’. In November 1988 he could, for the first time since then, travel abroad. He was invited by the University of Bologna, which, on the nine-hundredth anniversary of its being founding, decided to confer an honorary doctorate of political science on Dubček. The journalist- columnist Luciano Antonetti, who had worked in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and was a friend of Dubček’s, helped to organize his trip to Italy. In this article he describes the preparations, the visit itself, and the response to it. He gives his account of the visit in the context of the renewed interest in the Prague Spring, which in that same year was marking its twentieth anniversary, and the hopes that were raised by Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union, which evoked in left-wing sympathizers also in the West Dubček’s attempt at ‘Socialism with a human face.’ After he managed to get the Czechoslovak authorities’ permission to travel, Dubček spent a fortnight in Italy, which was full of visits to various places, official meetings, and a number of meetings with academics politicians, journalists, students, and also post-August emigrants from Czechoslovakia. Apart from the conferring of an honorary doctorate by Bologna University, the height of Dubček’s visit was an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, which met with an extraordinary response. The reactions to Dubček’s Italian visit were mostly positive, though the non-Communist dissidents back in Czechoslovakia tended to distance themselves from it and it was completely distorted by the Communist leadership of Czechoslovakia, which, flying in the face of the facts, called Dubček’s visit a fiasco.

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 3-4
• Pages: 670-685

Contributors

author

Luciano Antonetti

• Soudobé dějiny, redakce, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v.v.i., Vlašská 9, 118 40 Praha 1, Czech Republic