Politické rozpravy intelektuálů za „pražského jara“

• Authors: Karel Hrubý

Title variants

EN

Political Discourses of Intellectuals during the ‘Prague Spring’

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

This article is an analysis of the development of the political thought of Czech and Slovak intellectuals involved in the attempt to reform the Socialist system during the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. The author focuses on the key concepts of the broad-based public discourse of the times (Socialism, democracy, freedom, power, pluralism, and opposition) and their relation to each other. He endeavours to defi ne the typical attitudes and to differentiate amongst the positions of the intellectuals and politicians on the one hand and the Communists and non-Communists on the other. (The essential contributions to the debate, in which not only intellectuals but also politicians and trade-union leaders took part, were published in Jaro 1968 , an anthology of articles from the contemporaneous daily press, which was published by Index, Cologne, in 1988. A rather different selection of discussion articles appears in Pražské jaro v médiích [Prague, 2004], compiled and edited by Jiří Hoppe of the Institute of Contemporary History.) After the lifting of censorship in early spring 1968, the debate, which had been brewing in previous years, was thrown wide open by Communist intellectuals (in particular the philosophers Karel Kosík, Robert Kalivoda, and Ivan Sviták, the novelists Ludvík Vaculík, Milan Kundera, and Jan Procházka, the Germanist and Chairman of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers Eduard Goldstücker, the poet and journalist Ladislav Novomeský, the journalist Antonín J. Liehm, the economist Ota Šik, and the historian Karel Kaplan). They criticized the Czechoslovak developments in the twenty years since the Communist takeover in 1948, which were marked by a number of systemic defects with grave consequences for the lives of individuals and society, and they demanded the far-reaching reform of politics, economics, and the arts. Many of them had, since the Communist takeover, been actively involved in the establishment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but their faith in Soviet-style Socialism was badly shaken in 1956. They sought a way out, which would return the humanist content to Marxist Socialism while maintaining the existing system of state Socialism in which the leading role was reserved to the Communist Party. And they saw it in the democratization of the system, in achieving freedom of speech, and greater participation in public affairs by non-Communist individuals and organizations. Though the reform politicians (Alexander Dubček, Josef Smrkovský, Zdeněk Mlynář, and others) largely shared these opinions, they tended to express themselves with reserve and felt a more pressing need to advocate the decisive role of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in leading society. By contrast, non-Communists (including the dramatist Václav Havel, the fi ction writer Alexandr Kliment, and the columnist Emanuel Mandler) expressed the critical attitude of a considerable part of the population towards the existing political system, and demanded an alternative that would do away with the privileges of the Communists and bring about a restoration of pluralist democracy, at least in the form it had once had in Czechoslovakia from mid-May 1945 to late February 1948. Whereas the Communist politicians and intellectuals remained within the bounds of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the opinions of the non- Communists were based on the idea of universal human rights.

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: 545-574

Contributors

author

Karel Hrubý

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