Reforms of the different spheres of societal life were prepared in Czechoslovakia with considerable thoroughness. This is by no means only true of 1968, but of the first half of the 1960s as well, even though this is not always fully appreciated.9 Sizable groups of cadres advocated reform at different levels of the party apparatus, in the state administration, and in the economic and scientific communities. With a bit of simplification, one might say that it was these people who had, after 1945 and when they were still young, supported the Communist seizure of power and the construction of the Communist system out of conviction, sometimes even in a spirit of fanaticism. In the 1950s, a number of different circumstances subsequently led many of these people to view critically the reality that had developed after 1948; they noticed that it had little in common with the idealistic notions they had initially harbored. Any criticism within the party was suppressed until 1956 and did not resurface until the beginning of the 1960s. In the meantime, many of these critical thinkers had reached relatively important positions. The reasons for their disenchantment were to be found in a number of different areas: the weak economy, cases of blatant disregard for the law, the suppression of artistic freedom, and so forth. In addition to these, the nagging sense that Czechoslovakia was hopelessly trailing the countries to the west of its borders, countries with which Czechoslovakia had shared the same or a similar standard of living immediately after 1945, existed. The sense that the country was falling behind concerned not only the economy, but also technology, culture, and civilization in general. When the strict isolation in which the country had found itself in the 1950s was beginning to yield, the gap became very apparent. A solution, perhaps the proverbial five-to-twelve doomsday scenario, to give the country a break appeared to lie in the preparation and implementation of fundamental reforms. These reforms were meticulously planned. On the basis of close cooperation between institutions of the party, the state and academic teams were put together to orchestrate reforms in different spheres: one team, with Ota Šik at its head, was to deal with the economy, Zdeněk Mlynář headed another that was supposed to fix the political system, and Radovan Richta and his team were to devote themselves to the environment. The teams received relatively generous support in terms of money and the possibility of traveling abroad for study purposes. This proved somewhat counterproductive: the insights these people gained abroad served mainly to strengthen their conviction that far-reaching changes were necessary.
The reform program was underpinned not only by a general awareness that Czechoslovakia had significantly fallen behind the West and that the system as such was dysfunctional, but also by an ideological basis. The ratification of the new constitution in 1960 entailed the assessment that the process of the construction of socialism had been successfully concluded in Czechoslovakia and that the time had now come—in accordance with the classics of Marxism-Leninism—to discuss the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to a state for the entire population and the need and/or the possibility of a reduction of state control in view of the new situation. The reform program was hammered out and ratified under the aegis of Antonín Novotný. Economic reform, which was formulated down to the last detail and which was to combine state ownership and central planning with a dose of market economy principles, was begun as early as 1965. The program aiming at a reform of the political system was much more cautious in its scope and did not allow for the emergence of a certain limited political pluralism for at least another decade.
The general acceptance of the inevitability of reforms was one thing; quite another was their consistent implementation, which was viewed by the KSČ leadership and by important segments of the party and state apparatus with apprehension and distaste. Evidence for this can be found in such examples as the attempted economic reform and the reform of the domestic secret service. As regards the reform of the economy it was, paradoxically enough, its initial successes—an increase in the profits of several businesses and the ensuing wage rises—that evoked in Novotný a nightmare that Communist functionaries knew only too welclass="underline" the fear that demand and supply might be thrown out of sync in that the supply of goods available in the market might prove inadequate in relation to the workers’ increasing spending power. Novotný therefore began to backpedal, to slow the pace of the reform, delay its implementation, and generally make sure it was no more than a half-hearted attempt. In the case of the transformation of the domestic secret service from an organ that was supposed to form the vanguard in the exacerbating class struggle into one that was to protect the state against external enemies—which was the totality of Minister of the Interior Lubomír Štrougal’s blueprint for reform—the decisive opposition came from below. The majority of the service’s staff never accepted this transformation, sabotaged it as best they could, and did everything to reverse it.
In 1967, the demarcation line that separated the inimical camps within the KSČ leadership became apparent: those who supported a continuation and intensification of the reforms and those under Novotný’s aegis who, motivated by fear of further progress, opted for indecisive and incomplete solutions. However, at the crucial moment toward the end of the year there were a number of additional fault lines which caused these forces within the Central Committee to split into opposing factions. There were those who joined the anti-Novotný camp for various personal reasons, and the Slovak question was another key factor. Novotný’s lack of sensitivity in handling Slovak matters and Slovakia’s declared wish to be granted a certain maneuvering space at the expense of strict central control resulted in a Slovak front practically unified against Novotný. By another paradoxical twist, one of the protagonists in the activities that led to Novotný’s dismissal, Vasil Bil’ak, was to assume a leading role a few months later in a plot that staged a coup in the KSČ with Moscow’s help and engaged in preparations for the military invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Some of the measures adopted by the new party leadership after January 1968 were merely designed to reduce further the standing of Novotný and his supporters and, therefore, lacked the logic of a consistent reform program. The key decision at the end of February 1968 to abolish censorship must be seen in that context. This decision was taken in the illusory conviction that the party’s control of the media was guaranteed by the KSČ members being among the editors and that society could be counted on in its entirety to support the reform program and nothing else. This quickly proved a misjudgment. The media totally emancipated themselves from any control within weeks and assumed the role of one of the most important political actors. The nascent civil society and the critical public opinion generated demands that went much further than the planned reforms, which, moreover, had at least in part been conceived in an academic environment and were still far from having assumed the form of a concise political program.
Incidentally, the reformist movement within the KSČ did not achieve by any means a stable or fixed identity during the eight months of the Prague Spring, the time between Alexander Dubček’s acceptance of the party leadership and the intervention in August. It was itself in a state of flux; it accommodated a variety of different viewpoints, nuances, priorities, and a whole range of different assessments as to the envisaged scope of the reforms. It was, therefore, not highly developed in terms of its program nor even, for a long time, in terms of its membership. The line of demarcation between reformers and orthodox Communists that eventually split the KSČ leadership emerged slowly and by degrees. It did not imply radically different programmatic viewpoints; what set the camps apart was, rather, a difference in the way they represented their viewpoints in public and the attitudes they displayed toward the Warsaw Pact “allies.” For the reader of the minutes of the speeches delivered at the sessions of the KSČ’s governing bodies in April or May 1968, it is virtually impossible to tell which of the speakers would end up after the suppression of the Prague Spring with the tag “revisionist” and “opportunist” and which would be counted among the “healthy forces.” Utterances that are characteristic for us of the way the Kremlin viewed the situation in Czechoslovakia were voiced in the spring of 1968 not only by those members of the KSČ leadership who in the end threw in their lot with the “allies” of the Warsaw Pact and took part in preparing the intervention, but also (and on a fairly regular basis, too) by the protagonists of the reform movement. Dubček himself as well as the head of the government Oldřich Černík, the president of the National Assembly Josef Smrkovský, Central Committee Secretary Zdeněk Mlynář, and others routinely referred to the imminence of the counterrevolution, to the need to leave the people’s militias (the KSČ’s armed units) intact because it might become necessary to deploy them, to tanks and the use of force as extreme but, perhaps, inevitable possibilities. They, too, voiced regular complaints about the party’s increasing loss of control of the media and peremptorily demanded a change of this intolerable situation. They did mention, it is true, other things as well, such as the positive transformation program for which the party had to muster and retain public support. (The reasons given for this included the need not to concede terrain to “right-wing antisocialist forces.”)10 Above all, they used a somewhat different diction when their words were designed for public consumption. Yet it reflects to their credit that they were capable of heeding the mood and the expectations of the public, of respecting them and taking them into account. This was not necessarily due to their unprincipled, opportunist “Janus-headed politics” (epithets used later by the “normalized” KSČ leadership and the “normalized” media to characterize their approach), but is regarded as evidence of the increasing regeneration of society’s potential in the direction of an open society and a normal interaction between the public and the political elites. A situation characterized by almost complete freedom of speech and the restoration of public opinion was simply too propitious to be ignored. Dubček’s own position was somewhere in the middle. He tried to defuse extremist positions, he tacked and veered, and his increasing popularity was due primarily to his likable appearance, which did indeed set him apart from leading Communist functionaries both before and after him.