What revved up the 1968 events?

Miroslav Londák is a Slovak historian who studies recent Slovak history. He works at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Just as many people abroad still do not know that Dubček was Slovak or the circumstances under which he became leader of the so-called Prague Spring, there is also little known about the role of the Slovak intelligentsia and political elites in the period preceding the Prague Spring, which directly initiated it, as its foundations were being formed. Slovak historians have therefore called this period the “Pre-Spring” (1963–1967).

After the crash comes a willingness to listen

In Czech and Slovak society, starting practically from the early 1950s, a critical perspective began to mature as the communist regime, relatively quickly after taking power in February 1948, demonstrated its “iron fist” rule. As a result of fabricated political trials, censorship, restrictions on human rights, the terror policy imported from the Soviet Union against landowners during forced collectivisation, private owners/craftsmen, small business owners, churches, ideological opponents—the regime gradually sank into a deepening moral crisis and growing distrust, not only among the population but even among its own party members.

While in the 1950s, the regime’s leadership managed to silence this first crisis through authoritarian means (according to historian Karel Kaplan), it continued to ferment beneath the surface. It began to manifest more intensely when, at the start of the 1960s, Czechoslovakia unexpectedly and incomprehensibly, for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) leadership, found itself on the brink of a second, this time political, moral, and economic crisis, which had existential implications for the regime. The premature collapse of the Third Five-Year Plan (1961–1965), a centralised national economic programme, in its second year led the conservative communist leadership under Antonín Novotný to make a desperate move: he was forced to seek help from experts and intellectuals, whom the workers’ party had never trusted and had kept out of leadership positions.

Novotný, the leader of the KSČ, reached out to the economist Ota Šik (they knew each other personally from a concentration camp during the war), who had caught attention by publishing a critical article on the current economic problems. Soon after, in 1963, Šik became the director of the Economic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and was given free rein to form a team of progressive economists with the goal of preparing economic reforms. Šik’s team was not only tasked with stopping the economic recession, but was also given the challenging responsibility of creating a manual for future economic growth in the socialist economy.

Awakening in Slovakia

It soon became evident, that Slovakia’s traditional perception as a region somewhat removed from the real decision-making processes and events in the Prague centre within the shared state could, paradoxically, sometimes be an advantage. For instance, no Slovak economist was included in Šik’s team to ensure that the needs, conditions, possibilities, and potential consequences of the reform on Slovakia were considered.

In the spring of 1963, Alexander Dubček, a politician of a new generation unburdened by the grim past of the Communist Party, became the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia (ÚV KSS). Although he was, at that time, a typical communist official produced by the party apparatus, he preferred constructive dialogue in his political work over the convenient authoritarian tools of power.

Under Dubček’s leadership, the KSS was once again able to reconstruct Slovak political interests aimed at achieving equal status within the state compared to the Czech lands. This was not only due to Dubček’s position within the KSS, but also because of the intellectuals who articulated these interests. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: Dubček not only tolerated the criticism of the intellectuals within the limits of his power, but also established contacts with them and surrounded himself with them. Feeling their support, he gradually began to share their views.

Another significant factor in the political movement in Slovakia was Dubček’s prioritisation of rehabilitating the victims of the campaign against the so-called Slovak bourgeois nationalists (1951–1954) and its consequences. The physical elimination of part of the post-war generation of Slovak intellectuals and resistance fighters, who were executed or sentenced to long prison terms in staged trials, along with the unprecedented intimidation and instillation of a permanent sense of fear within the cultural community, traumatised Slovak society with a sense of injustice and also damaged Czech-Slovak relations.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Slovak society was confronted with the testimonies of people who returned from prisons after partial amnesties. Dubček himself, a member of the so-called Kolder Commission, which was focused on investigating these trials, recalled how the documents he encountered literally shook him. He stated that after the commission’s work was completed, he was “no longer the same person as before.”

Rehabilitation – a leitmotif of the 1960s

The rehabilitation of representatives of the Slovak cultural intelligentsia became one of the key themes in the collective efforts of the Slovak elite. The priority was to fully exonerate those who had been unjustly convicted and imprisoned in fabricated show trials, where they not only lost their freedom but also their civil rights, property, and, for many, their health and families, which often fell apart due to separation. Another political priority for Dubček was the “rehabilitation” of Slovak historical milestones, events, and personalities that had been trivialized or misrepresented. This agenda was positively received in Slovakia, along with the emergence of a high-ranking official of a new generation and type on the Slovak political scene.

A political accelerator of developments in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s was the growing criticism of the bureaucratic and totalitarian methods of governance by the Communist Party. In Slovakia, this included long-standing dissatisfaction with the country’s status within the shared state, which had been accumulating since the early days of post-war recovery—when the systematic curtailment of the powers and competencies of the Slovak national institutions began. This centralisation peaked in 1960 with the introduction of a new constitution, which further entrenched the formation of a centralised communist state. Although Slovaks were officially recognised as a distinct nation, the role of Slovak national institutions was minimised, and their influence on real political life or the management of economic processes was merely symbolic, in reality negligible. Communist Czechoslovakia was unequivocally built as a centralised state. Due to the orthodox stance of the KSČ leader, Antonín Novotný, the demand for an adjustment of Slovakia’s state-legal status within the structure of the shared state remained unacceptable.

Disconcerting disparity and criticism of centralism

Critical voices during the Pre-Spring period also emerged from Slovak economists. Their analyses, which appeared more frequently in the second half of 1966 and in the spring of 1967, focused on objectively mapping the development of the Slovak economy after February 1948, including the results of socialist industrialisation. They highlighted the negative consequences of Šik’s economic reforms on Slovakia. Dubček, who collaborated with the economists, was particularly irritated by the outcomes of long-term investments managed from the Prague-based state centre, which barely reflected or considered the different demographic processes occurring in Slovakia compared to the Czech lands. The results of these analyses are documented in the attached table.

Of course, although Dubček did not have access to such a table, he was well aware of the key data and trends. The figures clearly indicate that despite the implementation of a planned economy in Czechoslovakia and the support of socialist industrialisation in Slovakia from nationwide resources, after the 20 years that had passed since February 1948, the situation was such that, although Slovakia contributed over 70 percent to the nationwide increase in the working-age population, it only accounted for 25 percent of the increase in employment opportunities in the national economy. At the same time, Slovakia contributed less than 35 percent to the nationwide increase in industrial jobs, despite the fact that the Czech lands were already at a much higher level of industrialisation after World War II.

Moreover, during the summer of 1967, Antonín Novotný, the First Secretary of the KSČ, prepared a document for approval stating that the industrialisation of Slovakia was essentially complete and that efforts should be made to increase the transfer of the Slovak workforce to Czech factories and production plants. By 1980, this was expected to involve the relocation of 100,000 people to the Czech lands in search of work, bringing the total migration from Slovakia to the Czech Republic to half a million people.

Prologue to the year 1968

Based on these facts, Dubček delivered a significant critique of the situation at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (ÚV KSČ) in September 1967. This intensified the ongoing conflict between him and Novotný, foreshadowing Novotný’s eventual fall from the highest party position.

The economic developments that Slovakia underwent since February 1948, the campaign against the so-called Slovak nationalists, their subsequent rehabilitation, and the growing dissatisfaction with Slovakia’s position within the shared state were key factors that, along with many others, propelled Czechoslovakia into the reform-oriented year of 1968. Proposals for significantly increasing the powers of Slovak national institutions in economic management, the formation of a group of reform-minded communists within the highest echelons of the state who sought to end the Novotný era, Dubček’s speech at the end of October 1967, in which he pointed out the inappropriate concentration of power in Novotný’s hands as both the First Secretary of the ÚV KSČ and the President of the Republic, and the critical atmosphere in both Czech and Slovak society—all of these factors accelerated the developments leading to the events of 1968.

The piece was originally published in Slovak in August 2023.

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