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Political Change in Czechoslovakia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

A. H. Brown
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Extract

IN A RECENT ISSUE OF Government and Opposition AN ATTEMPT WAS made to answer at an abstract level the question, ‘Why Political Systems Change’. The aim of this article is more limited. It is a tentative preliminary attempt to explain why important changes took place in a particular political system – that of Czechoslovakia – in January 1968 and to examine the changes themselves and what remains of them in the wake of the Soviet intervention.

It must be emphasized straight away that the January changes in Czechoslovakia were not so sudden as their treatment by the western mass media perhaps implied. For something close to five years before the January reforms pluralistic developments could be discerned in Czechoslovakia. Limited though they were, they expressed themselves in the form of a less severely censored press, greater scope for interest group activity, a slight relaxation of detailed central party control over the National Assembly and local government, and in more debate within the ranks of the Communist Party.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1969 , pp. 169 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1969

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References

1 Apter, David, Government and Opposition, III, No. 4, Autumn 1968.Google Scholar

2 For further discussion of aspects of these developments see Edward Táborský: ‘Czechoslovakia: out of Stalinism?’ in Problems of Communism, May/June 1964; A. H. Brown: ‘Pluralistic Trends in Czechoslovakia’ in Soviet Studies, April 1966; Morton Schwartz: ‘Czechoslovakia: Towards One-Party Pluralism?’ in Problems of Communism, January/February 1967; and Gordon, H. Stilling: ‘Background to the Study of Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe’ in Government and Opposition, III, No. 3, Summer 1968.Google Scholar

3 The intention to federalize the party has not, in fact, been carried out. See p. 187, where I discuss what remains of the reforms.

4 This point links up with David Apter’s Information-Coercion Relationship (‘Why Political Systems Change’, op. cit.) Though this aspect of the Apter model strikes me as relevant and illuminating, I have very serious reservations about the explanatory value of his conceptual construct as a whole. Among other things, his blurring of the distinction between technical information and political opinion is unhelpful.

5 Interest group activity was accepted by the Action Programme of the Communist Party approved in early April. Earlier Zdeněk Mlynář, one of the authors of the Action Programme and a theorist who had long recognized the role which interest groups might play in the decision-making process, had urged (Rudé Právo, 13 February 1968) that ‘every institutional component of the political system must also be an independent political agent: the state (its agencies), the Party, and the many social organizations which represent various interests of people (the interests of producers and consumers, various professional groups, and of various types of labour, the interests of specific generations, cultural interests, etc.)’.

6 The Action Programme of the Czechoslovak Communist Party argued that it was necessary to divide the security forces into two independent bodies—one concerned with combatting external threats and the other with maintaining public order at home. The individual Czechoslovak citizen’s political opinions were to be of no interest to either body.

7 On Events in Chechoslovakia: Facts, documents, press reports and eye-witness accounts, Moscow, 1968, p. 23. A full English translation of the Two Thousand Words is included as Appendix 3, pp. 227–34, of the recent book by Weisskopf, Kurt, The Agony of Czechoslovakia ’ 38/’68, London, 1968.Google Scholar The same author provides a translation of some of the major points of the Action Programme.

8 The enthusiasm – so vividly displayed, for example, on May Day 1968 – was beautifully captured by a Czech documentary film, ‘In the Heart of Europe’, made to celebrate the fifty years of existence of the Czechoslovak state. The film was completed before the intervention and at the time of writing – December 1968 – is still being shown in Czechoslovakia.

9 Edward Táborsk, Communism in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1960, 1961, pp. 603.

10 Ibid., p. 606.

11 I should personally prefer to rephrase the statement as follows: ‘The greatest immediate stimulus to change is economic failure when expectations are high.’ It is a generalization which at least arguably applies to Czechoslovak developments in the 1960s, It would be easy to find examples of situations where it did not apply, for no single-sentence, unicausal explanation of political change could conceivably do justice to the complexity of social and political reality.

12 Terekhov, V. F. and Shastnitko, V. M. (eds.); Ekonomicheskiye reformy v sotsialisticheskikb stranakh, Prague, 1967.Google Scholar

13 Alois Indra probably fell into this category. An abler man than Novotn, he had little respect for the latter’s limited ability. On the other hand, as Indra’s subsequent record was to indicate, his opposition to Novotn was not based on the extent to which Novotn was compromised by his past.

14 Some armchair criticism of Dubček on the grounds that he allowed the mass media to demand too much too soon is beside the point. Though there are degrees of freedom, a basic test of a free press is whether or not political rulers can prevent it from publishing something they do not like. The liberalizing movement in Czechoslovakia acquired its own momentum. Dubcek could only have imposed his more cautious judgement on the most outspoken journals by resorting to precisely those methods from which the new party leadership was trying to escape.

15 Husák only became First Secretary of the Slovak Party after the invasion. Dubček’s successor as head of the Slovak party organization in January was Vasil Bilák, an even more conservative communist than Husák. Husák set enormous store by federalization. Indeed, he annoyed many Slovaks by his insistent references to Slovak rights in the first months after the Soviet intervention, a time when Slovaks in general felt more united with the Czechs than ever before.

16 This point becomes a substantive one for those Czechoslovaks who believe that too much has been conceded by their leaders under Soviet pressure in the post-August meetings. Some Czechs claim that there is an unfortunate significance in the fact that those who have had to defend the post-January gains in successive confrontations with the Soviet leaders were not those who initiated the radical reforms. They would have preferred as negotiators Mlynář, Šik or Smrkovsk to Černík and Husák.

17 What might have happened in the very long run is anyone’s guess. But does the Soviet Union, any more than other states, base its foreign and defence policies upon the very long run?.

18 The invasion itself did great damage to the moral authority and influence of the Soviet Union within the world communist movement. But it would appear that the interests of this movement come much lower on the list of Soviet priorities than concern with developments in the European communist states.

19 It is clear that one of the minimum Soviet objectives was the replacement of Alexander Dubček as First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. (The Moscow choice for his post was Alois Indra.) The deep hostility of the Soviet leaders to Dubček was confirmed by Pravda’s reference to him on 22 August as the leader of a minority group within the Praesidium who adopted a ‘frankly right-wing opportunist position’.

20 Indra was, however, confirmed in his post as Secretary of the Central Committee and Bilák is a member both of the Praesidium and of the Secretariat. The members of the Executive Committee of the Praesidium are Dubček, Prime Minister Černík, President Svoboda, G. Husák, E. Erban, S. Sadovsk, J. Smrkovsk and L. Štrougal.

21 ‘Comparative Political Culture’ is the title of an essay by Sidney Verba which forms the last chapter (pp. 512–60) of Pye and Verba, Political Culture and Political Development, 1965. The concept of political culture had earlier been developed by Gabriel Almond and Samuel Beer, but Verba’s lucid and judicious essay is the best treatment of the theory I have seen. It would not be totally unfair to say that ‘political culture’ is but a new name for the kind of relevant information which political scientists have traditionally studied under some such heading as ‘historical background’. But the recent elaboration of the concept has been of value in clarifying the relationship between history and politics and for its stress upon the influence of society upon the way political institutions function. It has been made ‘operational’ by the collection of quantitative data and it is at this point that any attempt to apply the concept to communist states runs into difficulties. It is unlikely that western political scientists are going to be allowed to carry out surveys in East Europe on the scale of those employed by Almond and Verba for The Civic Culture (1963.) There is perhaps, however, future significance in the fact that The Chic Culture is among the works of western political science which have been translated in very limited editions in Czechoslovakia (for distribution only to professional students of politics). Indeed, at least one Czech political scientist was still tentatively hoping in the autumn of 1968 that it might be possible to carry out a comparative study along the lines of The Civic Culture in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia and East Germany. Already some fairly precise data on political attitudes in Czechoslovakia are available as a result of the work of the Czechoslovak Institute for the Investigation of Public Opinion which reopened in 1966.

22 Apter, in his most recent article (op. cit.), takes the view that what these states have in common as ‘socialist industrial countries’ is more important than the differences. But even if they were at precisely the same stage of economic development (which they are not), my scepticism about the value of such a political indicator would remain.

23 Hochman, Jiří, ‘Jaká východiska’ in Reportér, No. 38, 1968.Google Scholar

24 Two useful brief accounts of the nature of Czechoslovak political experience prior to the communist period are to be found in Miloslav Rechcigl, Jr.: The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture, (the essay by Václáv Beneš, ‘Background of Czechoslovak Democracy’, pp. 267–76) and Paul E. Zinner: Communist Strategy and Tactics in Czechoslovakia, 1918–48, 1963 (Chapter I, ‘The Political Character of Czechoslovakia’, pp. 5–24).

25 In Rechcigl: The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture, op. cit., p. 269.