What if the USSR would not intervene militarily in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the so-called Prague Spring continued?
Historical context:
The Prague Spring began in 1967 at the December plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party which ended on January 5, 1968, when Alexander Dubcek became the first secretary to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Alexander Dubcek was a so-called reformist communist who began a process of democratization of Czechoslovakia. The aims of his reforms were to create a freer space for private business, the media, and some limited space for opposition. Nevertheless, he did not count on free elections that could jeopardize the leadership of the Communist Party.
The reforms of the Prague Spring were an attempt to liberate the regime and expedite the process of democratization. This intention was not met with understanding on the Soviet side which sent thousands of soldiers of the Warsaw Pact to start the occupation of the state. So, on the night of August 20 to August 21, 1968, the Army of the Warsaw Pact countries crossed the border to Czechoslovakia.
This supposed to remove the reformist communist from the leadership and allow the creation of a “workers’ peasant government”. After Czechoslovakia subsequently entered the era of normalization, the party leadership essentially re-established the political and economic values that prevailed in the late 1950s.
So what if the USSR did not intervene and let the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to adopt all the reforms and liberalize the state?
There is a certain likelihood that the Communist parties would be removed from leadership not only in Czechoslovakia, but also in Poland and Hungary. Both countries neighboring Czechoslovakia underwent some changes in the 1960s. In Poland, the workers held demonstrations in the big cities for expensive food, and Hungary was undergoing economic reform that resulted in the development of the private business sector. The Czechoslovak protests against Communist leadership were more of a cultural and intellectual basis. Their names, and often the lives of calls for reforms, were mainly hosted by artists, actors, writers and former professors who had links with foreign anti-communist “resistance.” Thanks to them, the entire Western world learned about the events of August 1968.
I believe that if the liberalization reforms in Czechoslovakia were not suppressed in such a violent way, the secret opposition movements would be relatively quickly combined with the Polish and Hungarian resistance and would then work together. The consequence would be undermining the legitimacy of the Soviet regime from within its satellites and the subsequent liberation of these three countries.
In parallel, however, there would be a paradox. In the Western countries, of course, there existed communist parties that were based on Marxism-Leninism and believed in Communist ideology. In many cases, for these parties, the violent suppression of the reforms in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 has become the last proof that communism (in the form in which it was established in Central and Eastern Europe) really is a totalitarian ideology. An indirect consequence and also a great paradox would be that while in Central and Eastern Europe communism would have weakened, its popularity would increase in Western Europe.
Veronika Spalkova.
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