Czechoslovak Generational Experience of 1968: The Intellectual History Perspective

Reform Communists and Their 1968 Expectations

Is it possible to call Czechoslovak Reform Communism a generational project? I believe it is, and in the following text I will bring to light the specific generational aspects of the political thought of 1960s Reform Communism in Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovak Reform Communism as an intellectual-political project was carried out primarily by the generation of communists who were experiencing their first intellectual and political reformulation since the late 1930s. This was a generation severely affected by the economic crisis in 1930s and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and often by personal or family experiences of Nazi repression and concentration camps. ² Such experiences instilled in the young post-war generation a strong mistrust of liberal-democratic social organization, which had seemed unable to ensure protection against the drastic consequences of the 1930s economic crisis and had failed to prevent the rise of Nazism. Furthermore, no matter how Western democratic states contributed to the defeat of Nazism and the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945, the trauma of the “Munich betrayal” and distrust towards the “West” remained deeply ingrained in many of this generation.

As such, a substantial portion of young people made an active political commitment to communist politics after 1945. The partial liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army was a crucial factor in this development. Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague—a scene that became a symbol of communist oppression after 1968—for a long time represented a positive memory for a significant part of post-war Czechoslovak society, and the Soviet Union symbolized a guarantor of the struggle against fascism in Central Europe.

The so-called “sixty-eighters,” or those members of the Communist Party who enabled the liberalization of the 1960s, did not come from the older pre-war generation of communists. They were mostly young, politically inexperienced proponents of building Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. They represented the political generation of people who completed their studies in the mid-fifties and established themselves among young party cadres across different political, scientific, or cultural institutions. They were usually motivated by their post-war uncritical pro-Soviet optimism and actively participated in establishing both new communist institutions and state repression; at the same time, a few years later, during their studies and early careers, they entered into a period of criticism of the cult of personality, which triggered the consequent de-Stalinization and the gradual reformulation of their previous opinions. One of the most prominent Reform-Communist politicians, the legal theorist Zdeněk Mlynář, remembers:

The majority of young communists from Czechoslovakia who studied at Soviet universities in the first half of the 1950s, returned home with shaken ideological beliefs. We had gone to Moscow with the hope that we would catch sight of our own future. We then failed to realize that we did in fact see it—but our communist faith did not yet want to submit to our own experience. This faith, however, was unsettled for the vast majority of us in one of its basic principles: we no longer believed that the USSR represented the realization of our ideals, that it was a binding model without reservations. The Party leadership’s strategic intention behind sending young party members to study in the Soviet Union largely failed. ³

The young Communists representing these “middle party cadres” began, in the mid-fifties, to slowly abandon Marxist-Leninist schemes in the name of Marxist revisionism, and thereby basically encouraged the beginnings of internal party opposition to the Stalinist political establishment. Thus began an important phase of the path to Reform Communism. From the late 1950s, the Marxist political dictionary began to change. This change was rooted in political and intellectual criticism that developed from the traumatic realization of many (young) Communist intellectuals that negative social phenomena such as alienation, economic crisis, or the existence of social inequalities, can be observed not only in capitalist societies but also in societies of “developed socialism” (as Czechoslovakia was at that time) where private ownership had been formally canceled. ⁴ This intellectual and political shift should have become the basis for removing “deformations” from the system and for creating the social and political conditions that would give way to the transition to the communist phase of society.

Here I find eloquent what the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who was part of this post-war political generation, wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: They were a generation that eventually rebelled “against its own youth.” ⁵ It is important to note, however, that the generation of Reform Communists never aimed for a pluralistic society in the liberal sense, that is, of competition amongst various completely independent political views. The post-war intellectual platform of socialism (both Marxist and non-Marxist) was deeply anchored in the socialist and anti-fascist consensus, which excluded right-wing as well as “independent” political entities from the realm of political decision making. ⁶

The world-famous 1968 phrase “socialism with a human face” is often associated with the concepts of liberalization and democratization. However, if we examine the concrete political and theoretical debate behind this seemingly progressive notion, it quickly becomes obvious that “Dubček’s” democratic socialism never sought to question the basic principles of Lenin’s model of governance and the leading role of the Communist Party. In this sense, the spontaneous political manifestations of the Prague Spring—that is, the independent civic activities including those of the younger generation of intellectuals and students—were, in fact, aimed directly against the original idea of “socialism with a human face,” since they were creating a political grouping independent of any centralized decision making. Reform-Communist plurality excluded spontaneous “bottom–up” participation, which could not be controlled by the communist party. This conflict reached its apex in 1968 and, from our intellectual-historical perspective, it crystallized in the discussion over the nature of democracy and opposition. While the older generation of Reform Communists continued to insist that the framework of communist institutions and leadership of the Communist Party was indisputable, “new voices” made themselves heard: younger intellectuals, for whom a mere “revision” of the system through gradual reforms no longer constituted the basis for the fulfillment of democratic principles. These “new voices” did not appear out of the blue; many of them arose from non-Marxist intellectual circles that were fundamentally suppressed and excluded from public and official discourse after 1948, yet never ceased to exist.

To elucidate this conflict, I will first show how the Reform Communists understood the joint issues of political pluralism and opposition in 1968. In this respect, the conclusions of four interdisciplinary social-scientific teams working at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences are crucial. ⁷ These teams were established to solve the social situation identified as a “crisis.” For the formulation of a new political theory of Reform Communism, the most important was the interdisciplinary team “Development of the Political System in Socialist Society,” which was founded in 1966 under the leadership of the aforementioned Zdeněk Mlynář. The Mlynář team, composed of top communist legal and political theorists of the time, dealt with questions of political thought—questions of democracy and the wider political system in society. The work produced by this group of authors became constitutive of the political theory of Czechoslovak Reform Communism and also led to the most important political document of 1968: The Action Program. The theorists of the interdisciplinary Development of the Political System in Socialist Society team believed that the new theory of politics must solve the basic problems of the relationship of politics and political management “to the internal dynamics of socialist society, specifically in regard to the status of the individual in the political organization of the democratic system of a socialist type of industrial society.” ⁸ Moreover, the team was entrusted with developing the main features of the so-called optimal model of political organization in the CSSR. Mlynář considered an “optimal model” to be a political system that would be better suited to the “historical mission of the working class.” ⁹

The Reform Communist intellectuals’ conception of politics persisted in the belief that it was necessary to find a suitable path from the socialist stage to the communist stage and that “the historical mission of the working class, its most important interest, is communism.” ¹⁰ While the scientific work of Mlynář’s team concentrated on the numerous partial problems of the socialist political system, such as the status of major social groups in the political system, the position of the individual in the political system, the problems of formal democracy, the function of the rule of law in political governance or the issue of state and public administration, the questions that most dominated the public debate pertained to pluralism in the political system, the existence of opposition and the leading role of the Communist Party in society. These themes became the center of fundamental societal debates, in which culminated the generational conflict between the older Reform-Communist intellectuals and the younger intellectuals with nascent careers. For students and younger intellectuals, 1968 generally represented their first experience with political freedom. For the new political generation, the understanding of political pluralism as proclaimed by the new Reform Communist program was perhaps more liberal than before but still very limited, and it certainly did not represent a guarantee sufficient to realize democratic values in society.

The Reform Communists understood the optimal model of opposition to be a two-party (socialist and communist) system which, however, they viewed as a project that would not be feasible “even in the near future.” In this respect, despite the theoretical recognition of the future possibility of limited political pluralism, Mlynář’s team refused such a model in 1968, owing to their belief that the Czechoslovak Communist Party at that time was the only political subject that could be the bearer of social-historical change and realize the transition from the stage of late-industrial socialism to the stage of scientific-technical communism. In Reform-Communist thinking, the ideation of opposition was never that of an “independent opposition,” but rather a sort of “party corrective.” ¹¹ In March 1968, Mlynář expressed his opinion regarding the widely discussed issue of the National Front:

The [National Front is] a political platform that does not divide the political parties into the government and the opposition in the sense that, opposing the state program there is an opposition seeking power in the state. Instead, it raises the problem of the disagreement over the state program, i.e. the problem of the possible opposition of the opinion of one component against another, despite the common ground, the common agreement, the common principles of the socialist concept. We already dismissed any opposition to this concept of the National Front as a whole in 1945. ¹²

Significantly negative attitudes towards non-communist opposition were not only the theoretical postulate of Reform Communism, but they also manifested themselves in party tactics used to block the possibility of restoring the Social Democratic Party in 1968. Reform Communism understood the resumption of social democracy not as a manifestation of the democratization of society and the renewal of pluralism, but as a failure in the process of joining social democracy with the Communist Party (CPC), which was a prerequisite for the functioning of communist society.

In practice, the limits of the Reform-Communist concept of political pluralism were manifested most clearly during the establishment of the Club of Committed Non-Party Members (KAN) and other new political subjects during the spring of 1968. Theoretical guidelines about the need for caution in forming opposition groups were formulated at the Central Committee Party meeting on May 7 and 8, 1968. This meeting is described in detail in Jiří Hoppe’s book Opposition 68. Reflecting the attitude of Reform-Communist political theory, the chairman of the Czechoslovak National Assembly, Josef Smrkovský, inaugurated the meeting with the following words:

Things are different than we wanted. We want to democratize our social life, to democratize the management of society, and, in this, we have great sympathy from the masses, which is indisputable, it is a fact. . . . But we are talking and the others are forming not around the Action Program, but instead countering our efforts; while we want to democratize our lives, others are already forming a frontal attack on our positions. ¹³

Zdeněk Mlynář, at the time considered one of the most favored party political theorists, put forth the most thorough analysis of the political activities of the newly forming “civil society.” Mlynář believed that the main aim should be

to prevent the opposition, which seeks to remove the Communist Party from power, from any chance of uniting under the motto of “socialism without the Communist Party. . . . Thus, I believe it is of utmost importance today for the Party and its leadership to not to take any action that would enable the opposition. ¹⁴

It was precisely the impossibility of political pluralism outside the sphere of “socialist consensus” that became a relatively clear political boundary, which the Reform Communist generation never doubted. They understood the post-war communist society to be based on a broad “socialist consensus,” representative of a “higher developmental stage” that overcame “bourgeois free competition of party interests,” and should act as a base for any political deliberation. This distinctive feature of Reform Communism started to become a public issue, especially in May 1968 when censorship laws were withdrawn and subsequently critical views were expressed in the press about the CPC’s progress and the limits of the Action Program. Against such critiques, the Reform Communists’ defense mechanism was enacted through a series of warnings against “anti-socialist and anti-communist forces” in society that were disrupting the otherwise “unified reform process.” For example, communist economist Zdislav Šulc wrote on 14 May 1968 in Rudé právo about the dangers of anti-socialist elements and the need for the national unity of all “progressive forces in Czechoslovakia.” ¹⁵ In his presentation of the ideological functioning of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, its chairman Jan Kozel described the situation in Czechoslovakia as a “politico-ideological boiling pot.” Although Kozel appealed to both communists and non-communists to participate in political development together, he also pointed to the fundamental diversity and contradiction of the ideas that were appearing in the public sphere, stressing that it was impossible to turn a blind eye to the emergence of anti-communist “glorification of bourgeois democracy.” ¹⁶ Josef Smrkovský, one of the most popular politicians of the Prague Spring, spoke out several days later in similar warning against the “uncritical glorification of pre-Munich times.”

In this respect, the politics of “socialism with a human face” was not inclusive, it maintained the necessity of policy-making by Leninist principles of governance, in an “old-leftist” belief that politics can be carried out only through state and party institutions, and thus rejected the “bourgeois” idea of civil society as a party- and state-independent sphere, which represented an autonomous political subject. The generation of Czechoslovak Reform Communists always presented these principles in contrast to the “less progressive” Western liberal democracy. This negative explanatory framework was further supported by the collective memory of the economic crisis of the 1930s and, above all, of the “Munich betrayal” and its profound implications. “Socialism with a human face” was supposed to be the fulfillment of the post-war promise of building Marxist communism in practice, and a large number of young people who became enthusiastic about post-war communism experienced the heyday of their political careers in 1968. The fact that the Prague Spring was followed enthusiastically by a large part of the world’s media bolstered the confidence of the reformist communists in Dubček’s circle, and strengthened their belief that they were the ones who represented the unified “national will”; they continued to promulgate this belief long after the August military invasion. Although the support for Dubček appeared consensual from the outside, the intellectual-political discussion of that time shows that an intense conflict persisted in Czechoslovak society during the spring of 1968.

One of the consequences of the late 1960s liberalization of Czechoslovak society was a considerable increase in the number of public opinion polls and sociological surveys, specifically pertaining to the structure of society. ¹⁷ Thanks to this, we have access to a relatively comprehensive overview of sources that reveal specific views of the Czechoslovak society during 1968 and which significantly undermine the fallacy of   ”national unity” built around the Reformist-Communist motto of “socialism with a human face.” Research by the Institute of Sociology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, conducted under the guidance of sociologist Pavel Machonin, demonstrates that although people’s trust in the communist party was “greater than ever before,” the overwhelming part of society did not perceive the leading role of the Communist Party as a requirement for building socialist democracy (Figure 1). Moreover, if we look at the political and intellectual manifestations of students and younger intellectuals and artists, it is evident that they did not necessarily see Marxism and its political principles as the only theoretical framework that allowed for discussing and developing democracy. This new political generation went far beyond questioning “Stalinist deformations” of ruling communism; in many cases, it formulated clearly liberal-democratic demands.

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Figure 1.

The results of the survey about the leading role of the Czechoslovak communist party (May 1968).

The Student Generation

The usual labelling of the 1968 phenomenon as a “student movement,” “youth rebellion,” or “generational revolt” does not correspond to the reality of events in Czechoslovakia. Students represented an important social group here but did not define the political atmosphere as in Germany, France, or the USA, but also in Poland and Yugoslavia. ¹⁸ In his new book Prague Spring: A Breakthrough in the New World, German historian Martin Schulze Wessel points to the fact that the Prague Spring “did not represent a generational revolt because the development in Czechoslovakia, unlike Western Europe or the USA, was initiated by party and state leadership.” ¹⁹ He argues that the reform that came “from above” transformed society more significantly than Reform-Communist politics had predicted. “It was barely indicative of a generational conflict,” writes Wessel. I agree with Wessel to an extent: the generational quality of the revolt was not as striking in Czechoslovakia as it was in the West, where the generational dichotomy advanced to the forefront of the political conflict. Nevertheless, I contend that the younger generation, whose political attitudes were formed mainly in the latter half of the 1960s, held quite distinct ideas of key political concepts such as freedom, democracy, or pluralism to those of the previous generation, educated in the early 1950s. Thus, even in the midst of the seemingly “homogeneous” Prague Spring, there was evidently an ideological generational conflict resulting from the formation of a new political generation that rejected the limited notions of pluralism and democracy of the Reform Communists.

While the post-war generation obtained its foreign educational and working experience mainly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, a growing number of the people from younger generations had the opportunity to travel to Western Europe and the USA and confront their views with the attitudes of their Western colleagues. What is more, during the first half of the 1960s, publishing policy was already being liberalized in Czechoslovakia. Cultural journals started to publish texts by western unorthodox Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Fischer, or Herbert Marcuse, but also by intellectuals who combined Marxist analyses with different critical approaches such as existentialism, psychoanalysis, or phenomenology (and since the beginning of the 1960s, non-Marxist attitudes were also openly discussed on the margins of the political and cultural space). Some of them also personally visited Czechoslovakia, including the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski and the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Academic libraries had made the texts of unorthodox Marxist thinkers accessible since the mid-1950s. Czech philosophers also contributed significantly to this new “boom” of “open Marxism”: for example, most prominently, Karel Kosík’s famous Dialectics of Concrete, or the lesser known Robert Kalivoda’s Modern Spiritual Reality and Marxism. Both authors rejected Marxism-Leninism and sought for a way to interpret reality by combining Marxist philosophical approaches with non-Marxist ones, such as existentialism, phenomenology, or psychoanalysis. The incorporation of non-Marxist scientific approaches into the hitherto rigid Marxist methodology was taking place across all scientific disciplines and produced many intellectually extraordinary works, such as Pavel Machonin’s sociological book Czechoslovak Society: Sociological Analysis of Social Stratification (1969) or Radovan Richta’s Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution (1966).

Despite this “explosion” of new Marxist approaches in Czechoslovak research in the second half of the sixties, the younger generation, including students, did not strongly identify with the new “open Marxism” and its political demands. Only a minority within the Czechoslovak student movement advocated the radical ideas of the western New Left. In the book Mocným Navzdory, Jaroslav Pažout describes the international seminar “Marxism and existentialism” held in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1966, which was attended by a group of Czechoslovak students from Charles University (including Václav Bělohradský, Zdeněk Pinc, and Jiřina Šiklová). According to Zdeněk Pinc, it was interesting that those presenting themselves as Marxists were predominantly German students, while the Czechoslovak students “were closer to existentialism.” Pinc stated that he and his fellow students “did not show an interest in Marcuse’s work, and rather saved their money for more classic philosophical writings, such as Husserl.” ²⁰

The lukewarm interest of Czechoslovak students in Marxism as a suitable tool for articulating social criticism became clear throughout 1968, particularly in their encounters with visiting young Western European political activists. The radicalism of the Western New Left did not much appeal to the Czechoslovak student generation. In mid-April 1968, French Trotskyist Hubert Krivine arrived in Prague to discuss current social problems with young Czechs. However, the visit did not quite meet either side’s expectations. Krivine had had higher hopes of the famous Czechoslovak “experiment” of “socialism with a human face.” He expressed his disappointment and resentment over the “disorientation of Czech students,” by which he meant, for example, their unwillingness to engage more in protests against the war in Vietnam. In this regard, according to Krivine, Czechoslovak students advocated “the same opinion as the French fascists.” ²¹

A similar difference of opinion was observable when Rudi Dutschke visited Prague in April 1968. Dutschke spoke very critically about capitalist societies and devoted much of his lecture to his vision of a future society: the direct democracy of producers (Produzentendemokratie). Dutschke argued that the current western oligarchical structure of power manipulators did not differ from the Stalinist type of socialism; in both cases, a vast gap was formed between the ruling elite and the electoral base. ²² Nevertheless, Dutschke’s call for the creation of a direct democracy was not met with an overly positive response. In April 1968, the young historian Milan Hauner remarked, in the magazine Student, that Dutschke had

a critical attitude to the current rational capitalist society, but at the same time he was full of illusions about its future organization: the utopia of direct democracy. For our students, the approach was almost fully the opposite. . . . In their utopian combination, they seek to merge the productive capacity of the American with the ascetic morality of the Chinese. ²³

It is difficult to reconstruct an “intellectual profile” of students who did not reproduce the “typical sources” of political thought, yet it is obvious that Czechoslovak students never identified themselves with Marxism as much as their Western counterparts at the time. From the analyses of various student journals (Elixir, Buchar, Integral, Impuls), we can see that Czechoslovak students lacked a keen interest in the theoretical issues of Marxism and socialism, unlike their Western colleagues. Instead, their political critique of the system was formulated around very concrete topics. Above all, students complained about the impossibility of traveling to Western universities and they instigated a critical discussion about the Stalinist past of individual academic faculties, questioning the qualifications of some of the high functionaries and criticizing the “cadre conditions” for the admission or exclusion of individual students. The most integral political controversy of the student movement pertained to the official Czechoslovak Union of Youth (CUY). Students criticized the monopoly of this centralized organization that did not allow them full academic freedom of speech and represented an inadequate vehicle for the interests of such a diverse group of students. These critiques were part of an attempt to decentralize student organizations, so that individual organizations could act independently and make decisions only within the context of their own universities. In practice, these debates resulted in the disintegration of CUY at individual faculties in 1968 and its subsequent transformation into numerous independent groups and an independent Academic Council of Students (ARS). Representatives of ARS believed that no voluntary organization, not even the CUY, had the right to speak on behalf of all students. ²⁴ For example, at the Faculty of Arts in Prague, ARS worked very freely, had no organizational statutes, and did not demand, or even expect, a unity of opinion or a common ideology. ²⁵ They organized open debates where students discussed current social problems, often even criticizing Czechoslovak foreign policy—for example, in regards to Western Germany, Israel, or Nigeria. The student demands had much in common with non-communist demands for the creation of an extra-parliamentary opposition that would not be under the control of the Communist party or any state institution. The key political concepts through which they developed their social critiques were not Marxism or socialism but freedom and justice.

Young Intellectuals Entering the Public Debate

From the perspective of the history of political thought, it is crucial also to study the generation of young intellectuals—that is, not the young student generation, but rather those who were just entering or were in the early stages of their careers at various academic and public institutions—that is, those of roughly twenty-five to thirty-five years of age. The leading intellectuals of this generation did not see a future in building communism, but had instead formulated positions that could be described as liberal-democratic, which, in principle, conflicted with the Reform-Communist concept of democracy and political pluralism. The “socialist consensus,” proclaimed by the party apparatus, was revealed as truly fragile by the abolition of censorship in the spring of 1968. Within a few months, opinions hotly critical of the party’s very limited concept of “opposition” emerged in the press. Among the young non-communist intellectuals of the time, the most notable were those associated with Tvář magazine, especially Václav Havel, Emanuel Mandler, Bohumil Doležal, Ladislav Hejdánek, and Jiří Gruša (all of them were later active in Charter 77). Tvář declared its content as “non-ideological poetry and independent literature.” The magazine published prominent Czech non-communist authors and poets, who otherwise received marginal attention. From 1965 onwards, the mainstay of the magazine consisted of critical and specialized essays. Translations of texts by non-Marxist authors, such as Martin Heidegger, José Ortega and Gasset, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, amongst others, certainly garnered the greatest attention. In 1968, Tvář also closely cooperated with the critical economists Václav Klaus and Josef Kreuter. The younger authors of Tvář identified with a “pluralistic, non-ideological view of artistic, political and social phenomena.” Such an approach led to enduring conflicts not only with the government press control (censorship) and the Communist Party but also with the pro-reform Czechoslovak Union of Writers. These disputes led to the suspension of Tvář’s publication rights in 1965. After a short period of resumed publication in 1968, the final ban on its activity came in 1969, at the beginning of normalization.

I will demonstrate this type of critique through three examples (from the political, cultural, and economic perspectives) to show the non-communist and non-Marxist critique that came from the younger intellectual circles. Young liberal-minded intellectuals sought changes by calling for the establishment of traditional institutions of Western liberal democracy, in particular a pluralist parliament based on a system of contention between various political subjects, and the restoration of traditional political—or in Marxists terms, “bourgeois”—freedoms. In the liberal-democratic conception of change, the leading role of the Communist Party was fundamentally questioned; it was seen as a principle incompatible with the essential values   of a free and politically pluralistic society. In this respect, the iconic article written by the young playwright Václav Havel “On the theme of Opposition” (Na téma opozice) in April 1968 caused a small uproar among intellectual circles. Havel criticized the efforts of Reform Communists to introduce an opposition to the Communist Party as a halfway step—similarly, philosopher Ivan Sviták calls the party democratization attempts “squaring the circle” ²⁶ (trying to create political pluralism and at the same time to maintain the main Leninist principles of the governance)—and advocated the end of single-party rule:

The half-heartedness of all these approaches has, therefore, a common cause: none of them allow real choice. Indeed, we can speak seriously about democracy only when people have the possibility, every once in a while, to freely choose those who govern. This assumes the existence of at least two comparable alternatives. That is, two distinct, equal and independent political forces, both of which have the same chance of becoming the ruling power of the state, should the people thus decide. ²⁷

In this same article, Havel broke the silence on the long-tabooed issue of non-communist opposition and post-war emigration. He advocated for “the comprehensive rehabilitation of all non-communists,” ²⁸ and the rehabilitation of tens of thousands of university students who were forced to abandon their studies in 1949 and 1950 because they disagreed with “the fanatical views of their colleagues.” Havel also expressed a criticism shared by the student movement: Reform Communism continued to assume the privileged position of party members, which was entirely contradictory to the understanding of political freedom held by the young generation of the late 1960s.

How significantly the Reform Communist narrative was questioned “from outside” the Marxist discourse can be demonstrated with another example. In 1963 the so-called “Kafka Symposium” was taking place at the castle of Liblice near Prague, the conference center of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The event—later termed in historical discourse the “Liblice Conference”— represents a symbolic turning point in the Communist coming to terms with the Stalinist past during the 1960s, when the aesthetics of socialist realism were profoundly questioned. Thus, the conference became a “literary canon of de-Stalinization.” ²⁹ Perhaps the most incendiary presentation was delivered by the professor of German literature Eduard Goldstücker, a reform member of the Communist Party, but also a former political prisoner from the Stalinist period (1953–1955). In his presentation, Goldstücker questioned the official strict division between the socialist East and the capitalist West, especially in the way that both “civilizations” produced “de-humanizing elements” and thus fostered a deep sense of human alienation, which had previously been ascribed exclusively to the logic of capitalist social and economic organization. Goldstücker’s paper not only irritated the Marxist-Leninist orthodox thinkers but was also subject to sharp criticism from outside Marxist discourse. Allegedly it was also the reason why Goldstücker supported the “suspension” of the Tvář journal in 1965, in the fifth issue of which a critical response to the Liblice Symposium was published. The article was authored by the young literary historian Přemysl Blažíček and criticized Goldstücker’s presentation, particularly his interpretation of Kafka. The basis of his criticism was the political instrumentalization of Kafka’s work: “The real subject of Goldstücker’s essays is not a literary work; literature is here just a means to a different interest than that of a literary theorist: the political and cultural-political interest. . . . The theorist asks whether an opinion is true, the politician asks whether or not it fits today’s needs.” ³⁰ Blažíček’s critique was not a solitary outcry, but represented the view of a significant part of the Czech non-Marxist intelligentsia. This criticism not only revealed the limits of the Reform-Communist vision of “universally” desirable social changes, but also, from a historical point of view, it made known the existence of people (intellectuals and artists) who actively participated in the liberalization process, yet did not necessary share its Marxist or communist orientation.

Thirdly, in addition to the intellectual-political and cultural debates, noteworthy critiques of the system also came from a circle of young authors associated with the so-called KMEN— “Club of Young Economists.” KMEN was founded by the young scholar Václav Klaus (later the most prominent figure in the economic transformation of the 1990s and the president of the Czech Republic from 2003) and brought together young economic thinkers who criticized the so-called “Šik reform” from the right. They saw this new Reform-Communist economic program as too cautious and centralized and therefore ineffective. The first article that attracted the public’s attention, “Fear of Inflation,” ³¹ was written in 1966 by Václav Klaus and his colleague Tomáš Ježek; in this text, they raised the question of inflation in a socialist economy. The very use of the word inflation in connection with the socialist economy was provocative, since it indicated a disturbance of the economic equilibrium, which was not seen as compatible with the basic laws of the socialist economy. The authors argued that the cause of inflation lay “far deeper than a mere ideological identification of socialism with equilibrium growth.” ³² Klaus formulated an even more radical position in his 1968 text, Reflections on the Market in Socialism. He argued that all considerations of the socialist economy are “self-censored” and openly questioned “to what extent the traditional system of values   and accustomed notions of socialism constitute an obstacle to rapid economic development.” ³³ Klaus asserted that the reformist concept was reductive and internally contradictory because it envisaged restoring the market only to the level of “simple commodity production” in which solely the commodity market would exist, but not the “labor market or capital market.” This, he argued, did not correspond to contemporary economic theory or practice. (In the late 1960s Klaus was able to study abroad in the USA, where he had had the opportunity to learn the latest economic trends.) According to Klaus, a socialist economy with commodity, labor, and capital markets was possible, but only if the state would “supplement and repair the market, not replace it.” ³⁴

Conclusion

The consequences of the defeat of the Prague Spring are often described in terms of a “lost faith” in Marxism and socialism; the military intervention supposedly “proved” that the communist system cannot be reformed. In this text, I aimed to demonstrate that this seemingly self-evident narrative is not entirely reflective of reality. 1968 is often considered the year that Marxism and socialism achieved significant political legitimacy amongst a younger generation. Yet this is only partly true for Czechoslovakia, where the younger, politically active, generations, both students and young intellectuals and artists, brought about the emancipation of non-Marxist political thinking in public discourse, which at that time represented a deep revolt against—rather than a careful revision of—Marxism. Step by step, young intellectuals rejected Reform-Communist positions that were rooted in a post-war anti-fascist consensus that, no matter how innovative, never ventured beyond the “safe zone” of Marxist politics. In the academic and public spheres, new non-Marxist and non-communist (which did not necessarily mean non- or even anti-socialist) ideas appeared: students had the chance to have their opinions challenged during academic exchanges in western countries, and books and movies formerly labeled as “bourgeois” were made accessible. All this contributed to the gradual rejection of the Marxist theoretical basis as the favored intellectual critique, for both political doctrine and critical theory. Marxism thus lost its prominent position and became merely one of the possible intellectual approaches, which, of course, threatened both Soviet communism and domestic Reform Communism.

Here, intellectual history can help us understand that it was not a “single political event”—the Warsaw Pact military intervention—that caused a fundamental mistrust towards the Marxist political vision. Rather, the young generations of the Prague Spring experienced a gradual break from Marxist revisionism, or more precisely, an ongoing estrangement from Reform Communism that actually started a few years prior. Their intellectual experience mirrors what Leszek Kolakowski describes in his famous book The Main Currents of Marxism: “It can be said with little fear of contradiction that if freedom of thought were allowed in the Soviet bloc, Marxism would prove to be the least attractive form of intellectual life throughout the area.” ³⁵ Maybe “the least” is too extreme, but regardless, it expresses the strong disillusion of the time. To follow the political discussion among the young generations during late 1960s means to recognize that the departure from Marxism considerably preceded the August military intervention and consequent normalization. Moreover, many of the key political figures who formulated liberal non-communist critiques in 1968, later—that is, 20 years later, in 1989—became prominent exponents of the Velvet Revolution, most importantly the “two Václavs”: Václav Havel and Václav Klaus.