Prague Spring
Conflicted memories

The Prague Spring has deeply marked the history of communism in Eastern Europe even though its outcomes were modest. Rather than remembering the cultural democratization, the opening of the press and its impact on the emergence of a new form of socialism, history textbooks consider Prague Spring as one of the major crises of Socialism in the Soviet bloc. The memory has acquired a negative significance as marking disillusion of political hopes within Eastern European communism. Indeed, long hidden and rejected from the collective memory, the Prague Spring of 1968 is rarely commemorated in Prague and is often considered a painful defeat, a symbol of disappointed hope and surrender that heralds twenty years of 'normalisation'. It was not until the 2000s, following the publication of texts dating from 1968, such as Milan Kundera, "Český úděl" (The Czech Fate), and Václav Havel, "Český úděl?" published in 2007 in the weekly magazine Literární Noviny (52/1), that the debate on the Prague Spring resumed. Indeed, the posterity of the Prague Spring remains first and foremost the memory of the military intervention of the Warsaw Pact as well as the failure of reform within a communist regime, which definitely discredited the Dubcekian "revisionist" perspective in the East. The memory of the Prague Spring is thus largely obscured and often overviewed. Indeed, the Prague Spring also deeply impacted the Czech society and should also be remembered for the cultural momentum that accompanied and illustrated this movement, of which there are still films, novels, and plays. The Prague Spring also influenced a renewal of the Prague artistic and cultural scene as well as a liberalization of society which deeply marked the following years. The 1960s indeed saw the emergence of a major shift in Czechoslovakia with cultural changes and movement coming from the West, notably rock music and sub-cultural movements which are the symbol of cultural renewal for Czechoslovakia. The Czech sixties were thus a process of emancipation of culture from the constraints of existing political structures and were the prelude to the upheavals of 1968. In fact, the regime's political crisis did not begin with Dubcek's election as party leader on 5 January 1968, but with the break-up speeches delivered at the Writers' Congress in June 1967 by Ludvík Vaculík, Milan Kundera and Antonín Liehm. In addition, the revitalization of society was also an essential component of the Prague Spring. Indeed, the great achievements of the Prague Spring, i. e. the abolition of censorship, the restoration of individual and collective freedoms... have revitalized society, which has begun to express itself more freely. Although the Prague Spring only restored what had existed thirty years earlier in Czechoslovakia, the spring of 1968 had a profound and long-lasting impact on the society.

Recently, the anniversary of the 50 years of the conflict raised the question of the memory of the Prague Spring. The European Commission Vice-president Maroš Šefčovič, himself a Slovak, reminded us on the occasion that "we should never tolerate a breach of international law, crushing people's legitimate yearning for freedom and democracy". The European justice commissioner Věra Jourová also made a speech. However, the memory is still very conflicted as demonstrated when the Czech Republic's pro-Russian President Miloš Zeman refused to attend any ceremony remembering the Prague Spring and didn't give any speech in memory of the numerous deaths.

The memory of the Prague Spring is also transmitted through testimonies of former Czechoslovak citizens. In a 2018 article, Radio Free Europe collected testimonies of four women who witnessed the Warsaw Pact troops invasion and bravely acted. Stanislava Draha who volunteered to help some of the 500 wounded testifies says that the invasion had a major impact on her life. Besides, Vera Homolova, a radio reporter broadcasting the invasion from a covert studio testifies "I experienced the Soviet-led troops shooting recklessly into the Czechoslovak Radio's building, into windows." In the aftermath, Vera Roubalova, who reacted as a student to the occupation by demonstrating posters, that tensions were still present towards the countries that occupied Czechoslovakia. On the night of 20–21 August, 137 Czechoslovaks died during the invasion.
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