Commentary
One of the manifestations of the Prague Spring was the awakening of civil society, including, for example, the creation or restoration of independent political movements.
With this issue, however, the clear limits of democratisation were shown by the fact that even the new Communist Party leadership did not allow the emergence of other political parties.
The Social Democratic movement had its roots in the Czech lands in the 19th century, and during the interwar period, the Social Democratic Party was among the major political parties in Czechoslovakia. At the end of the 1940s, during the period of the Stalinist revolution in Czechoslovakia, it was forcibly merged with the Communist Party (Show trials).
In 1968, however, its former members and sympathisers began to seek its recovery and in the spring formed a preparatory committee and held meetings. This initiative came mainly from the ground up.
The text is an excerpt from the minutes of the meeting of the supreme body of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. People who were a symbol of democratisation and reform, such as Alexander Dubček (Politician in a swimsuit), made it clear that the one-party political system would persist, and that the former social democrats’ expectations of democratisation were unfounded. The “leading role of the Communist Party” had been declared in the constitution, just like in the other Eastern bloc countries, and the role of other parties that were allowed to exist was absolutely minimal. This was a line that even the reformist wing within the Communist Party could not cross. No other parties could be formed.
This resistance was also an expression of fear of the reaction of the Soviet Union, which might see the emergence of other political parties outside the current system as a betrayal of communism that could not be tolerated. Furthermore, the reformists in the Central Committee were not sure if they had the trust of the entire Party, so their speculation about State Security’s role in the whole development, i.e., proposing the initiative, could be just an instructed provocation. Thus, in order to not provoke the Soviet Union, social democratic politicians abandoned the attempt to restore the party in the summer of 1968, although this of course had no effect on the Soviet Union’s decision to invade (1968 – Invasion).
