Prague Spring
In the wake of the State Police’s purges (1950s), only dedicated party members were allowed to take responsibility for even routine decisions. The CCP eventually rehabilitated most of the victims of the purges, but its reviews of the trials, begun in 1956, were a reluctant process that dragged on for 12 years until Alexander Dubček’s Central Committee published a tough report. The Commission of Inquiry found that some “grave defects darkened the image of socialist reconstruction, and chief among them were the political trials [which] detracted from the success of socialism in Czechoslovakia, damaging it in the eyes of its supporters at home and abroad, and discrediting the achievements of the Czechoslovak people”.
To prevent a repetition, the CCP commission recommended that future leadership selection be based not only on a declared commitment to socialism but also on personal courage, character and integrity. The Slovak leader Alexander Dubcek (Dubček) makes an attempt to rebuild “socialism with a human face.”
In 1968, discontent with token reforms of party chief Antonín Novotný led to his being replaced by the Slovak, Alexander Dubček, who took major steps toward political, social, and economic reform. Alexander Dubček came to power in the brief Prague Spring. In August, the Warsaw Pact military intervention orchestrated by Moscow destroyed the Prague Spring and communist normalization ensued in Prague. Jan Palach, a 21 – years old university student, had burned himself to death in 1969, as a protest against the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. Nowadays, his monument can be found a few meters in front of the Saint Wenceslas statue in the Wenceslas Square.
The Soviets forced Dubček to resign, and replaced him with Gustav Husák. About 150,000 Czechs and Slovaks were exiled abroad, and 500,000 others and about half a million people lost their jobs or were expelled from the CCP. Dubcek was moved to Slovak forestry service.
However, during the 1970s the dissident movement had developed in Czechoslovakia. The most known dissident leaders were Václav Havel (a Czech writer and dramatist, the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic) and Václav Benda (a political activist and mathematician). In 1976, the “Charter 77″ movement had been established in order to monitor and to report abroad human rights abuses within the country. The “Charter 77” first spokesmen were Václav Havel, Jan Patočka and Jiří Hájek.
