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... The events of 1968 in Prague continue to arouse great interest among researchers. Significant contribution to the study and analysis of those events was made by such scholars as John Bradley (1992), Marcos Degaut (2019), Pete Dolack (2013), Julia Friday (2011), Ernest Gellner (1995, John K. Glenn (1999), Michèle Harrison (2003), Peter Hames (2013), Mary Heimann (2009), Miklos Kun (1998), William H. Luers (1990), Petr Oslzlý (1990), William A. Pelz (2016), Anna J. Stoneman (2015), Jiri Suk (2018), Marek Thee (1990Thee ( , 1991, Kieran Williams (1997), and others. ...
This article is a comparative analysis of two revolutions in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and 1989. The main question of this article is: Why did the revolution in 1968 fail, but the revolution in 1989 succeed? In this article the main reasons, common features and differences of those two revolutions were analysed and defined. The main conclusion of this article is the fact that a necessary condition for the victory of popular resistance is the support of these manifestations by the military or their non-interference. The 1968 revolution was suppressed as a result of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops under the leadership of the Soviet Union, but the events of 1989 were marked by a decision by the country’s military leadership on their neutrality.
From the perspective of cultural and intellectual history, the 1970s and 1980s are often regarded as a period when the free-thinking ideals of the previous decade were progressively extinguished. In the case of Czechoslovakia, these decades are often spoken of as a fundamental watershed, when the ‘golden age’ of the sixties was crushed under the tracks of Warsaw Pact tanks. Observers at the time even interpreted the subsequent purges in the intellectual realm as a ‘Biafra of the Spirit’. In other words, freedom was replaced by unfreedom, the light of ‘socialism with a human face’ was smothered by the shroud of normalisation. In this chapter, I do not wish to entirely overturn this evaluation, but rather to affect a certain rotation of viewpoint. Although I accept that the normalisation period was essentially an intellectually shallow maintenance of the socio-political status quo, I attempt to take the rhetoric of the time seriously and trace what Czechoslovak normalisation actually meant to those who elaborated and enforced it. On the basis of contemporary documents, I reconstruct the conceptualisation and practice of cultural policy and culture during the 1970s and 1980s. I believe that such an inquiry can help us clarify the seminal points of departure and contours of the regime that referred to itself as ‘real existing’ or ‘developed’ socialism.
Příspěvek se zabývá druhou polovinou 60. let 20. století („dlouhým osmašedesátým“) jako přechodovou fází, jako koncem jedné éry, ve kterém jsou však již obsaženy také zárodky éry nadcházející. 60. léta na Východě i na Západě tehdejšího studenoválečného světa jsou charakterizovány dvěma rovinami – utopickou a anti-autoritářskou, přičemž události roku 1968 znamenají především oslabení utopické roviny ve prospěch roviny anti autoritářské. Při srovnání konce 60. a konce 70. let tak příspěvek poukáže na přechod od dřívějších vizí ucelených kolektivistických projektů k zaměření na práva jednotlivce. Jako jedna z příčin tohoto přechodu a zároveň důsledků roku 1968 je zde vnímáno uprázdnění ideologického prostoru v souvislosti s kritikou starého „sociálně-regulativního“ systému a zároveň neúspěšnými pokusy o radikální politickou transformaci.
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