What were the factors that brought about the 'Prague Spring' of 1968?

Résumé du document

After February 1948, the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party through Coup of Prague implemented the Stalinist model of political organization, social model and economic development which contrasted profundly with the multiparty system which had featured Czechoslovakia in the First Republic period embodied by Masaryk who was the President from 1918 to 1935. The death of President Klement Gottwald in 1953 coincided with the one of Stalin the same year, whereas Antonin Novotny became First Secretary of the Communist Party. Novotny was soon to become the symbol of the Stalinist and repressive model which controlled all the aspects of public life and against which the concept of "socialism with a human face" was directly targeted.

Extraits

[...] The oppositions within the Party reached a climax in the October and December 1967 meetings of the Central Committee , when Novotny , failing to obtain Brezhnev´s formal support and to maintain a majority around him , was forced to relinquish his post as head of the Communist Party to Alexander Dubcek. Novotny´s dismissal was synonymous with the broadening of participation in the debate and discussion about change in Czecholovakia . The stage was then ready for the performance of the tragedy of the "Prague Spring " . [...]

[...] The situation deteriorated to the point that Czechoslovakia knew a decline of more than 2 per cent of its national income in leading to the giving-up of the third Five-Year Plan . The crisis was triggered off by a confluence of exogenous factors ( the loss of trade with China , the Berlin and Cuban missile crisis ) and chronic irrationnality in investment policy , limited reforms in 1958 ( which had actually led to increase monopolization and bureaucracy ) and a series of poor harvests. [...]

[...] The devastation of the country's social structure was accomplished through severe repression - imprisonment , police surveillance , labor camps and the excution of some 200 "enemies" . In the countryside , repression was also used to impose a Marxist system of collective agriculture which faced an important resistance from the peasantry . This situation within Czechoslovkia contrasted with Krushchev´s renewed denunciation of Stalin at the 22nd Party Congress of the CPSU in In this situation , and this is one of the main features of the Prague Spring , intellectuals were the first to challenge the regime . [...]

[...] But , most important of all , it was the discontent from the Slovaks which was to constitute the most serious threat to the regime . In the Czechoslovak state, the Czech part has always been richer and more industrialised than Slovakia . Slovakia's evolution into a modern nation generated strong and emotional nationalist feelings whereas the Soviet model advocated minimizing nationalist identity to the greater good of the central communist state . In these conditions desires for greater recognition of Slovak interests within the common state and desires for greater equality of condition and treatment grew and represented an important part of the desire for change in the late 1960s . [...]

[...] Was also taken account the democratic and national element in the Czech and Slovak sense. But the force of the Prague Spring was that , although born in the intellectual sphere , it succeeded in gaining supporters both inside the existing power structure , provoking a sission within the CPCz , supporters in the foreign communist parties ( french and italian mainly ) , and supporters among the Czechoslovakians, producing a feeling of national unity around "socialism with a human face" : that's a feature the Russians will be surprised to discover after invading Czechoslovakia in August 1968 . [...]