Once the pride of interwar Czechoslovakia, and key during the
forced industrialization of the Stalinist period, during the 1970s
and 1980s the Czechoslovak railway sector showed the symptoms of
the ...political tiredness and economic exhaustion of the Soviet Bloc.
This book examines the failure of central economic planning through
the lens of this national transport system.
Based on the presentation of its history and on the detailed
scrutiny of the actors, institutions, internal mechanisms, and
conditions of the railway sector, the analysis reveals the
identities of the real stakeholders in the state administration.
This case shows how the country was governed by Communist Party
institutions and government ministries, and how developments in the
transportation sector-like in every sector-reflected their
priorities. Numerous tables with selected statistics underscore the
economic analysis and black and white photos offer a glimpse on the
technical base of the railway sector.
The book is filled with enlightening comparisons of the
Czechoslovak transportation industry with its counterparts in the
whole Eastern Bloc. Integration into the Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance (Comecon) of the Bloc could have been an asset,
yet the records have more to say about conflicts than
cooperation.
At 11 o´clock in the evening of 20th August 1968, the armies of four Warsaw Pact countries, the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary, crossed the borders of Czechoslovakia, starting the ...“Operation Danube”. Literally overnight the Czechoslovak experiment with Alexander Dubček´s liberalization reforms was transformed from living reality into history. Although the Soviet Union’s action successfully halted the pace of reform in Czechoslovakia, it had unintended consequences for both the unity of the communist bloc and the establishment of the new Soviet foreign doctrine. This book brings the international context of the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia to the center of attention. It brought together experts from within as well as from without Central Europe with the hope of igniting, or, perhaps better, re-igniting an international discussion on the Prague spring, its origins, its unfolding, its aftermath, and, most importantly, the international context.
The volume’s contributors are: Ljubodarg Dimić, Jakub Drábik, Mihail Gruev, Slavomír Michálek, Miklós Mitrovits, Jackques Rupnik, Alexander Stykalin, Mirosław Szumiło, Michal Štefanský, and Virgiliu Tarau
The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of ...television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times.
The Greengrocer and His TVoffers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear.
Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience.
Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such asThe Woman Behind the CounterandThe Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing-literally and figuratively-Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.
Worlds of Dissent analyzes the myths of Czech resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces these heroic victory narratives with a picture of the struggle against state ...repression as dissidents themselves understood and lived it. Their diaries, letters, and essays convey the texture of dissent in a closed society.
The article deals with Czechoslovak dissident culture after 1968, in particular with the movement Charter 77 and its legacy after 1989, focusing on the concept of paralelní polis (parallel polis) ...introduced by Václav Benda and widely discussed among dissidents: the idea of creating new and independent cultural, economic, and media structures parallel to the official structures. The study considers the paralelní polis as an instrument through which the (post-)‘68-movements led by intellectuals, artists, and theorists sought the emancipation and diversification of civil society in both capitalist and socialist countries. With the collapse of the socialist world after 1989, the history of the paralelní polis reveals that the ‘68 idea of civil society was ambivalent, while Charter 77 proved to be a heterogeneous movement. Many ex-Chartists came to believe that capitalism could better enable the existence of a civil society than socialism, while others did not accept this view. Moreover, even among the supporters of capitalism there was no unity (some were close to neoliberalism, others were critical of it). In contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, there was no dialogue between these different positions within civil society, but rather radicalization and exclusivity. The radical left, anarcho-capitalism, and Christian fundamentalism developed their particular and mutually exclusive narratives about the legacy of paralelní polis.
The book was completed in the autumn of 1988 and published in hardback almost a year later, but the momentous events of 1989 seem not have overtaken the validity of the argument presented here. The ...book examines—theoretically and in the light of empirical evidence—the roots of the failure of the Marx‐inspired economic system of socialism, and hence the reasons behind the search of market‐oriented remedies. The twists and bends of this difficult search have led to what in the book is termed ‘market socialism proper’ (MS) as the last station of the ultimately futile reformist road. ‘Real socialism’ has proved non‐reformable, and even MS would hardly match the advantages of the private market economy. This conclusion argued in the book does not justify, however, the laissez‐faire tendency to abandon a number of basic values associated with socialism: major concern for full employment, social care, which in turn imply preservation of a place of substance to state macroeconomic policy, equality of opportunity based on redistribution of income and wealth etc. reflecting the concept of an overall interest of society which cannot just be reduced to a sum of individual self‐interests.
1968 was a watershed year not only for the new left but even more so for the rise of the New Right. It turns out that, if 1968 “prepared” 1989 as the next turning point in European and world history, ...it was probably more through the new right’s forging of ideas that would eventually provide ideological justification for illiberal democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. Yugoslavia is an important site in this history not only because of its early exposure to the ideas of the new right through the work of the painter and publicist Dragoš Kalajić but also because in his seminal book The Philosophy of Parochialism (1969), Radomir Konstantinović anticipated the rise of the new right and offered a penetrating critique of its fundamental premises.
On August 20, 1968, tens of thousands of Soviet and East European ground and air forces moved into Czechoslovakia and occupied the country in an attempt to end the "Prague Spring" reforms and restore ...an orthodox Communist regime. The leader of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, was initially reluctant to use military force and tried to pressure his counterpart in Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, to crack down. But during the summer of 1968, after several months of careful deliberations, the Soviet Politburo finally decide that military force was the only option left. A large invading force of Soviet, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops received final orders to move into Czechoslovakia; within 24 hours they had established complete military control of Czechoslovakia, bringing an end to hopes for "socialism with a human face." Dubcek and most of the other Czechoslovak reformers were temporarily restored to power, but their role from late August 1968 through April 1969 was to reverse many of the reforms that had been adopted. In April 1969, Dubchek was forced to step down for good, bringing a final end to the Prague Spring. Soviet leaders justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia by claiming that "the fate of any socialist country is the common affair of all socialist countries" and that the Soviet Union had both a "right" and a "sacred duty" to "defend socialism" in Czechoslovakia. The invasion caused some divisions within the Communist world, but overall the use of large-scale force proved remarkably successful in achieving Soviet goals. The United States and its NATO allies protested but refrained from direct military action and covert operations to counter the Soviet-led incursion into Czechoslovakia. The essays of a dozen leading European and American Cold War historians analyze this turning point in the Cold War in light of new documentary evidence from the archives of two dozen countries and explain what happened behind the scenes.
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