It was 47 years ago yesterday that Alexander Dubček replaced Antonin Novotný as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee and the Prague Spring of 1968 began to unexpectedly bloom under the still Communist regime.
Dubček was born in 1921 in Uhrovek, Slovakia. He had joined the Communist Party in Slovakia in 1939 and during the Second World War in 1944 joined the Slovak Resistance, serving with the Jan Zizka Brigade, which operated in the lower Tatra Mountains.
After the war ended n 1945, Dubček rose through the Communist ranks. From 1951 to 1955, he was a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé, the national assembly, and in 1953 he was sent to the Moscow Political College, where he graduated in 1958 with honours.
When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Dubček was appointed principal secretary of the Slovak Communist Party in Bratislava.Under Dubček’s leadership, Slovakia began to move toward political liberalization. Kultúrny život, the weekly newspaper of the Union of Slovak Writers, published frank discussions of liberalization, federalization and democratization, written by progressive and controversial writers – both Slovak and Czech – and became the first Slovak publication to gain a wide following among Czechs, as well as Slovaks.
In 1958, Dubček also joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which he served as secretary from 1960 to 1962, and the same year became a member of the Czechoslovak Party Presidium. A year later, he succeeded Karol Balicek as first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party. From 1960 to 1968 he was again a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé.
On Jan. 5, 1968, the party’s central committee nominated Dubček to succeed Novotný after the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee passed a vote of no-confidence in its then first secretary.
As first secretary, Dubček, although no democrat, began nourishing the first seeds of what became known as the Prague Spring, that proved to be a brief but exciting season of liberalization that wouldn’t bloom again for 21 years until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, when Dubček returned from long political exile to be elected speaker of the Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly.
In 1968, Dubček had moved toward what became known as “socialism with a human face,” saying he was determined to achieve the “widest possible democratization” of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of “a free, modern, and profoundly humane society.”
He allowed Communist Party members in Czechoslovakia to challenge party policy, as opposed to the traditional acceptance of all government policy. Party members were given the right to act “according to their conscience.” He also announced the end of censorship and the right of Czech citizens to criticize the government. The country’s newspapers produced scathing reports about government incompetence and corruption.
Dubček also announced that farmers would have the right to form independent co-operatives and that trade unions would have increased rights to bargain for their members.
At the same time, Dubček tried to reassure the country’s Soviet masters that Czechoslovakia had no intention of leaving the Warsaw Pact and Czechoslovakia’s 1968 reforms were an internal matter. The Soviet Union was not reassured.
On the pretext they had evidence that West Germany was planning to invade the Sudetenland, comprising the Czechoslovakian border districts of Bohemia, Moravia and parts of Silesia. Moscow said it would provide Czechoslovakia with the troops needed to protect the country from invasion by the NATO power. Dubček refused the offer but the Soviets insisted.
On the night of Aug. 20-21, 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces from Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia. The occupying armies quickly seized control of Prague.
The beginning of the end of the Prague Spring came on that night of Aug. 20-21, 1968. Dubček was arrested, spirited away to Moscow with other reform leaders, and detained for a week before he was returned to Prague and released, and then continued on as first secretary until April 17, 1969, when he was appointed speaker of the new Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly, and soon after went on to serve as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to Turkey for just over six months from Dec. 15, 1969 to June 24, 1970. Three days later, on June 27, 1970, Dubček was expelled from the Communist Party and banished to Bratislava where he worked in a timber yard, spending the next 19 years in a low-profile but not entirely uncomfortable position, although he had little contact with the outside world for almost two decades and was under surveillance by the Státní bezpečnosti (StB), the Czech secret police.
Dubček spent the last three years of his life back in the political limelight after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989. He died at the age of 70 on Nov. 7, 1992 at Homolse Hospital in Prague. A little more than two months earlier on Sept. 1, Dubček had been seriously injured in an automobile accident that occurred when a car driven by his chauffeur left the highway in a rainstorm and plunged down a ravine. Dubček suffered serious spine and chest injuries and underwent surgery.
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