Among the politically engaging films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Ladislav Helge’s Shame (Stud, 1968) provides one of the most complex and daring observations about the social and political predicament in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s. The film centers around the moral dilemmas and frustrations of Arnošt Pánek, all-powerful local Chairman of the Communist Party in the rapidly changing social and political environment of the late 1960s. At first, the Chairman appears as a model functionary; he is a decent family man and a hard-working official, commanding respect from citizens as well as his subordinates at the office. However, the surprise prosecution of one of his trusted associates for the rape of an underage village girl and abuse of his powers suddenly puts Pánek on the defensive and strips him of his sympathetic outlook. While he cannot deny the gravity of the alleged crime, he desperately tries to protect his corrupt associate and, by extension, his own reputation and power. However, when Pánek personally investigates the issue later, he realizes that not only is the allegation real, but his own negligence of the true conditions in his district had allowed such corruption and abuse to persist unchecked for years.
The film’s radical element lies in its clear-eyed portrayal of the social conflicts between the young intelligentsia and the older Party functionaries. The young prosecutor of the small town insists on criminally charging the accused functionary despite the apparent anger and frustration of the powerful Chairman. In a heated moment, Pánek tells the prosecutor that “there are a lot of new people around” making important decisions without consulting him, adding with a sense of pride that he had been “working in the district for twenty years.” In the village, a young agricultural engineer courageously criticizes Pánek and the rest of the local Party leadership for their blindness, claiming that the only reason ordinary people put up with the years of corruption and abuse was because “they got used to it. They started to believe that this was true socialism.” Pánek quickly dismisses such criticism as “envy and intellectual prejudice speaking.” Later, another old-timer, the Chairman of the local collective declares a similar suspicion against people like the young engineer and warns Pánek that “the new people with proper school training” keep arriving and threatening “the cause.” He claims that people like himself and the Chairman Pánek, who “have been hanging on for twenty years,” should stick together and defend themselves against educated newcomers like the engineer and the prosecutor.
By emphasizing the tensions and relationships between the protagonists from different social groupings, Shame portrays Czechoslovak society at a boiling point. Although the old-power elites, represented by Pánek and the Chairman of the local collective still hold on to power, the members of the young intelligentsia, like the prosecutor and the engineer, effectively challenge their authority and legitimacy, causing frustration and confusion among the power-holders. Only a few months after filming was completed, the social tensions depicted in the movie came into full play. In January 1968, with the ascendence of Alexander Dubček to leadership, the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) launched a reform program with ramifications for the Party’s leading cadres at both the national and regional levels. In many ways, what came to be known as the Prague Spring was, first and foremost, a rebellion of the relatively young and educated Party cadres, represented by the characters of the prosecutor and the engineer in the movie, against the country’s power elites.
This article examines Czechoslovak reform socialism through the social and emotional transformation of young educated intellectuals between the communist takeover of 1948 and the Prague Spring of 1968.Footnote 1 After the communist revolution of 1948, affirmative action policies in education and employment facilitated social mobility for young revolutionaries, enabling them to secure administrative, cultural, and technical white-collar positions in the 1950s. This new generation of educated socialists, whom I refer to as “red-collars,” emerged as the key drivers, advocates, and architects of reform socialism in Czechoslovakia.
My main argument is that the reform socialist movement in Czechoslovakia was rooted in a two-dimensional rupture that the Party (and its membership) went through shortly after the revolution in 1948. The first dimension is socioeconomic. Despite the success of post-revolutionary class restructuring policies in creating a new socialist-educated class, contrary to the hopes of Party leaders and ideologues, they failed to secure its long-term loyalty to the official Party line. Instead, many members of the newly educated class resented their relatively low income, social status, and political capital compared to the Party elites, many of whom had occupied top political and administrative positions despite their lack of formal education. The second dimension of the rupture is emotional. Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956 sparked a collective sense of guilt and betrayal among many members of the newly formed educated socialist class. Throughout the 1960s, shared feelings of remorse over the Stalinist past served as a powerful anti-establishment “emotive,” fueling the red-collar desire to reform the system and reclaim what they considered the humanistic core of socialism. In order to capture both dimensions of the ideological transformation from Stalinism to reformism, this study will combine the methodologies of social and emotions histories, analyzing the impact of post-revolutionary class restructuring alongside the negative political emotions preceding and during the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
The broader question here, of course, is how studying social discontent and negative political emotions of the young intelligentsia can enhance our understanding of democratic socialism in Czechoslovakia. How does analyzing the social and emotional dimensions of reform socialism contribute to the existing literature about the subject? As early as 1980, the émigré scholar Peter Hrubý argued that a sense of guilt was vital to the ideological transformation of the reform-socialist intellectuals, or whom he referred to as the “cultural elite.”Footnote 2 Similarly, Marci Shore identified “shame” as a key emotion driving the rebellion of the dissenting reformist writers against the Party.Footnote 3 More recently, Vítězslav Sommer argued that the perceived loss of the revolutionary ethos—which, according to leading socialist intellectuals, “had gone missing during the course of the 1950s”—was a primary motivation for intellectuals seeking an alternative to the bureaucratic rule of the Party apparatus in the 1960s.Footnote 4
While these works offer valuable insights into the emotions driving political and cultural actors, they do not extensively analyze these emotions or their connection to social class aspirations, instead treating them as secondary to ideological and political activities of the decade. The historiographical approach known as “emotions history,” pioneered by scholars such as William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Ute Frevert, has yet to gain traction in the study of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.Footnote 5 Although, since the mid-2000s, a new generation of Czech and Slovak historians have challenged the narrowly defined political history of the earlier scholarship and significantly widened the scope of the historical analysis by studying topics such as youth identity, recreation and leisure, everyday life, and civil society under communism, collective feelings have still been treated as secondary aftereffects of past events and policies.Footnote 6 Emotions and mechanisms of political convictions are treated as things in themselves, as certain ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling appear randomly in some groups, not in others.
To identify and differentiate the young reform socialist intelligentsia from the wider populace, I will use the term “red-collar” to emphasize the interplay between their generational belongings, social class aspirations, and emotional yearnings in the making of the group that was the main force behind the reform-socialist ideas and motivations in the 1960s. The term refers to young revolutionaries of the immediate postwar years (born roughly between the late 1910s and early 1930s) who, due to their allegiance to the Party, obtained higher education and white-collar positions but later experienced regret and guilt over socialism’s moral and institutional failures. As will be discussed in detail, many of these revolutionary “1948ers” became convinced of the need for reforming socialism, not only because of their generational experiences and their emotional repercussions but also because of their class aspirations and lower social standing vis-à-vis the Party elites under “mature socialism.”
The article conceptualizes “red-collars” as a social typology, similar to what Max Weber called “ideal type,” with generational, social and emotional undertones. Weber, of course, proposed “ideal type” not in the sense of “desirable,” but as a methodogical toolkit to capture the chaotic historical processes through deliberate abstraction and simplification, but without disregarding the complex intersection between social forces and collective values and emotions that societies experience and endorse. To put in Weber’s words, an ideal type is a “one-sided accentuation of one or a number of viewpoints and through the synthesis of great many diffuse and discrete individual phenomena […] into an internally consistent mental image.”Footnote 7 In the spirit of Weberian methodology, I use the term “red-collars” not as an aggregate of individual phenomena, nor does it suggest that the group it denotes was a monolithic political entity. Rather, it seeks to draw a more nuanced mental image than commonly used social categories, such as “1960s youth,” or “critical intelligentsia” to identify the social actors and emotions behind the reform socialism in Czechoslovakia.
In particular, by conceptualizing “red-collars” as a social typology, this article expands on the term “generation,” which has been the predominant unit of analysis in the literature on the 1960s in both Western and Eastern blocs.Footnote 8 In the Czechoslovak context, as early as 1968, the sociologist Jiřina Šiklová used the postwar generations as her units of analysis for explaining different attitudes towards the Party in the 1960s, arguing that each generation’s degree of participation in the revolutionary struggle before 1948 determined one’s loyalty to the official Party line in later decades.Footnote 9 Subsequently, historians of reform socialism in Czechoslovakia adopted a similar generational approach and explained the polarization within the socialist base after 1956 and the emergence of different dissident milieus (e.g., students, journalists, sociologists, writers) by emphasizing—to varying degrees—the generational differences and conflicts between the older generation of “Party conservatives” and “younger reform socialists.”Footnote 10
The term “red-collars” is not intended to repudiate the analytical value of “generation” as a category but rather to build upon it. While this study acknowledges the significance of generational commonalities and milieus in shaping political perceptions, it contends that the concept of generation alone is insufficient to fully capture the social and emotional dimensions of the reformist intelligentsia of the 1960s. Many of the revolutionary “1948ers” became convinced of the need for reforming socialism, not only because of their generational experiences and the emotional repercussions of those experiences, but also because of their class aspirations and lower social standing vis-à-vis the Party elites under “mature socialism.” By defining this group as “red-collars” rather than, for example, the “reform generation,” I aim to highlight both the social class dimension and the emotional undertones of reformism in 1960s Czechoslovakia.
Revolution and Its Intelligentsia
Shortly after seizing power in February 1948, the Czechoslovak Communist Party, drawing inspiration from the Soviet example, implemented a radical affirmative action policy for children from working-class and small-peasant families in university and high school admissions.Footnote 11 By doing so, the Party leadership aimed to create a new intelligentsia with a socialist ideological orientation and unwavering loyalty to the Party line. President Klement Gottwald proclaimed to Party members: “In order to build socialism, the working people must create and educate its own intelligentsia, coming from its core, connected with its class and ideology.”Footnote 12 As part of this plan, in addition to affirmative action for working-class students, the KSČ carried out mass purges against the suspected enemies of communism among university students and academics. Student councils, composed exclusively of communist students, were entrusted with identifying and expelling “reactionary” students and professors from universities. Given extraordinary authority over the fate of their peers and professors, the students embarked on the mission with revolutionary enthusiasm and zeal. However, lacking clear criteria for determining who was “reactionary,” they made decisions arbitrarily, often targeting individuals based on wealth. As one official complained, the purges were conducted with a “frivolous evaluation of students with greater wealth.”Footnote 13
As the Party expelled “reactionary” students from universities, their seats were quickly filled by communist and working-class students. The effects of affirmative action were swift: by the 1949–50 academic year—just one year after its introduction—the percentage of working-class children in high schools across the Czech Lands had surged from 8 percent to 46.5 percent.Footnote 14 Similarly, the proportion of university students from working-class and small-peasant backgrounds climbed steadily, rising from 18 percent in 1946 to 47 percent in 1958.Footnote 15 This transformation was further reinforced by the mass recruitment of communist youth into universities. Throughout the 1950s, especially in social science and law departments, students from middle-class backgrounds were admitted only under strict conditions—either their parents had to demonstrate unwavering loyalty to the regime, or they themselves had to prove their commitment by working in industry for a period before being sent to university by their enterprises.Footnote 16 Indeed, many well-known dissidents and cultural figures of later decades, such as Milan Kundera, Pavel Kohout, Ivan Klíma, and Antonín J. Liehm, were able to enroll in universities in the late 1940s and early 1950s despite their middle-class origins, largely due to their own or their family’s Party membership.
At the same time, the Party’s efforts to transform the intelligentsia coincided with an increase in white-collar positions and a growing demand for educated personnel. Between 1950 and 1961, the percentage of people employed in office jobs rose from 16.4 percent to 27.9 percent.Footnote 17 Sectors that traditionally required university-educated employees experienced the most significant expansion. While employment in the fields of “education and culture” and “health and social care” nearly doubled, the number of workers in “research and science” more than quadrupled.Footnote 18 To meet the growing demand for an educated workforce, universities—now transformed under communist rule—produced an ever-increasing number of graduates throughout the 1950s. According to statistical records, between 1952 and 1962, the total number of “educated specialists” (odborníci) with university or specialized technical education rose from 420,959 to 695,858 across all sectors of the economy.Footnote 19
Most of these new positions were filled by the first graduating cohorts of the 1950s. However, upon entering the workforce, many of these new graduates found themselves under the ideological and professional control of former workers who had been promoted to Party functionaries or managers despite lacking formal education. A 1954 study revealed that 47 percent of employees in ministries and administrative institutions did not meet the educational requirements for their positions.Footnote 20 In the National Committees—the Czechoslovak equivalent of Soviet “soviets”—this figure rose to 56 percent.Footnote 21 Even more striking, data from 1961 showed that 61.1 percent of leading cadres in state administration had only a primary school education, while a mere 5.4 percent held university degrees.Footnote 22 As will be further argued, the unequal power dynamic between the new Party elites and the young socialist intelligentsia—who, despite their high cultural and educational capital, lacked political power—played a crucial role in fostering reformist sentiments among the newly educated class.
Nonetheless, in the long run, available evidence suggests that the Communist Party was largely successful in cultivating an intelligentsia that remained socialist in both political and ideological outlook. Public opinion research conducted during the relatively free atmosphere of the Prague Spring indicates that, as of the late 1960s, the overwhelming majority of the country’s intelligentsia—despite their criticisms and demands for reform—remained committed to socialist ideals and did not seek a return to capitalism.Footnote 23 According to a 1967 public opinion survey conducted among university students, around 80 percent of the students stated that they preferred socialism to capitalism as an economic model, and only 6.1 percent were unequivocally in favor of capitalism.Footnote 24 In another survey conducted in April 1968, 82 percent of university-educated respondents expressed confidence in the Communist Party under Alexander Dubček.Footnote 25
Furthermore, compared to other East-Central European countries, Czechoslovakia had a significantly higher proportion of white-collar Party members. In 1962, the KSČ counted approximately 434,878 white-collar workers among its ranks—roughly one-quarter of the total white-collar workforce.Footnote 26 In contrast, in Hungary that same year, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party had around 53,000 white-collar members (10.3 percent of Party membership), constituting less than 7 percent of the country’s white-collar workforce.Footnote 27 In Romania, only about 10 percent of white-collar workers were Party members in 1960.Footnote 28 In Poland, where the proportion of communist members among the middle class was closest to Czechoslovakia, the United Workers Party had around 495,000 white-collar members, slightly less than 19 percent of the total white-collar workforce.Footnote 29 In this regard, compared to its regional counterparts, the KSČ was the most “intellectual” in character.
First Grumblings
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, as young revolutionaries entered universities and joined the white-collar workforce, the country underwent a sweeping transformation under communist banners. Following the Soviet model, the Party swiftly eliminated all non-communist media, brutally suppressed dissent, nationalized the economy, and initiated the collectivization of agriculture.Footnote 30 By and large, communist youth supported and actively participated in the Stalinist crackdown in the country. Many future reform-socialist politicians, political commentators, and cultural actors of the 1960s first gained prominence through their fiercely Stalinist articles and verses.Footnote 31
However, after initial enthusiasm, many members of the young intelligentsia began to have second thoughts about the ruling logic of the new regime. In their retrospective accounts, memoirs, autobiographies and interviews, they described their experience through a narrative of political disillusionment.Footnote 32 Accordingly, once young and naïve believers of socialism, they gradually became aware of the dictatorial, paranoid practices of the actually-existing Stalinism and felt indignant for the injustices they witnessed around them. In other words, their accounts do not say much about whether or to what extent their material and social conditions contributed to their change of attitude towards the regime. However, a closer look at the primary sources from the era suggests that low salaries and worsening material conditions were significant points of contention among the emerging intelligentsia.
In 1954, an official report submitted to the Party Secretariat of the Slovak branch of the Communist Party informed, with an alarming tone, that the low wages of the qualified employees had a severe detrimental impact on the morale and motivation of the cadres. The report criticized the salary policy, in which the employees with the highest education and qualifications at the research institutes were earning less than the “workers with lesser qualifications at the ordinary production facilities.” Footnote 33 In a similar vein, in May 1955, a reader’s letter to the cultural magazine Literární noviny (“Literary News”) protested the leadership for expecting “people with better education to work for half the salary” of unqualified workers and claimed “the principle of brotherly unity between the workers, farmers, and working intelligentsia is wise and absolutely correct. Yet, in order not to have it only on paper, then it should reflect in our salary policy as well.”Footnote 34
The underlying problem was that the emergence of the new intelligentsia corresponded with the loss of status and income for non-manual workers in Czechoslovakia. In accordance with the Marxist philosophy of labor, the Party placed industrial workers and collective farmers above the non-manual workers in terms of salary and access to various consumer goods and services.Footnote 35 In the new salary structure, while the managers (the top Party elites), miners, and locomotive drivers became the top-earning income groups in the country, the white-collar employees’ purchasing power either did not improve or worsened compared to the white-collar workers of pre-revolutionary Czechoslovakia.Footnote 36 As a result, by the mid-1960s, doctors and teachers were earning less than lathe operators and dairywomen, respectively.Footnote 37
In addition to their declining purchasing power, the “social prestige” of the intelligentsia was significantly reduced during the 1950s.Footnote 38 Because the Party promoted Party veterans, many of whom were working class by occupation, to positions of power and recruited new graduates of the socialist universities to mid- and low-level positions, it created a discrepancy between one’s education level and political capital. In other words, while the typically less-educated Party veterans constituted a new political elite and occupied top managerial positions thanks to their connections, the recent graduates of the revolutionized universities were situated below lesser-educated individuals in terms of status and position in the social hierarchy. The new power hierarchy soon created conflict between those whom Slovak historian Marína Zavacká referred to as “intellectually unfit and politically meritorious” Party veterans and the young intelligentsia.Footnote 39 One of the first instances of the socio-generational conflict between the two groups was observed during the ideological courses organized in the agricultural collectives, where the recent graduates of the revolutionized universities were tasked with training Party members, including the higher-ups, on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.Footnote 40 However, soon the instructors began to complain that they were not receiving the respect they deserved from “the old communists” who “think that they need no learning, that they know everything.” In return, the Party officials blamed the young instructors for lacking workers’ ethics and for being “unreliable intelligentsia, torn off from the people and looking down on their audiences.”Footnote 41
Especially in the culture industry, where the Party implemented strict ideological control and screenings, the unequal relationship between the characteristically older Party higher-ups and young literati was particularly pronounced. For instance, in the area of journalism, the young communist cadres dominated the field; by 1956, “66.6 percent of the approximately 3,000 members of the Union of the Czechoslovak journalists were no more than thirty-five years old, and only 11 percent had any journalistic experience before 1945.”Footnote 42 However, this young generation of journalists had to work under the tight control and supervision of the Chief Authority for Press Supervision (HSTD after its acronym in Czech), whose ranks were filled with the Party veterans turned bureaucrats who lacked formal education. According to a report about the “original professions” (původní povolání) of the censors employed in the HSTD from 1955, the majority of the censors (54 in total) lacked relevant education and experience; eleven of them were shop assistants; seven were unskilled workers; five were typographers; two were seamstresses; and there was a dressmaker, a soldier and a waiter among them.Footnote 43 As late as 1963, 35 percent of the censors had only primary school education, and 17 percent were high school dropouts.Footnote 44
Given the lack of correlation between young intellectuals’ cultural and political capitals under socialism, it is not surprising that young intellectuals resented their subordinate position and came into conflict with the power-holders in their workplaces. In his memoirs, writer and journalist Ivan Klíma (b. 1931) explains the tense atmosphere created by the relationship of domination between the Party controllers and the young intelligentsia in the editorial office of the lifestyle magazine Květy (Flowers), where he found a job upon his graduation from university in the mid-1950s: “Another class-conscious bigwig worked here, the venerable widow of the Communist writer Egon Ervín Kisch. This comrade likewise did little actual work; instead, she watched over everything that went on in the editorial offices and apparently did not take kindly to the fact that youngish and insufficiently class-conscious people were employed there who, in her opinion, threatened the quality, but most of all the Party mission, of the magazine […] I was stunned by how the environment bubbled over with rancor, continual suspicion, malicious gossip, and personnel screening.”Footnote 45
Despite censorship, hints of ideological confusion and dissatisfaction emerged in the media. In a telling article from September 1955, journalist Ladislav Mňačko (b. 1919) reported in the magazine Kultúrny život (“Cultural Life”) that many of the people he knew were feeling sad and depressed in their daily lives.Footnote 46 Mňačko narrated an encounter with a friend who told him that he felt unsettled but could not explain why. “To tell you the truth, I do not know. It is only this … everything.” With an unusually combative tone for the era, Mňačko emphasized that the sadness and discontent of his friend was not a result of an individual condition. “I came to realize that he is not alone,” Mňačko wrote: “There are many people like that, I am meeting with many people like that. The person that I know is not some embarrassed intellectual (rozpačitý intelektual).”Footnote 47 While he did not explain its root causes, Mňačko emphasized that the feeling of “discontent” (nespokojnost’) was widespread among society.
One of the individuals deeply unsettled by the state of the country during this period was Čestmír Císař (b. 1920), who would later become one of the most prominent politicians of the Prague Spring era. In his memoirs, Císař reflected on his early years as a young father and low-ranking Party official in Prague during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He recalled his struggles to find adequate housing for his family after the revolution and how, even after resolving the issue through Party connections, the rent was “unchristianly expensive,” forcing them to endure a “cold upbringing” because the owner cut costs on heating.Footnote 48 Despite his working-class background—his father was a building painter—Císař had studied at a high school in France on an international scholarship in the 1930s and strongly identified with the country’s intelligentsia. He felt unease when Klement Gottwald was elected as the first “working-class president,” believing that Zdeněk Nejedlý, a communist university professor, would have been better suited for the role.Footnote 49 As the Party implemented revolutionary policies accompanied by severe repression, Císař was appalled by the Party leadership’s anti-intellectualism and was dismayed by the policy of “separating schoolchildren based on their class origins” at the expense of their academic qualifications.Footnote 50
Similarly, Ota Šik, who would later become the chief economist of the Prague Spring era, recalled in his memoirs his struggles as a low-level Party official during this time. Šik recounted that his salary was insufficient to support his family, forcing his wife to return to work shortly after giving birth. A committed communist sympathizer since the pre-war years, Šik felt profound shame and a sense of injustice when he observed top Party officials receiving scarce goods such as meat and dairy products for free, while the general population, including himself, had to wait in lines to obtain them.Footnote 51 He also noted that many Party leaders lacked even a basic understanding of Marxist theory and harbored deep suspicion toward the Party’s intellectual circles.Footnote 52 Soon Šik and a few like-minded colleagues, including the future Marxist philosopher Lubomír Sochor (b. 1925), began meeting privately to critically discuss the Party’s ruling logic.Footnote 53
Like many other young socialist intellectuals from their generation, despite their concealed criticisms of the system under “real socialism,” both Šik and Císař chose to remain within the Party. While Šik transitioned to academia and became a university professor, Císař remained in the Party apparatus and pursued a successful political career throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As trusted members of the Party intelligentsia, both were given opportunities to lecture on Marxist theory at Party schools and universities. Over time, as ideological controls loosened, they began to share their unorthodox views with younger Party members. As Císař noted on this period years later, such interactions had “altogether not insignificant influence” on the future developments in the country.Footnote 54
Khrushchev’s Tear Bomb
The moment that brought hidden criticisms into the public sphere was the revelation of Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech” in which he denounced Stalin for fostering a personality cult and unjustly persecuting innocent people. Although Khrushchev delivered the speech in a closed session during the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, its content quickly spread, sending shockwaves across the Soviet bloc. In Czechoslovakia, a limited number of copies of the speech were initially distributed to high-ranking Party officials, with strict instructions to return them after reading. Footnote 55 As rumors about the speech’s content began to circulate, the Central Committee sought to contain growing doubts and criticisms by organizing discussion sessions throughout the country. Footnote 56
Many of those who attended the discussion meetings later reported witnessing strong and emotional reactions to the news from ordinary members. Years later, one Party member recalled the atmosphere within the Party as “a real explosion… the people, especially women and old communists, for whom Stalin was an absolute symbol of revolution and liberation and even their own lives, burst into tears. Others, who still could not recuperate from his death, were not ready for the news that their idol was indeed a maniac and criminal.”Footnote 57 In Olomouc, the local Party functionaries reported that the discussions were filled with frustrated screams, noting that some members now ceased to wear the Party badge for fear of being associated with Stalin’s personality cult.Footnote 58 A Party official in Pilsen, who was responsible for leading the discussion at the Party’s evening school, wrote to the headquarters that “all the present female-comrades (soudružky) cried” upon the news about Stalin.Footnote 59 In Brno, the (female) typists working in the Party organization wept when they were informed about “Stalin’s mistakes.”Footnote 60 Similarly, Ivan Klíma remembered the tense atmosphere among the Party members upon the verification of Khrushchev’s speech by the Party leaders: “... at a party meeting of the department, excerpts of Khrushchev’s heretical speech were read … Now they [the members] were stunned. Some of the women started sobbing, and I remember the hysterical cry: ‘You deceived us.’”Footnote 61
Whether or to what extent the reaction of the young socialist urban class differed from other social groups is difficult to pinpoint. Studies by historians such as Muriel Blaive and Jaromír Mrňka reveal that while Khrushchev’s speech caused a legitimacy crisis for the Party at the national and regional levels, unlike in Poland and Hungary, the general public remained quiescent thanks to the betterment of living standards in the country.Footnote 62 Arguably, for the members of the young intelligentsia, the situation was different. First of all, as we have seen, Khrushchev’s revelations came upon their existing social grievances towards their social position under real socialism. Second, the revelations about the criminal nature of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union made a deeper emotional impact on the young socialist intelligentsia, whose introduction to socialism during the war was closely connected with the charismatic persona of the Generalissimo. Because that image was now irreparably shattered, many became rebellious towards the Party’s rule and hierarchy.
For instance, in late 1956, a communist medical doctor from eastern Slovakia complained to the secret police (StB) that the Twentieth Congress had a detrimental impact on discipline in the Party as the orders no longer carried much importance for the members: “Before the Twentieth Congress, the president or secretary had a certain respect and when they said something… everyone had to obey. Whereas now, he has to beg everyone [to implement the orders], and in the end, the people do not bother to help (vykašle na hlavu) and you cannot tell them a single word in return.”Footnote 63 He also informed secret police agents that he “heard from an assistant at the department of Marxism-Leninism that, in certain circles, they were saying there could be some unrest (within the Party) because Bacílek, who did a lot of bad things when he was the minister of security, is now the secretary of the Central Committee of the Slovak Communist Party.”Footnote 64 For the informant, the Party had lost its grip on its members among the employees and students in the medical faculty. Earlier in 1956, another doctor from Prague, upon witnessing a meeting of the employees of Barrandov film studios, wrote to his diary that the situation was so tense that it reminded him “of the days before Munich in 1938.”Footnote 65 He observed that the communists among the employees were “all indignant” and talked about some of the Party leaders “as if they talked about murderers. There came accusations: Why did ‘the red aristocracy’ use the methods which the real aristocrats abandoned already in the last century?”Footnote 66
Criticism of the new power elite for forming a “nobility” in the name of socialism was not an isolated incident. As Khrushchev’s speech and the wave of de-Stalinization opened the public sphere for criticism, the writers and journalists could now voice their social grievances about the new elite’s privileged position and material benefits. A journalist at the newspaper Svoboda (Freedom) wrote: “Why do higher functionaries have so many Sunday ‘official trips’ by car and squander national wealth? Why don’t their children go to school like other youths but have special teachers and educators as it used to be under the monarch?”Footnote 67 In Slovakia, emphasizing the opposition between the conduct of the Party elites and the normative values of the ruling ideology, the cultural journal Kultúrny život went as far as to publish a cartoon depicting a car with a private chauffeur having to stop because Karl Marx is blocking the way. And the chauffer shouts: “Move away from the road! Don’t you see I am driving the comrade director?!”Footnote 68
In this atmosphere of mounting indignation toward the Party elite, the young socialist intelligentsia emerged as a distinct counter-hegemonic group in the country. Members of this intellectual cohort began openly discussing the moral and institutional failures of the ruling elite in universities, government offices, and Party events. Beyond condemning the leadership’s responsibility for the regime’s wrongdoings, these discussions frequently addressed the question of individual culpability in supporting and participating in the indigenous Stalinism of the country. Just a few years earlier, many members of the young intelligentsia had supported and even participated in the purges and persecutions following the revolution, believing such measures were necessary to protect the revolution from its enemies. The subsequent revelations of widespread injustices carried out in the revolution’s name forced many young revolutionaries to confront their own complicity, triggering an acute sense of guilt for the excesses of the recent past.
In his memoirs, Miloš Hájek (b. 1921), a future historian who was then a low-ranking Party official, recalled his initial reactions to the infamous Slánský trial. While he experienced unease upon realizing that most of the defendants were Jewish, he did not question the trials’ legitimacy at the time and noted that no one in his immediate communist circles doubted their fairness. Hájek reflected that, had he known the true extent of the fabrications and injustices, he “would have probably jumped into the Vltava (river).” Footnote 69 However, when Khrushchev’s revelations hinted that the Stalinist trials in Czechoslovakia had been contrived, he was overcome with remorse for their victims. Following a Party discussion of Khrushchev’s speech, he returned home, told his wife that “Stalin was an oriental despot,” and removed the Generalissimo’s portrait from the wall.
They were difficult days. On Sunday morning, I went for a walk … and could not shake the image of Ejche, how he would lie in his cell and write to Stalin about his innocence. Few days later, Mirek Kadlec told me that they were thinking about leaving Prague, because (his wife) Erika is having hysterical cries at nights. I invited Erika and convinced her that leaving the scene would be a futile act. (“odchodem ze scény vyklidíme pole”)Footnote 70
Another young intellectual within the Party ranks, Zdeněk Mlynář (b. 1930), also vividly experienced the emotional repercussions of Khrushchev’s revelations. Until that point, he believed that obeying Party orders meant serving the “interests of the working class” without bearing personal responsibility for any errors, as the Party itself held accountability before history.Footnote 71 However, the Secret Speech profoundly unsettled this “insouciant attitude,” and Mlynář began to feel personally responsible for the crimes committed in the Party’s name. “Where then did that leave me? Was I any different (than Stalin)?” he asked rhetorically in his memoirs.Footnote 72 By the end of 1956, the psychological strain had worn him down to the point where he found himself “mentally incapable of taking” any further part in Party politics. “Too many elements of my original faith had collapsed, and I did not know what ought to be or might be preserved after all that,” he reflected.Footnote 73 Mlynář subsequently left his position at the Office of the Prosecutor General and took a position at the Academy of Sciences. Like Ota Šik, he shared his unorthodox political views with the next generation of Party intellectuals through his lectures at universities, conferences, and Party schools.
The future sociologist—then a young communist student—Jiřina Šiklová (b. 1935) recalled similar questions and emotions upon the news about Khrushchev’s speech at her university faculty: “I remember to this day the discussions after the Twentieth Congress. Some said that we were all wrong; we all share responsibility for the cult of personality.”Footnote 74 She further remembered that as the discussion went on, the declarations of guilt and self-responsibility gave way to blaming political leaders. One young member of the teaching staff refused to take on responsibility for the wrongdoings of the Party and claimed that the blame lay with someone else. “Wait a second, comrades, do not tell me any of this. I did not do anything; why would I take the blame for it?” he asked rhetorically.Footnote 75 He then went on to blame Party leaders and talk about the unjust trial of Tukachevsky and the Doctor’s plot in the Soviet Union.
Šiklová’s anecdote is a fairly representative example of the way in which retrospective emotions appeared and functioned in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s speech. The discussions and declarations of guilt for past Stalinism were often superseded by the criticism of the Party elders for the betrayal of their youthful trust and knowingly importing the criminal excesses of Soviet-style communism. In this regard, the declarations of guilt and lamentations for the past served as a discursive stepping stone for questioning the political legitimacy of the ruling Party elites. Crucially, it was in this wave of criticism that the young intellectuals of the 1948 generation forged their distinct socio-emotional identity, which I will refer to as “red-collars” hereafter, effectively transgressing and challenging the status quo in the country. By expressing their emotional pain over their past Stalinism, the red-collars continuously distinguished themselves from the ruling cadres and the Party conservatives, who refused to accept personal responsibility for past wrongdoings.
For the Party leadership, the rebellion of the young and educated cadres, whom they had regarded as the backbone of the new socialist intelligentsia, was a hard blow. In a May 15, 1956 report, the Politburo admitted that during the meetings related to Khrushchev’s speech, there had been “harsh and sharp” criticism from many members, including workers, for the Party’s many shortcomings.Footnote 76 Presumably, at least partially referring to the declarations of emotional pain, the report argued that the comments made by the intelligentsia were filled with “personal issues” and, while doing that, “many unknowingly express incorrect opinions.”Footnote 77 Accordingly, while the working-class members criticize the concrete issues and cases, the members of the intelligentsia only “look for […] sensation and focused solely on the (criticism of the) personality cult.”Footnote 78
More importantly for the purposes of this research, the report specified a social typology of those who harbored “incorrect opinions” towards the Party. It informed that there had been around 200 resolutions calling for the extraordinary meeting of Congress to act upon the implications of Khruschev’s speech. Such demands mainly came from “city organizations in Prague, organizations in scientific institutions, universities, white collar sectors […], writers, and some local organizations.” The report also stressed that similar erroneous “voices and ideas” were also present among the political employees in the Army and the Ministry of Defence. These members were mostly from “the ranks of the intelligentsia […] who have no experience in the lower Party organs, many graduated from various schools and, without (sufficient) life and Party experience, they were put into the positions at the ministries, at the political and command posts in the army, at the editorial offices, in the teaching positions at the universities.”Footnote 79 In effect, the Politburo observed that it was the members of the newly educated socialist middle class, the red-collars, that were challenging their authority.
Writers as Red-Collar Representatives
In the charged atmosphere following Khrushchev’s revelations, cultural literati—particularly writers and journalists—played a pivotal role in channeling local popular resentment into the national public sphere. As the Party leadership eased ideological control over the media during its controlled de-Stalinization efforts, first initiated in 1956 and later intensified after 1963, writers and journalists, primarily from the “red-collar” generation, often pushed the boundaries of acceptable criticism. By doing so, they amplified grassroots discontent and brought it to the attention of broader audiences.
One may reasonably question the extent to which culturally prominent figures—such as writers, filmmakers, and musicians—were representative of the broader urban, middle-class intelligentsia. As we have seen, one of the key points of discontent among red-collar workers, as well as the wider educated class, was the discrepancy between their high levels of education and their relatively modest incomes and living conditions. This critique, however, did not apply to many prominent writers, particularly popular figures such as Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, and Ladislav Mňačko. Benefiting from substantial book royalties, these writers often enjoyed a standard of living well above that of the typical red-collar intellectual. Many resided in comfortable homes in neighborhoods shared with Party elites and had access to privileges such as international travel and stays at quasi-luxurious retreats, including the Writer’s Union residences at Dobříš Castle in the Czech Lands or Budmerice in Slovakia.
Notwithstanding, their literary and cinematic outputs did not reflect their privileged socioeconomic status. Instead, their work often focused on themes of historical injustice, disillusionment with the revolutionary project, and critiques of bureaucratic authoritarianism. As members of the emerging communist cultural elite, the young writers and journalists had taken an active part in the creation of Stalin’s image as a quasi-mythical hero figure and persecution of the real and imagined enemies of the new regime through their writings. Thus, in the post-1956 era, they shared with the broader red-collar base a deep sense of regret over the Stalinist past and frustration with their limited influence in shaping cultural and political discourse. Moreover, they strongly resented the censorship mechanisms governing their work, as well as the perceived incompetence of those responsible for editorial decisions. For this reason, despite their material advantages, reform-minded writers positioned themselves as representatives of the broader frustrations and disappointments of their educated contemporaries, particularly as they too faced restrictions on their social settings and felt deeply disappointed with the unmet promises of socialism and its painful recent past.
The first major public demonstration of the criticism made by the members of the red-collar class/generation occurred at the Second Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in April 1956. In their speeches, the young writers, like Stanislav Neumann, Ladislav Mňačko, and Pavel Kohout, declared their emotional pain for their own support and participation in Stalinist practices and called for the Party elders to take responsibility for their past actions.Footnote 80 For instance, the young poet Stanislav Neumann (b. 1927) began his speech by reflecting on the Stalinism of his generation and the emotional toll that the past was taking on them: “My generation grew up with Stalin’s name, and with his name, in 1944, as seventeen-year-old boys, we came to the party. My best friends went to their deaths in Terezín with his name. He personified our youth and our hope.”Footnote 81 After emphasizing his deep disappointment and pain over his past support for the Stalinist persecutions, Neumann called for an open dialogue over the “truth” and “conscience” within the Party. More combatively, Pavel Kohout claimed that there was a moral crisis in the country and criticized the leading functionaries and ideologues in the cultural sphere, namely the Minister of Culture Václav Kopecký, and the literary critic Ladislav Štoll, for ignoring the recent developments and failing to face their roles in the wrongdoings of the past. “Why are the ministers and their deputies evading the questions like the devil evades the cross?” he semi-rhetorically asked.Footnote 82 Reflecting on his own past Stalinism, he shared that he simply wanted to become a “partisan of the revolution” instead of remaining a mere “observer,” but admitted that this choice led him to make many errors, of which he was only now grasping the full extent.Footnote 83
For many of the red-collars, emotional declarations at the Writers’ Congress and the fact that they were openly published in print media signaled that profound change was coming. In his letter to Literární noviny, a cultural weekly of the Union of Writers, an enthusiastic reader, an office worker (úředník) from Liberec reported that when his colleagues and friends read the speeches, they wondered if there would be consequences for the uttered “words.” “There was a good deal of discussion among the people and endless wondering about what is newly developing in the Union Hall. People talk about it in factories, offices, race clubs, and cultural circles.Footnote 84 Another reader, a teacher from Moravia, expressed the hopes and expectations of the critical reading public for the new era: “You cannot imagine how animatedly we are analyzing your newspaper here! How the wilted, almost dead, flower of trust again rises in our hearts—we again have our writers! […] they think, they feel, they talk, they are ours!”Footnote 85 For the reader, the act of “feeling” was one of the essential components of the authenticity of the critical writers.
The uprisings in Poland and Hungary put an abrupt end to such discussions and criticisms in Czechoslovakia. Amid the news about lynchings of communists by “anti-communists and chauvinists” in the streets of Budapest, the KSČ launched a counter-de-Stalinization policy, which significantly reduced the extent of criticism of the leadership in the media. The high functionaries and the Party hardliners often questioned the country’s intelligentsia, arguing that the “country’s writers, university students and other layers of the intelligentsia” were inclined to have “incorrect” revisionist ideas and suggested that the Party’s ideological and pedagogical apparatus should pay more attention to the ideological work at universities and admit even more students from the working-class families.Footnote 86 In doing this, they often portrayed the dissenting red-collars as hypocritical opposites of the country’s honest proletariats. One such article, headlined “Martin Klzký is criticizing the cult of personality,” caricaturized a fictitious middle-aged office worker, who has never worked on a farm or with peasants, and was eager to blame honest Party officials for cultivating the cult of personality during Party meetings at the collective farm. Klzký, which incididentally means “slippery” in Slovak, says, “I have been beaten as a working intellectual (pracující inteligent), and now in the spirit of Twentieth Congress, I will show it to them.”Footnote 87 With arrogance and a sense of vengeance, he attacks the “personality cult” at every meeting, but in fact, he had been part of the cult before and knowingly supported the practices, which he now denounces as terror. The text was accompanied by a caricature of a clumsy intellectual with an unsatisfying look on his face.
In the summer of 1956, when it was becoming clear that de-Stalinization would be slower than anticipated and that Party leaders were reverting back to discourse on “fighting against revisionism,” one university student and future film director, Pavel Juráček (b. 1935), wrote in his diary that he “almost cried” upon reading the summary of speeches made by the Party leaders:
The worst repercussions are (felt) among the intelligentsia. It showed us that eight years since February did not take away the innate need for personal freedom and especially freedom of thought. Now there will be suffering for it. I am afraid that I will now become a reactionary. A month ago, I believed, and I was happy that finally, the time of free-thinking and feeling is coming. Today I am disappointed, and I am starting to doubt the humanism of the current order. I have never followed the (political) events so carefully as in the last weeks.Footnote 88
Fortunately, for the red-collars, the Party’s crackdown on public criticism did not last too long. In late 1962, facing pressure from Moscow, the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party decided to implement further de-Stalinization and established a commission to investigate the trials of prominent Party members in the early 1950s. The subsequent commission defined the trials as “fabrications” and rehabilitated some of the condemned Party members. While the commission’s report did not assign individual responsibility to any of the ruling Party members, it was nevertheless a significant milestone as it represented the first official admission of criminal wrongdoings in the political trials.Footnote 89 A few months after the report, without any public announcement or media discussion, the Central Committee demolished Stalin’s monument in Prague, erasing one of the most iconic symbols of Stalinism. Almost simultaneously, encouraged by the recent signs of political change, critical voices re-emerged and advocated for political, economic, and cultural reforms in the country.Footnote 90
Emotional Schism
The red-collar writers and other members of the cultural intelligentsia were at the forefront of demands for change and the reassessment of the Party’s past actions. The self-reflexive questions and lamentations for the Stalinist past quickly became central to political discussions as well as the cultural production of 1960s Czechoslovakia. Some of the cult novels of the decade, such as Milan Kundera’s Joke (Žert, 1967), Ludvík Vaculík’s Axe (Sekyra, 1966), and Ladislav Mňačko’s Taste of Power (Ako chutí moc, 1967) were semi-autobiographical reflections of the red-collar authors, dealing with the issue of the recent past and encapsulating both the romantic selfless dedication and harmful deeds of the revolution and revolutionaries. Similarly, in the country’s cinema, films like Evald Schorm’s (b. 1931) Everyday Courage (Každý den odvahu, 1965), Antonín Máša’s (b. 1935) Searching (Bloudění, 1965), and Ladislav Helge’s (b. 1927) Shame (Stud, 1967) depicted the socialist society in a state of ideological decay, making psychological observations about the effect of the failure of revolution on the revolutionaries. Discussions of these cultural outputs in the period’s publications often led to impassioned discussions about the Stalinist past of the individuals filled with declarations of guilt and implicit criticism of Party leaders.
Some of these discussions provide invaluable insight into the emotional divide between the red-collars and the Party conservatives among the rank-and-file members. One such discussion took place in the pages of Kultúrny život following the publication of Ladislav Mňačko’s journalistic stories titled Delayed Reportages (Oneskorené reportáže).Footnote 91 The stories narrated the sorrows and injustices endured by the victims of the Stalinist persecutions and show trials, which Mňačko had covered in a propagandistic manner for the Party newspaper a decade earlier. Repenting for his past journalism, Mňačko now gave a voice to the victims of the show trials, emphasizing their innocence and the Party’s total lack of regard for the “truth” at the time. When the stories were published in a book later that year, it became an instant bestseller, selling 300,000 copies in one year.Footnote 92
The Reportages led to a passionate public discussion about the country’s problematic revolutionary past, eliciting both praise and criticism from readers.Footnote 93 Some of the working-class Party members were particularly outraged by what they saw as defamations against the good name of the Party. In a letter to Kultúrny život, a technician from Zvolen by the name of Ištván accused Mňačko of “exaggerating” and “generalizing” the mistakes of the past “to defame the whole socialist establishment” and “rip off everything that the working class achieved with their blood.”Footnote 94 He then speculated that Mňačko was “perhaps the son of a merchant or factory owner rather than a small peasant or worker” to harbor such enmity toward the rule of the working class in the country.Footnote 95 Although the reader acknowledged that “during the time of the personality cult, personal disputes were also settled and both guilty and innocent people suffered,” he emphasized that the era “was in the past and behind (us)” and the past mistakes did not give people like Mňačko, who had a questionable class background, the right to defame the achievements of working-class rule in the country.Footnote 96
A few weeks after publishing the letter of “comrade Ištván,” Kultúrny život announced that “in the eighteen years of the magazine’s existence, (they) have never received so many letters from the readers as (they did) in the last weeks and months.”Footnote 97 The magazine further stated that they received forty-one letters about “comrade Ištván’s letter” alone, and the clear majority of letters, all but four of them, were in favor of Mňačko.Footnote 98 Despite the overwhelming support for the writer, “for the sake of complete objectivity,” the magazine published excerpts from all the critical letters they received against the Reportages, providing a small window of opportunity to look into how hard-line communists among the rank-and-file perceived the recent surge of public declarations of regret.Footnote 99
The letters opposing the Reportages indicate that the outrage against the frequent condemnations and declarations of guilt was not confined to the power elites. A worker from Prague criticized Mňačko for neglecting to acknowledge the job and education opportunities the Party provided to people from all walks of life, and challenged him to “show one person, despite being wronged, who did not have an opportunity to find honest work.”Footnote 100 Another reader from Trenčín expressed doubts about the accuracy of the Reportages and argued that it was “incorrect to claim that everyone in our country lived in fear. It is a lie of bourgeois propaganda, intended to slander and discredit our establishment.” Another reader from rural Žiar nad Hronom angrily wrote that he was not sure whether to address the writer a “comrade or mister.” He continued, “after reading your Evening Interview, I came to the conclusion that you are not writing about the past, but about the contemporary era just like the poet K. H. Borovský wrote about King Lávra but actually meant Franz Joseph.”Footnote 101 The reader claimed that the “Twentieth Congress has already put an end to the influence of the personality cult” in the country and argued that “constantly reminding and returning to the painful past is not acceptable , because it only hurts us, our entire society.”Footnote 102
In addition to the criticism, the magazine published numerous letters of support affirming the validity of the testimonies in the Reportages and emphasizing the necessity of confronting the crimes of the revolutionary past. An engineer from Prague declared his support for the writer and that he “was under the impression that Mňačko will be attacked for the article … if that happens, let him know he can count that I would be on his side.”Footnote 103 A reader from Trebišov, a small town in eastern Slovakia, reported that they had discussed Delayed Reportages with other fellow “employees” (zamestnanci—a term usually used for non-manual, office workers), and nobody, whether a Party member or not, disagreed with the accuracy of the stories. He asked: “Is it not true that while some people are fighting for the construction of socialism and a communist society, others already live in communism? I think our writers are taking part in the cleansing of unhealthy tendencies, which to a greater or lesser extent exist in each and every one of us.”Footnote 104
The stark contrast in reactions to Delayed Reportages suggests that divisions within socialist public extended beyond a small number of writers and politicians. Not only the Party elites but some portion of the socialist reading public seemingly disagreed with the accuracy and value of the constant lamentations about the Stalinist past. On the opposing side were the dissenters, most of whom belonged to the new socialist middle class, who shared the sense of pain expressed by the red-collars writers like Mňačko in the public sphere. The point of contention was not over the interpretation of Marxism or what political or economic model should be used in the new era. Their fundamental disagreement concerned what the “correct feelings” toward the Stalinist past should be and how they should be interpreted moving forward. While it is impossible to make a definite social class or generation analysis based on the fragmented evidence, the overwhelming support for Delayed Reportages among the readers of Kultúrny život suggests that the socialist intelligentsia, who presumably constituted the bulk of the readership of the magazine, belonged to the latter category.Footnote 105
Amid such discussions and controversy over Delayed Reportages, Juraj Špitzer (b. 1919), the literary critic and former partisan commander who had publicly supported the Stalinist persecutions of the “class enemies” in the late 1940s and early 1950s, wrote an extensive and reflective analysis on the ongoing discussions with regard to the past and present of socialism in the country.Footnote 106 He now emphasized that the Party’s recent commitment to de-Stalinization, as well as the sudden surge of criticism and regrets, amounted to a new beginning for socialism in the country. For Špitzer, despite the changes, the members of his generation were still experiencing emotional flashbacks due to the gravity of the past and its memory: “Now we are all talking about the end of the era, in which the values were eroded. The storm is already over the horizon, moving away, but sometimes it still gives flashes and gets hot. For this reason, there is still so much emotion and outrage in our way of thinking, for only a heartless person can rationally transcend (prenášať) the tragedies that took place … We are often afraid to look sternly at ourselves; we desire the new, but still, have old prison chains on our feet.”Footnote 107
Špitzer claimed that the people “with heart,” who “feel pain” for the victims of the show trials and the “horrible tragedies” in which they had participated in the name of revolution and communism, were the main force behind the recent struggle for the “eradication of dogmatic thinking” and revitalization of Marxism and Leninism in the country. In opposition to them, there were the “guardians with the raised fingers,” clinging to an old dogmatic way of thinking, not due to their purity of ideals, but rather due to their “conservative fear, an inability to give up on stubborn fantasies.”Footnote 108 Thus, he argued, the divide between those he labeled as “progressives” and “conservatives” was not only based on political convictions but also on their ability or willingness to “feel pain” for the cruelties of the past, rather than avoiding the past out of “fear” of its potential consequences for their identity and future standing in society.
The retroactive discussions and emotional declarations about the Stalinist past continued to be an essential part of the reformist discourse during the Prague Spring in 1968. This is why the Czech-born British historian Zbyněk Zeman, dubbed the period a “retrospective revolution,” a period in which “the politics and past came together and formed an explosive blend.”Footnote 109 During the eight months between January and August 1968, the injustices of the early 1950s became a national topic, and the red-collar writers and politicians repeatedly returned to their past, tried to make sense of their actions, and expressed their sense of guilt and responsibility toward the victims of the Stalinist period.Footnote 110 However, by 1968, the excessive focus on the past turned into a cliché for some of the citizens. Zeman, who went to Prague to witness the ongoing political changes during the Dubček era, came upon a student during his nightly stroll in Prague’s Malá Strana district making a mocking speech from a balcony above the door to a wine cellar: “I too admit to having made dreadful mistakes in the past […]”Footnote 111 In a public opinion survey conducted in May 1968, nearly half of respondents agreed with the statement that “too much is said about the mistakes of the past and not enough (about) what to do in the future.”Footnote 112
In fact, for the general public, the so-called Prague Spring and its pursuit of “socialism with a human face” primarily represented a critique and rejection of Stalinism and its perceived enduring legacy in Czechoslovakia. In the remainder of this article, I will examine the Action Program of the Prague Spring government and the Two-Thousand Words manifesto by Ludvík Vaculík to demonstrate how the red-collars’ revolutionary melancholy for the past, combined with their dissatisfaction with their socioeconomic standing coalesced into a crucial force driving the mobilization for reforming socialism during the Prague Spring of 1968.
The Red-Collars in Action
The political reform experiment that later became known as the Prague Spring began with a quasi-putsch against First Secretary Antonín Novotný in the Central Committee, leading to his replacement in December 1967 by Alexander Dubček, the head of the Slovak branch of the Party. Ironically, many of Dubček’s key supporters among the upper echelons of power were old Party hardliners—such as Jiří Hendrych, Jaromír Dolanský, and Drahomír Kolder—who seemingly acted more out of personal dislike for Novotný and his modus operandi, than out of genuine convictions about reforming the system.Footnote 113 To transform what initially appeared to be a routine change in leadership—one that had even received Moscow’s approval—into a radical attempt to redefine the main tenets of socialism, Dubček and other reformists in the Party’s top circles engaged in careful political maneuvering and mass social mobilization. Shortly after assuming power, Dubček promoted many of the reform-minded “red-collar” cadres, such as Zdeněk Mlynář, Ota Šik, and Čestmír Císař, to key positions in the critical institutions responsible for planning and executing the intended reform program. In the cultural sphere, red-collar writers like Ludvík Vaculík (b. 1926), Jan Procházka (b. 1929), Milan Kundera (b. 1929), and Dušan Hamšík (b. 1930) came to play significant roles in cultural institution like the Writers’ Union and in the editorial boards of leading publications, helping to communicate the reformist agenda to the public.
This is surely not to suggest that the red-collars constituted a uniform political bloc in 1968. While they broadly agreed on the need for democratization, significant disagreements existed regarding the methods and pace of change. On one side were radical intellectuals, centered around journals such as Literární listy and Kultúrny život, who advocated for the creation of independent political parties and a sweeping purge of old Stalinist cadres from central and local Party organs. Opposing them were the so-called centrists, who—while supporting the radicals’ demands in principle—favored a more gradual, moderate approach to avoid provoking Soviet intervention.Footnote 114 During the Dubček era, members of this moderate wing held influential Party positions and played a central role in shaping reform plans.
One of the clearest illustrations of how the moderate wing of the red-collars infused their political ideals and social aspirations into the 1968 reform movement was the Action Program – the only official comprehensive plan adopted by the Central Committee under Dubček. The Party commissioned a team of “200 Party functionaries, lawyers, social scientists, and intellectuals” to draft overarching goals and strategies for the new era.Footnote 115 Notably, all eight leading members of the working groups responsible for different areas of reform came from the red-collar class/generation (the oldest was born in 1920, the youngest in 1931), and the program they produced reflected their collective mental and emotional landscapes as of 1968.Footnote 116
Aligning with the prevailing discourse among red-collars in the public sphere, the Action Program opened with a critical analysis of the shortcomings in the implementation of socialism in the country. While praising the historic success of eliminating capitalistic exploitation, it unequivocally condemned the “grave shortcomings, unsolved problems, and deformations of socialist principles which are known as the personality cult.”Footnote 117 To underscore the difference of the current leadership from the earlier era, the document asserted that “the leading bodies and institutes of the Party and the State of that time are fully responsible” for serious mistakes such as “sectarianism, suppression of democratic rights and freedom of the people, violation of laws.” Crucially, beyond addressing economic bottlenecks and social injustices, the program argued that one of the most enduring damaging legacies of these “deformations of socialist principles” was the profound emotional toll they had taken on the people:
Embitterness grew among the people and a feeling that despite all successes which had been achieved and despite all efforts exerted, the socialist society was making headway with great difficulty, with fateful delay and with moral political defects in human relations. Quite naturally, apprehensions arose about socialism, about its human mission, about its human features. Some people became demoralized, others lost perspective.Footnote 118
Adopting an alarming tone, the Program claimed that due to the emotional toll of the Party’s shortcomings, people were losing faith in the socialism. To reverse this trend and bring about a “revival of socialist efforts” in the country, it proposed a range of loosely-defined policy plans for both the short and medium term to make a course correction. Beyond advocating for the modernization of economic management and the broader democratization of society, the program emphasized, over and over again, the importance of the educated and qualified workforce to the development of the scientific socialism in the country. It specifically acknowledged the grievances of the “socialist intelligentsia” and put forward concrete proposals to address them. As the antagonistic class relationships no longer existed, the program claimed, the country’s intelligentsia had become an “intelligentsia of the people” and the main aim of internal development was to deepen the “intensive cooperation” between them and the working class. It criticized the previous era for failing to foster such cooperation and “for underestimation of the role of the intelligentsia in this society,” while declaring that the new leadership would “strive for just remuneration of complex and creative mental labor.”Footnote 119
Thus, the Action Program unequivocally committed to addressing two major red-collar grievances of the late 1960s: (i) increasing the social status and income of the educated class, (ii) replacing unqualified cadres at the higher echelons of managerial/administrative positions with educated professionals. Although not stated explicitly, these proposals were not only a clear rebuke of the old ruling elite but also an implicit indication that the relatively high incomes of blue-collar workers over educated cadres would come to an end. While the program framed improvements in pay and conditions for educated professionals as a scientific necessity to enhance workplace efficiency and productivity, it remained unclear to what extent Party functionaries without higher education or unqualified blue-collar workers—who would be at a disadvantage under the proposed reforms—accepted this rationale.
The recent studies by Michael Voříšek and Jakub Šlouf suggest that in general the country’s working class had been initially suspicious—if not outright critical—of demands that prioritized the role of the intelligentsia and mental labor in the new era.Footnote 120 Already a year earlier, when the Party implemented a policy of wage differentiation in some of the factories, a series of strikes broke out across the country.Footnote 121 Public opinion surveys conducted in the spring of 1968 indicate that working-class skepticism toward the intelligentsia’s demands persisted into the early months of the reform experiment. While a majority of workers agreed on the need for systemic reform, a significant portion believed that the proposed changes primarily benefited the intelligentsia. According to one survey, only 53 percent of the respondents regarded the “present process of democratization” to be beneficial to all social classes. Twenty-one percent stated that democratization would “not be very beneficial to the common people (workers, peasants), but is beneficial to the intelligentsia (technical, educational, and scientific personnel);” 19 percent stated that it would be “ineffective in changing anything”; and 4 percent regarded the movement as “beneficial to no one and rather hurts everyone.”Footnote 122 Only 3 percent of the respondents thought that democratization would be “rather beneficial to the common people and is not beneficial to the intelligentsia.”Footnote 123 While far from being conclusive, these figures suggest that a statistically significant number of people—certainly more than those who outright disapproved of the reforms—perceived the movement as primarily serving the interests of the intelligentsia.
The red-collar literati themselves reported on and discussed the suspicions and occasional hostility of the workers towards the reformist intelligentsia. One of the most revealing articles on the working-class reaction to reform socialism was Ludvík Vaculík’s quasi-ethnographic field notes from a meeting with workers at the Škoda locomotive factory in Pilsen in April 1968. Reflecting on the overall impression that he received from the workers, Vaculík lamented the “strange fact that the average uninformed worker considers the bad condition of our state to be the work of intellectuals, [but] as intellectuals know, this bad condition was due to the professional revolutionaries acting on behalf of the workers.”Footnote 124 Vaculík observed that the perceived “leading role of the intellectuals” in the new era was the root cause of the working-class discontent, as many workers perceived the ongoing democratization as favoring only the intellectuals at the expense of working-class interests. He then reported the workers’ arguments against how the reform movement was taking shape in the country. “It all gives me an impression of a conspiracy against the working-class,” said one older worker commenting on the recent public meeting in favor of the reforms. Some workers blamed the earlier Party leadership for their current disadvantageous position, as well: “Ever since Novotný came to power, they have just been taking and taking from us, our norms, our salaries, but we endured it because it was supposed to be helping socialism. And now? Intellectuals are full of shit! (intelektuálové jsou mrvové!),” one worker said, blaming both old and new Party leadership for allowing intellectuals to benefit from their heavy manual work.Footnote 125
In his study of political activism among industrial workers in the Czech Lands, Jakub Šlouf argues that the Prague Spring government successfully overcame initial skepticism and hesitation among workers, ultimately securing their support. According Šlouf, a decisive factor in this shift was workplace democratization, which allowed workers to independently elect their representatives on the governing bodies and promised greater autonomy for their trade unions.Footnote 126 At the same time, however, it is also important to recognize that what united the great majority of the Czechoslovak public, including workers, behind the Dubček government was the looming threat of the Soviet intervention, which became increasingly apparent by early summer of 1968. As the Moscow took a more threatening stance against the reform leadership in Czechoslovakia, some of the scientists in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences asked Ludvík Vaculík to draw up a manifesto to galvanize public pressure for carrying out the reforms regardless of the Soviet pressure. Vaculík accepted, and the resultant document titled “Two-Thousand Words” was published simultaneously on June 27th in Literární listy, Práce, Zemědělské Noviny and Mladá Fronta with a total circulation of 1.3 million copies.Footnote 127 Initially signed by over sixty individuals, including prominent public figures such as Olympic gold medalists Emil Zátopek, Věra Čáslavská, actor Jan Werich, and poet Jaroslav Seifert, the manifesto was a clear public display of defiance against the implicit threats from Moscow.
Addressed to “workers, farmers, officials, scientists, artists, and everybody,” “Two-Thousand Words” was essentially a plea to the citizens to defend the ongoing experiment against its internal and external enemies. While it appealed to all social groups and classes, the text was written from the perspective of a red-collar, who participated in the revolution and witnessed its demise. And all he sees around is a spiritual ruin: “Most people accordingly lost interest in public affairs, worrying only about themselves and about money … Personal relations were ruined, there was no more joy in work, and the nation, in short, entered a period that endangered its spiritual well-being and its character.”Footnote 128 Similar to the Action Program, the manifesto starts with an analysis of why the revolution failed to deliver its promises. For Vaculík, the root cause of the presently deteriorating state of socialism was not the defects in state ideology (that is Marxism-Leninism) but the personal defects of people, whom the Party had entrusted with ruling the country. Accordingly, “the wrong people” obtained power after the revolution, the people who not only lacked adequate qualifications but also, and more importantly, were unwilling to be replaced when the cadres with proper qualifications and knowledge were ready to be hired:
The first threat to our national life was from the war. Then came other evil days and events that endangered the nation’s spiritual well-being and character. Most of the nation welcomed the socialist program with high hopes. But it fell into the hands of the wrong people. It would not have mattered so much that they lacked adequate experience in affairs of state, factual knowledge, or philosophical education, if only they had enough common prudence and decency to listen to the opinion of others and agree to being gradually replaced by more able people.Footnote 129
Thus, repeating the common red-collar demand of the 1960s, the manifesto emphasized the social and emotional ruin that the old elites caused in the country, and called for their replacement with new people. To boost the power of reformists, Vaculík made a plea to previously “sidelined” citizens to participate in the reform movement and “compel” the conservative elites, who “abused their power, damaged public property, and acted dishonorably or brutally,” to resign from their positions through civic actions.
Following the manifesto’s publication, there emerged a spontaneous public platform against both Party hardliners and Moscow. The journals that published the manifesto received an unprecedented number of letters from readers; Práce, journal of the Revolutionary Trade Union (ROH) alone received 102,621 readers’ letters in the first two weeks after the publication, and only 188 of them were against the content of the manifesto. In the same period, the cultural magazine Literární listy received 34,241 letters, and 296 of them were sent by a group of employees from various workplaces across the country. The public campaign against Soviet intervention appears to have united different social groups for the reform cause. Teachers from a school in České Budějovice reported that regional Party leaders were trying to force lower-level functionaries to write a letter against the manifesto and sign their names on it. “It is the same old method of the old-conservatives, who sit in their seats and do not want to move,” they wrote.Footnote 130 According to two opinion polls conducted in mid-July and early August, Ninety-one percent of the respondents wanted the “allied armies to leave the territory of our Republic immediately after the conclusion of the exercises,” and 95 percent of the respondents considered the changes since January as “positive changes for the development of socialism in Czechoslovakia.”Footnote 131 The latter number was twenty points higher than the support for Dubček two months earlier.Footnote 132
In July 1968, when David Newell-Smith, the British photographer, visited Prague to document daily life under Dubček, he witnessed a society united against intervention, albeit with differing priorities. An electrician complained that unqualified people were earning better salaries just because they were Party members; a student talked about creating a “sense of freedom” in the country; and one worker, “a fat man with a pockmarked face and a pipe, said: ‘Far too much money was being spent on white-collar administration—there were more administrators than workers in some industries. Jobs for the boys. Then, we want no outside interference in our country—from Russia or anywhere.’”Footnote 133 Although only handful of the actual reform plans would align with this worker’s demands, it apparently did not prevent him from supporting the reform experiment against foreign intervention. After all, the worst spring would still be better than the impending winter.
Conclusion
This article has interpreted the Czechoslovak reform socialism of the 1960s through the prism of the socio-emotional yearnings of the red-collar class/generation, who came of age under the spell of revolutionary Stalinism, benefited from it but later demanded a course correction for socialism from within. The emotional shock of Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956 built upon their emerging discontent with their social and material conditions under real socialism. Emphasizing their own guilt for having supported and participated in the Stalinist excesses of the recent past, members of the red-collar class/generation insinuated their critique into the public sphere, forming a formidable counter-hegemonic position in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Yet the forceful end of the Prague Spring and the mass purges resulted in the disappearance of the red-collars as a relevant social, political, and emotional group in the country. Their idealistic faith in the reformability of socialism received a fatal blow with the invasion, and the questions they had been asking regarding the nature of “mature socialism” and how to merge it with “democracy” became irrelevant even for many of the former reform socialists. When, in 1989, Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring re-emerged with the discourse on “democratic socialism” and “socialism with a human face,” his slogans soon lost their resonance. He was easily outmaneuvered by Václav Havel, a son of a well-to-do businessman and distinctly not a red-collar character, in the competition for the leadership of the Velvet Revolution. The time of socialism and its red-collar reformers had passed.
Funding statement
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 101034324.
