people’s ideals and dreams. They are asking questions, and some are trying to come up with answers. Why were so many mistakes made? Why do many of the communists still have major functions? Did we want things to go this way? The most important ones, however, are Was the revolution successful? and What have we learnt from it? In this article I want to address some of these questions, and explain the revolution and its results so that people who have little or no knowledge of it will understand this historical period better. Also, I hope to give rise to questions. Because I believe that many of the things my society has encountered are universal and apply to the whole of the Western world, I want to encourage anyone who would like to find out more about the revolution to contact me. Moreover, anyone who disagrees with anything I say or wants to start a polemic with me is welcome to respond to this article in any way he or she considers appropriate. The roots of the Czechoslovak revolution can be traced back to 1968 and the events of the Prague Spring. In that year the government of Alexander Dubcek started a series of reforms which abolished censorship and encouraged freedom of speech and art. Some people even speculated about the possibility of free elections. The society was excited about the new direction of the party, which was perhaps closer to social democracy than communism. However, on the night of the 21st of August the Warsaw Pact armies surprisingly
entered Czechoslovakia. Dubcek and his government were kidnapped and taken to Moscow, and any hopes for further reforms vanished in the face of the tanks shooting people in the squares of Prague and Bratislava. The Russians simply could not risk any unrest in ‘their’ sphere of influence and the Czechoslovak reforms were making Brezhnev nervous; what if other countries took inspiration from the development in Czechoslovakia? Therefore, the reformist movement had to be crushed. After 1968, Dubcek had to resign, and a hard-line Soviet backed government followed. The new era, which lasted for the rest of Czechoslovakia’s existence started, the era of the so-called ‘normalisation’. The communists declared that the state of the society in 1968 was abnormal, and that the society had to be ‘normalised’ again. In fact, this meant that the people who openly criticised the government were kicked out of their jobs, could not travel anywhere and their children could not study. The problem was that the whole nation was frustrated with the regime, the invasion and the party. People just could not see how they could change anything, so a vast majority of them remained silent and officially agreed with the new development, because they were afraid of the consequences of protesting. This explains why the support for the revolution was so thorough and the revolution itself so unexpected. Most of the people gave up any
hope that there would be any change in their lifetime, so when an opportunity for democracy (and this time it was real) appeared, people were consumed by happiness and excitement. The size of the revolutionary crowds speaks for itself - in Prague there were a million people, in Bratislava, about four hundred thousand. This accounts for basically the whole population of these cities. The role of the dissidents (who can be regarded as the intellectual elite) in the revolution was major: they were the ones who organised the civil movement. In the Czech Republic this was the group of people around Vaclav Havel’s Charta 77 movement, many of whom were philosophers, writers, lawyers or artists. In Slovakia the dissidents came mainly from the religious environment, but also a number of these participated in Charta 77. The dissidents were the ones who created the ideas and programmes of the future development; they were the faces of the revolution, speaking on television, radio or newspapers. The majority of them were people of very high moral standards, who were prepared to risk their freedom and safety for democracy. The stories of the dissidents after the revolution are very interesting and depict the social development of that era very well; I shall come back to them later. The leaders of the revolution could clearly distinguish between good and evil. They imagined an almost ideal society, and many of them believed that the new consciousness of the people
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