Alaksandr Hužalouski

Abstract

The study is devoted to one of the most difficult episodes of Czech/Czechoslovak and more widely – modern European history, commonly known as the “Prague Spring”, as it reflected on the Soviet Belarusian society. It shows how the official media reacted to Alexander Dubček election to the post of first secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, to the reforms aimed at expanding the rights and freedoms of citizens and decentralizing power in the country, as well as to the deployment of Warsaw Pact troops on the territory of Czechoslovakia. After the entry of Soviet troops and the suppression of protests in Czechoslovakia, the Belarusian leadership sought to preserve the political and economic values ​​that had prevailed in the USSR until the beginning of the “Prague Spring”. In the face of a strong official ideological campaign that unfolded in the Soviet Union to condemn Czechoslovak reformers as “agents of imperialism”, a small number of Soviet Belarusians openly supported democratic changes in the “fraternal socialist country”. Reservists refused to be sent to Czechoslovakia, representatives of the working class and intelligentsia expressed their open protest against the deployment of the Soviet troops in a verbal form, unknown persons secretly pasted leaflets that supported the Czechoslovak reforms. A much larger number of the Soviet Belarus residents expressed a hidden protest against the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia, understanding on intuitive level the futility of coercion to love.