1968

Milan Bárta - A remedy for all the lacks? Study‑analytical work in the Ministry of the Interior in the 1960s
Abstract

In context of the social development in communist Czechoslovakia, voices calling for the need for fundamental reforms also began to be heard in the security apparatus in the mid-1960s. Following the example of the Soviet Union and according to the instructions of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) leadership, a study‑analytical group was established in 1963 in the Ministry of the Interior, which was expanded to the Study Department in 1966 and to the Study Institute during the Prague Spring in early August 1968. It brought together highly educated workers who maintained contacts with reformists in the ranks of the Communist Party. Against the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior and the State Security (StB), defending the continuation of the tendencies of the strictly repressive component following the 1950s, they advocated the modernization of the ministry, where the State Security would significantly reduce its activities, especially against Czechoslovak citizens. The conflict culminated in 1968 during the Prague Spring, when Josef Pavel became Minister of the Interior. The reforms prepared by the Study Institute were to become a new program for the reorganization of the security apparatus. The subsequent entry of the troops of the five states of the Warsaw Pact into Czechoslovakia in August 1968 definitively resolved that the security forces, and in particular the StB, would remain the mainstay of the regime, still associated primarily with repression against internal opponents.

Alaksandr Hužalouski - Prague Spring 1968 Reflected by the Belarusian Soviet Society
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.