Občanská společnost a její význam v období Pražského jara
Civil society and its significance at the time of the Prague Spring

Summary/Abstract: The Prague Spring reform movement of 1968 had a markedly revitalizing effect on Czechoslovak society. The long suppressed instincts of civil society were reawakened within just a few weeks. Dozens of periodicals started to come out together with hundreds of formerly banned books, traditional associations were being restored and new were being founded. All this was mostly inspired by spontaneous movement from below. Along with the revival of civil society, interest was growing among the public in subjects that had been inadmissible until then. This concerned in particular the crimes of the communist justice, political plurality, and the legitimacy of the leading position of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in Czechoslovakia’s life. Civil society at the time of the Prague Spring was characterized by three basic features: firstly, almost all strata of society joined the process of social changes, secondly, it was for the first time in twenty years that civil society presented itself as a power factor which the ruling communists could not ignore or suppress, and thirdly, this new force manifested itself most strongly during the days of Czechoslovakia’s occupation by Warsaw Treaty forces in August 1968, when an overwhelming majority of the country’s population stood up against the forceful interruption of the revitalizing process. All this made the consequences suffered in the subsequent months yet worse and the civil society restored in the first half of 1968 quickly petered out, suffocated by the changes brought forth by the process of normalization. It thus „froze“ in the winter of 1968 and in the course of 1969 as quickly as it “blossomed” in the spring of 1968, with no evident traces of its existence left after 1970.

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