Pražské jaro 1968 v zrcadle běloruské sovětské společnosti
Prague Spring 1968 reflected by the Belarusian Soviet Society

Summary/Abstract: The study focuses on one of the most difficult episodes of Czech/Czechoslovak and, more broadly, modern European history, commonly known as the Prague Spring, as it was reflected in the Belarusian Soviet society. It shows how the official media reacted to the election of Alexander Dubček as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Central Committee (ÚV KSČ), 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 invasion 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”. Some reservists refused to be sent to Czechoslovakia, some representatives of the working class and intelligentsia expressed their open protest against the deployment of the Soviet troops in a verbal form, and 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.

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