Prague Spring

Excerpts from Jiří Pernes in “Communist Czechoslovakia on a Journey from the Consolidation of Totalitarianism Towards a Liberalization of the Regime (1959-1967)”

 

“The radio and also television, which was quickly becoming a mass medium, began to broadcast fresh, objectively delivered information, as well as shows featuring Western pop music. Young people turned to Western fashions both in clothing and hairstyles, driving their teachers and orthodox functionaries round the twist. Furthermore, Czechoslovak cinema experienced its golden age, giving rise to a great many films that came to win international acclaim…

 

“Authorities took great pains to put a stop to the new wave… But since the Communist government no longer used brutal violence against its opponents, its chances to curb the activities were smaller than small. The surge of criticism came to a head in 1967, at the 4th Czechoslovak Writer’s Conference, which came to symbolize a search for new horizons towards which the society should march and for the democratization of life as it was known. In their contributions, Luvdík Vaculík, Milan Kundera and others spoke the hearts and minds of almost everybody int he country… The conference organizers and the keynote speakers were subject to social discrimination by the regime and lost their CPCz membership, their works were banned again after a long periods of being tolerated, and the Literary Newspaper was seized from the Czechoslovak Writer’s Union and put under the wings of the Ministry of Culture to make sure it would be publish regime-approved articles…

 

“Before long, the Prague Spring took the country by storm. It was the year 1968.”[1]

An excerpt from Oldřich Tůma in “The Half-Life: the Communist Regime’s Greatest Crisis (1967-1971)”

 

“The Swirling ferment that engulfed Czech and Slovak society in 1968 had several different sources. Popular discontent with the current state of affairs, perceived by and large as discontent with the current national and party leadership, was on the increase both in society and within the party’s ranks. More and more people were becoming conscious of the unsatisfactory social and economic development, their discoveries reinforced by the newly acquired opportunities for extensive travel, including to capitalist countries. They were able to see with their own eyes the degree to which Czechoslovakia lagged behind the countries west of its borders, countries that only a generation earlier had been more or less its equals. While they may not have pinned the blame for this unfavorable development directly on the Communist system, they certainly attributed it to heavy-handed, inefficient governance of their current leaders.

 

“Within the CPCz’s ranks, the desire for change was represented mainly by the middle-aged generation of intellectuals, thinkers, and artists. That is to say, people who had, in their back in the post-war years, been staunch, enthusiastic proponents of Communist ideology and the construction of a new social system, but who over time had assumed a critical stance, realizing the risks involved in Czechoslovakia’s fatal setback in many domains… Now they were searching for new alternatives, but always within the framework of the system, never against it.”[2]

For more information, visit The Prague Spring Archive by the University of Texas at Austin, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Warsaw Pact Invasion

Excerpts from Mark Kramer in “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion in Historical Perspective”

 

“This eight-month-long experiment, widely known as the ‘Prague Spring,’ came to a decisive end in the early morning hours of 21 August 1968, when hundreds of thousands of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia on behalf of ‘healthy forces in the local Communist Party who set about reinstating a hard-line Soviet-style regime…

 

“Combat soldiers from Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary and a liaison unit from East Germany took part in the invasion, which began at 11:00 p.m. (Moscow time) on 20 August…

 

“Soviet airborne forces and KGB special operations personnel spearheaded the invasion, and they were followed within a few hours by nearly 170,000 regular Soviet troops. (In subsequent days, nearly 300,000 more Soviet soldiers moved into Czechoslovakia, bringing the total to around 450,000-500,000.) Within hours, the Soviet-led units seized control of Czechoslovakia’s transportation and communications networks and surrounded all the main Communist pParty and government buildings in Prague and other cities. Soviet troops began methodically occupying key sites (including military bases and airfields) and setting up new communications and broadcasting facilities… the whole of Czechoslovakia fell under Soviet military control.”[3]

For more information, visit the Wilson Center Digital Archive on the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia

Jan Palach

An excerpt from Karin Andriolo in “The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide”

 

“Protest suicide attempts to draw the attention of others to something that, in the suicide’s perception, constitutes a wrong of moral, political, or economic dimension… If a protest suicide were to reach its ideal goal, attention would initiate action that, ultimately, would right the wrong… The above definition of protest suicide contains… (1) An action invokes (2) a reaction based on (3) the premise that the action, indeed has the potential to trigger such a response.”[4]

An essay by Matthew McCarthy ’17: “Jan Palach and his Legacies”

 

Jan Palach (1948-1969) was born and raised in Všetaty, a small village thirty miles north of Prague in the Mělník District of the Central Bohemia Region, Czech Republic. Growing up, his family owned a confectionary (cukrářství) with a storefront in the village square; his father ran the family business, while his mother spent her days at home with Jan and his older brother, Jiří. Yet following the February 1948 coup, which resulted in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz) taking control of the government in Prague, the Palachs, like so many self-employed families, were pressured to close the doors of their family business. By 1957, they had forfeited their confectionary business to the state.[5]

 

Despite this, Palach’s mother joined the CPCz in 1957 so that he and his brother might be able to study at the district high school and subsequently attend university. In the fall of 1963, Palach began his studies at Mělník Secondary Comprehensive School, where he graduated from in the spring of 1966. He had intended to study history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, and though he passed the necessary entrance exams that summer, his application for admission was rejected due to a large applicant pool. He enrolled instead at the University of Economics in Prague, where he began his studies in the fall of 1966.[6]

 

While at the University of Economics, Palach witnessed firsthand the Prague Spring of 1968. He graduated that semester after passing his final examinations, and applied once more for admission into the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague over the summer. This time, Palach was admitted, and he began attending the Faculty in August 1968 as Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia.[7] When he was not attending class, Palach was participating in the occupational strike organized by students at the Faculty. This ultimately unsuccessful protest led Palach to believe that more radical means were necessary to overthrow the occupation. In January 1969, Palach wrote to the student leader of the strike, Lubomír Holeček, his plan to occupy the national radio station and call for a protest. Palach never did receive a response from Holeček. On January 16, Palach wrote more four letters: one served as a suicide note, while the others were addressed to former University of Economics classmate Ladislav Žižka, Holeček, and the Union of Czechoslovak Writers. In each note, Palach demanded freedom of speech through the abolishing of state censorship and the cessation of the dissemination of Zprávy, the state newspaper. He claimed that he was part of a larger network of students who were prepared to protest through self-immolation, and that if his requests were not met within five days, others would follow suit. After drafting his letters, Palach headed from his dormitory at the Faculty to the National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square with a briefcase containing his suicide note and a barrel of petrol. A few feet away from the first of the front entrance steps to the museum, Palach took off his coat, doused himself in petrol, and self-immolated.[8]

 

Palach managed to run down the square no more than a few hundred feet before collapsing. Paramedics and police rushed to the scene, and Palach was transported to the nearby Vinohrady Hospital in Prague. While being admitted, he told the nurses that he had not attempted suicide; he compared himself to the Buddhists monks in Vietnam, stating that he had self-immolated in protest. He insisted that the larger group of students he mentioned in his letters was real, and a police investigation into this network began immediately. Palach refused to give up the names of those in the group, and three days later, on January 19, 1969, he died from third-degree burns and their complications.[9]

 

As news of Palach’s self-immolation spread through Prague, students began to gather in protest at the site of his self-immolation, where they commenced a hunger strike on January 18 that lasted until January 21. On January 20, thousands of people from all throughout Prague and the surrounding area met at the National Museum, before marching down Wenceslas Square to the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, where they gathered in square outside the building. In honor of Palach, the organizers of the march, the Union of the Students of Bohemia and Moravia, informally renamed the space Jan Palach Square (náměstí Jana Palacha).

 

Similar responses to the self-immolation continued through the completion of the necessary funeral ceremonies on January 25, 1969. Of particular note was the large attendance at the exhibition of his remains on January 24 in the main administrative building of Charles University (Karolinum); tens of thousands of visitors came to pay their respects to Palach. Immediately following the funeral, the regime in Prague began to increase the presence of public authorities at such demonstrations, ultimately reducing the number and strength of Palach-related protests. By late February, talk of Palach and his self-immolation was but a recent memory.

 

Yet as Palach suggested upon his admittance into the hospital immediately following his protest, he was not the first, nor would he be the last, to self-immolate as a means of radical demonstration against oppressive regimes. As noted earlier, Palach defended his actions while in the hospital, comparing them to those of the Buddhist monks protesting against their persecution in Vietnam by the South Vietnamese government. Indeed, on June 11, 1963, Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức had self-immolated at a busy road intersection in Saigon. Photos of his protest circulated throughout the world, attracting international attention to the policies of the South Vietnamese government toward Buddhist monks.

 

It is assumed that Palach had knowledge not only of Thích Quảng Đức and his protest, but that he was aware of the self-immolations of American Norman Morrison, Pole Ryszard Siwiec, and Ukrainian Vasyl Makuch as well: on Novemeber, 5, 1965, Morrison had doused himself in kerosene and self-immolated in front of the Pentagon to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War[10]; Siwiec set himself on fire in a stadium in Warsaw to demonstrate against Polish involvement in invasion and subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia on September 12, 1968[11]; on November 6, 1968, Makuch self-immolated on the main boulevard in Kiev to protest the Soviet regime and its occupation of satellite and Eastern Bloc countries more broadly.[12] It is likely that Palach, through his radical protest, considered himself the next step in a larger chain reaction of demonstrations against occupying, oppressive regimes through self-immolation.

 

Indeed, those self-immolators that followed Palach certainly viewed themselves and their suicide protests in this vein. On January 20, 1968, just four days after Palach self-immolated at the front entrance to the National Museum in Prague, sixteen year-old Hungarian Sándor Bauer set himself on fire at the steps of the National Museum in Budapest, Hungary. When questioned, Bauer implicitly mentioned Palach and his protest, stating that he had self-immolated to protest the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the presence of the Soviet Army in Hungary.[13] That same day in Pilsen, Czech Republic, Josef Hlatavý doused himself with kerosene and self-immolated, citing Palach as his inspiration. Bauer and Hlatavý would both pass away from complications related to their setting themselves on fire. About a month after Bauer and Hlatavý self-immolated, Jan Zajíc, a student from the eastern part of the country that had participated in the hunger strike at the National Museum in honor of Palach, set themselves on fire in a building on Wenceslas Square. In a suicide note, he stated that “‘In spite of what Jan Palach did out life is returning to its old ways, and that is why I decided to wake up your conscious as torch number 2.’”[14] If Zajíc acted as torch number two, Evžen Plocek can be considered torch number three. Plocek was a young adult who, like Zajíc, thought of themselves as part of a larger network of self-immolators protesting oppressive occupying regimes.[15]

For more information, visit Jan Palach: Charles University Multimedia Project by Charles University

References

[1] Jiří Pernes, “Communist Czechoslovakia on a Journey from the Consolidation of Totalitarianism Towards a Liberalization of the Regime (1959-1967),” in A History of the Czech Lands, ed. Jarolsav Pánek, Oldřich Tůma, et alii (Prague, Czech Republic: Charles University in Prague Karolinum Press, 2009), 534-535.

[2] Tůma Oldřich, “The Half-Life: the Communist Regime’s Greatest Crisis (1967-1971),” in A History of the Czech Lands, ed. Jarolsav Pánek, Oldřich Tůma, et alii, (Prague, Czech Republic: Charles University in Prague Karolinum Press, 2009), 539-540.

[3] Mark Kramer, “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion in Historical Perspective,” in The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, ed. Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2010), 35; 48-49.

[4] Karin Andriolo, “The Twice Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (Mar., 2006): 102.

[5] Petr Blažek et al.. “Jan Palach: Charles University Multimedia Project.” Charles University. Accessed 01/30/2017. www.janpalach.cz.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Tůma, 555-560.

[8]  Petr Blažek et al.. “Jan Palach: Charles University Multimedia Project.”

[9] Ibid.

[10] King, Sallie B. “They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self Immolators during the Vietnam War.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 20, (2000): 127.

[11] Petr Blažek et al.. “Jan Palach: Charles University Multimedia Project.”

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.