Prague Spring Archives - Not Even Past

IHS Talk: 50 Years Since Prague Spring: Czechoslovak Dreams and Cold War Realities

This panel offers a retrospective examination of the 1968 Czechoslovak “Prague Spring”, or what the LBJ administration labeled the “Czechoslovak crisis.” Panelists Dr. Mary Neuburger, Professor of History and Director, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and Dr. Jeremi Suri, Professor of History and Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs, offer their insights into the 1968 reform movement and popular response in the context of internal Bloc transformation and the “global 1960s.” They also discuss the implications of the Soviet (or Warsaw Pact) Invasion of Czechoslovakia and the US decision not to intervene for East-West Cold War engagement. 50 years after the event, both panelists tap into the past due decades of scholarship to re-examine the regional and global importance of these events and their aftermath.

Dr. Neuburger also introduced the Prague Spring Archive Project, an open-access resource consisting of digitized documents – such as intelligence reports, briefs, and day-to-day commentary by US policymakers – on the Prague Spring held at the LBJ Library.

More on the Prague Spring Archive Project:

Dr. Neuburger and Ian Goodale, CREEES digital librarian, reflect on phase one of the project, and Ian Goodale discusses media and the Prague Spring.

Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive

By Ian Goodale

In an unpublished letter to the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestiia, Liudmila Chukovskaya wrote that “muteness has always been the support of despotism.” This quote is cited in the booklet, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Public, compiled by the Radio Liberty Committee in New York in August 1968 to analyze the coverage of the Soviet invasion of Prague. During the Cold War, the media—and radio broadcasts in particular—were used as weapons by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in their battle to define a geopolitical narrative in line with their respective national interests. By examining the ways that both U.S.-backed and Soviet-supported media sources attempted to portray the events of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, this booklet serves as an important resource not just for understanding this specific event, but for how media was used by the two superpowers in their struggle for power and influence.

Soviet invasion of Prague, 1968 (via Mitteleuropa).

The two media sources analyzed by the booklet, Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow, were key propaganda arms of the United States and the USSR, respectively. In addition to the comparison of the coverage of these events by Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow, the booklet contains evaluations of the Czech events by staff members of the Radio Liberty Committee in Munich and New York, utilizing various documents and press clippings unavailable to the general American public. As such, the document provides a comprehensive overview of the events surrounding the Prague Spring as they were depicted by the popular and state-run media. This is not a complete narrative of the invasion, but a direct account of the ways it was portrayed by opposing sides of the conflict.

The front page of the Radio Liberty booklet (via author).

Radio Liberty, a radio station funded by the U.S. government to counter the Soviet-funded Radio Moscow, was a key piece of the U.S.’s propaganda strategy in its fight against the spread of communism in Europe. Founded in 1951 as an anti-communist news service directly targeting the Soviet Union, it began broadcasting in 1953, four days before the death of Stalin. It eventually expanded from its initial broadcasting base in Germany to include transmitters in Portugal, Spain, and Taiwan, the latter of which was used to direct broadcasts to Russia’s eastern provinces. By December of 1954, Radio Liberty was broadcasting in 17 different languages.

Radio Moscow, a state-run station in the Soviet Union, served a similar propagandistic role, broadcasting in German, English, and French in an attempt to reach western European audiences. The U.S. began to be targeted by the broadcasts in the 1950s, during the Cold War, with transmitters situated first in the Moscow region and, later, in Vladivostok and Magdalan. In the early 1960s the station began broadcasting in African languages, further broadening its audience.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still has an office in Prague and broadcasts in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East (via Wikimedia Commons).

The booklet notes the differing strategies of the two countries in their handling of the invasion. Soviet media, for example, simply refused to acknowledge a host of inconvenient truths regarding Czechoslovakia, remaining, as the booklet notes, “blind and mute” to student demonstrations, the broader democratization of Czech society, and even the replacement of party leader Antonín Novotný with Alexander Dubček. While Radio Liberty broadcast favorable news widely to promote its agenda–such as the fact that Czech citizens missed “no occasion…to let the Soviet troops know they were not welcome…students walked brazenly with flags under the long guns of the tanks”–Radio Moscow remained silent on unfavorable events.

But this silence could not last. The Soviet strategy soon transitioned from this calculated muteness to one of scathing criticism of liberalization in Czechoslovakia. As Izvestiia proclaimed on September 7th, Radio Liberty and other Western media outlets–described as “press and radio working in the service of the monopolies”–were creating “vile anti-communist inventions” to undermine the Soviet Union. “Every day,” the paper proclaimed, “brings new proof of the provocatory role of imperialist propaganda.”

Alexander Dubček attempted to reform socialism in Czechoslovakia, which antagonized hardliners in Moscow and staunch Czech and Slovak anti-socialists (via Wikimedia Commons).

By comparing the reports from Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow side-by-side, these differing strategies become all the clearer. Situated within the broader Prague Spring archive, the document is a source that helps to understand how both the U.S. and Soviet governments strategized their media communications in a cultural and political battle, spinning events to serve their respective narratives. In an era of conflict and confusion over the geopolitical future, portrayal of the present became a battleground of ideologies, the media a weapon to promote each side’s agenda.

Olivia L. Gilliam and Edward P. Pell, August, 1968. Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Public. The University of Texas, Austin, TX. Accessed January 21, 2017. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/38273
doi:10.15781/T2PN8XF39

More by Ian Goodale on Not Even Past:
The Prague Spring Archive Project.

The Prague Spring Archive Project

By Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents from the the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that shed light on the Cold War. While select documents from the LBJ collection can already be found online, CREEES is working to digitize National Security country files from the former Eastern Bloc in their entirety. Because these documents are open record, the LBJ Presidential Library has allowed unlimited scanning and open access presentation of such documents. The hope is that they will appeal to a wide and inclusive audience of students, instructors, scholars, and the general public.

Phase One of this project, largely comprised of National Security Files on Czechoslovakia, is nearly complete. The bulk of the documents in this collection focus on the so-called “Czechoslovak Crisis,” otherwise known as the Prague Spring, and its aftermath. The Prague Spring was one of the most dramatic and popular experiments in Communist Party reform, which took place in Czechoslovakia beginning in January 1968, only to be crushed by an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops on August 21 of the same year. This event was a major turning point in the Cold War and the history of communism more generally as the wave of reforms brought such a high degree of hope and enthusiasm and its suppression precipitated such deep disillusionment in the region and among the global left. It was the end, in a sense, of any hope for the communist system to be reformed and as such could be seen as the beginning of the end for the system itself.

The LBJ Library documents on Prague Spring are a treasure trove for historical research as they chronicle the event through detailed intelligence reports and day-by-day commentary by US policy makers. They include briefs on global reactions to the crisis, which many at the time thought could precipitate World War III. These documents are valuable both from a US policy standpoint and for a deeper understanding of the events and developments within the region itself. As the documents are all in English, they have the potential to be used for everything from academic historical research to student research.

Helsinki demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ian Goodale, the new Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies & Digital Scholarship Librarian, worked closely with graduate students from the School of Information at UT Austin and undergraduate students from CREEES to photograph the documents in the reading room at the LBJ. He then collaborated with the UT Libraries to process the images into archival-quality PDFs for ingestion into Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository. These PDFs were made machine-readable so that they are full-text searchable in the repository and Ian worked to create extensive metadata for each document to make the collection more discoverable. Finally, the students in Mary Neuburger and Vlad Beronja’s Graduate Seminar on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies worked with Ian over the last semester to create a guide to the collection. Ian did an amazing job of building a Scalar website as a portal for the guide, which provides summary descriptions of most of the folders and specific links to some of the most interesting documents.

Careful attention was paid to making the site accessible both to academic researchers and to patrons conducting personal or non-academic research, with additional features planned that will extend the breadth of the site’s audience. A module that will include materials aimed at high school and middle school teachers and students, including sample lesson plans and educational activities, will be added in the future. For researchers who would like to explore what is available in the physical collections of the LBJ Library, the finding aid for the entire archival collection is also available on the site.

UT CREES is located in Burdine Hall (Zug55 via flickr).

The Prague Spring Archive portal is a resource that will continue to grow, with new content and features continually added and expanded upon. By providing open access to important primary source materials, the project will continue to contribute to international scholarly communities, utilizing practices and tools of the digital humanities to freely share its content in an attractive, easily navigable portal.

Digitization work on the larger Cold War project is ongoing, with new materials currently being photographed, processed, and added to Texas ScholarWorks by graduate student Nicole Marino and Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ian Goodale.

More by Mary Neuberger on Not Even Past:
Balkan Smoke: Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria.
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt.

Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests

By Aleksej Demjanski

The 1960s saw an explosion of student activism across the globe. This increase in youth movements for social change was so influential that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the Central Intelligence Agency illegally monitor student movements both at home and abroad. After some investigation, the CIA produced an over two-hundred-page report, titled “Restless Youth,” which discusses their findings on the activities of students and student groups in the United States as well as nineteen other countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe.

vietnam_war_protesters-_1967-_wichita_kans_-_nara_-_283625

Students in Kansas protest in 1967 against the Vietnam War (via Wikimedia Commons).

The report broadly details the general trends of how the “restless youth,” particularly university students, engaged in a range of anti-establishment activism such as university occupations, street marches, and sit-ins. The CIA report analyzes what issues caught the attention of students, whether they organized ad hoc or within existing organizations, how many students were attending universities, how they connected with other social groups, how they transnationally exchanged ideas, and what ideas inspired them to action. Overall, the report argues that many of the students turned to activism because of their frustration with the socioeconomic and political status quo and that they demanded more from their universities, communities, and governments.

The CIA report also notes that many students, mostly American and European, were inspired to protest by “Marxist social criticism” and the writings of C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon, and especially the American critical theorist and sociologist Herbert Marcuse. This Marxist social criticism, also known as Marxist or socialist humanism, stresses the importance of Karl Marx’s early writings and the need for a critical praxis directed against capitalism as well as against traditional Soviet or statist Marxism. Herbert Marcuse was a proponent of socialist humanism and significantly collaborated with the most well-known Marxist humanist philosophical movement of the time – Yugoslavia’s Praxis School.

herbert_marcuse_in_newton_massachusetts_1955

Herbert Marcuse in 1955 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The members of Yugoslavia’s Praxis School were prominent professors in the Faculties of Philosophy at both the Zagreb and Belgrade universities who supported Yugoslavia’s protesting university students in 1968. The CIA report has an entire chapter dedicated to the student movement in Yugoslavia, yet, this eleven-page section oddly makes no mention of the Praxis School and the support its members gave to Yugoslavia’s protesting university students. The report clearly makes the connection between Herbert Marcuse, Marxist humanism, and student protests, but it fails to make the broader connection to the socialist humanist Praxis School of Yugoslavia and its affiliates who joined university students in protest in the summer of 1968.

How could the CIA have missed this? Although the authors considered student activism to be a growing threat and a “worldwide phenomenon” fueled in part by this particular philosophical discourse of socialist humanism, they didn’t seem to be interested in the leading socialist humanist movement of the time, despite its influence on students in Yugoslavia and beyond. The Yugoslav government, on the other hand, didn’t miss this connection and became extremely interested in the Praxis School. Although the movement wasn’t pro-capitalist or anti-socialist, the Yugoslav leadership still viewed it as a threat due to its criticism of the ruling party – the League of Communists of Yugoslavia – for not fulfilling its promises to create a more just socialist society. Similar views toward student protests were taken by the authorities in nearby countries: in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring and in Poland. The Czechoslovak government also monitored its growing student movement and produced its own report which noted the students’ criticism of Czechoslovak socialism.

The student occupation of the University of Belgrade (via The Modern Historian).

Following the student occupation at Belgrade University in June 1968, the Yugoslav authorities quietly cracked down on dissenting students and professors. The main target was the leading cohort of the Praxis School, professors in the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. Slowly, but surely, eight professors from Belgrade – Mihailo Markovic, Ljubomir Tadic, Miladin Zivotic, Zagorka Golubovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, Nebojsa Popov, Triva Indjic, and Svetozar Stojanovic – were removed from their professorships at the university. The Yugoslav authorities claimed that the professors were the “ideological inspiration” and “practical organizers” of the student demonstrations and university occupation and as such needed to be stopped at all costs. They had become too influential and were improperly educating students with ideas that the Yugoslav socialist system of “self-management” was flawed. Aside from being sacked from their university positions the professors also lost financial support for their research and funding for their publication, the Praxis journal, was essentially cut. Although the Belgrade professors didn’t organize the protests, their Marxist humanism consciously or unconsciously provided the intellectual platform for students to criticize the Yugoslav system. The CIA was never able to put these pieces of the puzzle together and failed to capture this source of student discontent both at home and abroad.

CIA Report, “Restless Youth,” Intelligence File, National Security File, Box 3, LBJ Library.
Additional Sources:
Mihailo Marković and R. S. Cohen, Yugoslavia: The Rise and Fall of Socialist Humanism: A History of the Praxis Group. (2005)Paulina Bren, “1968 East and West: Visions of Political Change and Student Protest from across the Iron Curtain,” in Transnational moments of change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989, P. Kenney and G. Horn, eds. (2004)

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