Hopes and Tragedy: The Prague Spring from a Polish Perspective

'The Action Programme', announced on 5 April 1968, while reiterating the principle of the leadership of the Communist Party, proclaimed the intention of the party reformers to change the political system in the direction of parliamentary democracy [Remington 1969: 88-137]. The British historian Archie Brown, in his biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, emphasised the impact of the Prague Spring on the generation of 'shestidesyatniki'-young communists for whom the period of the early 1960s was the most important political experience [Brown 1996: 40]. Since the future reformist leader of the USSR belongs to this generation, it is evident that indirectly the Czechoslovak reform movement had an impact on his political views. In June 1967, the Six-Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbours provided the nationalistic faction a unique opportunity to launch a political campaign ostensibly directed against alleged 'Zionists' but in fact aimed at the elimination of the best-known reformers from the leadership of the ruling party. A special field of cooperation I had with Czechoslovak sociologists was military sociology. Since 1958 I was the head of the chair of military sociology in the Military Political Academy in Warsaw-the first such chair in a military academy in the world.