Publisher's Synopsis
The original sources compiled in this volume, many of which have not previously been available in English, will allow students of communism to examine more closely both the substance of change in Czechoslovakia prior to Soviet intervention in August 1968 and the subsequent disarray in the international Communist movement.
Robin Remington has selected documents to show, first, what was actually happening in Czechoslovakia before invasion. Ow had what George Modelski calls "Communist culture" with its own literature, symbols, and ritual behavior declined in Prague? This section includes major statements on such questions as freedom of the press, the role of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Czech-Slovak constitutional federation, the importance of interest groups within a Communist state, and the controversial Action Program of the new Dubcek government.
The second and third sections of the book contain papers on Czechoslovak liberalization and orthodox response. The documents show increasingly concerned Soviet and East European reactions, pressures put on Prague, and negotiations, which, failing, led to invasion.
The book's fourth section deals with the invasion and the split in world communism. It shows postinvasion justification from Moscow combined with deviant reactions from other Communist parties. Specifically, documents demonstrate where parties normally so far apart as the Chinese and the French stood in relation to the invasion, and they discuss reverberations in Yugoslavia and Rumania, Cuba, North Vietnam, and Italy.
The text includes six cartoons from Czechoslovak journals, seventy-two documents, and thirty-five commentaries by Robin Remington, who is Research Associate in Communist Studies, M.I.T. Center for International Studies.
Winter in Prague is the fourteenth book in the Studies in Communism, Revisionism, and Revolution series, William E. Griffith, general editor.
