Memory of the Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Post-August History 1968–1989
Manipulation, Oblivion, and Conservation
Abstract
The meaning of the Warsaw Pact intervention in August 1968 soon became a matter of political manipulation. The spontaneously shared notion of the “occupation” quickly turned into its very antithesis. The postulate of the “friendly assistance” of the Soviet Army gradually promoted on the official level played a key role in the policy of the so-called consolidation. As a consequence, the Prague Spring was denigrated as an attempted counterrevolution. The memory of the August “occupation” disappeared from the public sphere: It went underground or was pushed into the private sphere. The idea of the heroic and victorious fight against the counterrevolution, so much cherished by leftist radicals, reached its peak by the end of 1970 when it was confirmed by an official document. After that, it started losing its momentum as if the Prague Spring and the August events were rather due to fall into oblivion. But in 1989, the relevance of the 21st August suddenly reemerged in public protests against the Communist régime, which were taking place on that date. The article explores the coexistence/parallel lives of the three conflicting memories of the August 68 during the post-August history of normalization mentioned below: the privatized memory of occupation, the radical memory of fraternal assistance, and the policy of oblivion.
Keywords
Czechoslovakia; Soviet army; Prague Spring; normalization; memory
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Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague Czechia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4580-3427
Marie Černá is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences, Prague. She focuses mainly on the social and political history of the communism.
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