Lessons from Prague

Have you ever wondered: what year of the last century do you consider it personified? My answer: 1968.

40 years ago, and it was in April-May, there was a whole scattering of the brightest events that shook, if not overturned, the foundations that seemed unshakable. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4th. On April 10, the Communist Party newspaper of Czechoslovakia Rude pravo published the Program of Action, the proclamation of the Prague Spring. In May, France was rocked by student unrest. There was a wave of protests in the United States against the Vietnam War.

So what, the reader yawns, such are the “roaring sixties”, and why, in fact, remember them today? I undertake to prove that 1968 is worth remembering. In 1968, I studied at a school, it was located in Berlin, in what was then the capital of the GDR. In total, there were two Berlins, which is why the TV programs of the other were freely broadcast in each of them. So I was a viewer who watched, first of all, on Western television what was happening in Prague and Paris. I perceived what was happening as taught: in Paris there is a revolution, which means that the students are “for us”, in Prague “they” are trying to win back. A lot has changed since then, and so have I.

Now I am sure not only that what happened in Prague, Paris and the USA has a deep inner connection, but also that this connection is not at all the one that I imagined at first. For the first time I thought about it when Soviet tanks appeared on the streets of Prague. I figured it out much later.

For me, the key is the Prague Spring. A failed attempt to build "socialism with a human face". Humanized socialism was also dreamed of in the USSR; this dream unites the generation of the sixties. I'm not afraid to seem blasphemous: the attempt did not take place because of the tanks. Do not rush to anathema.

I propose to think about this: the Prague Spring was born by the Kosygin economic reform, but in Prague from the very beginning they did not limit themselves to the economy. The Prague Spring showed where the construction of "socialism with a human face" is leading. The Kosygin reform was buried. But the Prague route went through Gorbachev's perestroika to the very end. Conclusion: the construction of humanized socialism did not take place because if you build it seriously, then you have to say goodbye to any socialism.

Do you still think that the Prague Spring lost? It all depends on what height you look at. After all, it was the first leap into the future, which came three decades later. And the main thing in this breakthrough is new values. Freedom of enterprises from the dictates of the state, the renunciation of a monopoly on power by one party, guarantees of political and property rights of citizens, freedom to travel abroad - all these are the slogans of the Prague Spring.

Now it's time to remember Paris and Martin Luther King. What was the New Left fighting for? For the rights of students to participate in the management of the educational process. For freedom from conscription in the army. For the rights of youth. Against hardened traditions and bureaucracy in all its forms. Without the Parisian barricades, even the usual crowd on the streets of European cities would look different. Yes, the drug market expanded, yes, some of the “May revolutionaries” later ended up in the ranks of the Rote Armee Fraction, the “Red Brigades” and other terrorist organizations, but the main thing is that it was an assault on the old society, without which it would not have been updated, but it was updated, rethinking human rights. With Martin Luther King, everything is textbook clear: his death was part of the victorious struggle for the rights of blacks, who have since become African Americans.

I will return to Prague. It not only paved the way for perestroika, it proved that the main thing in it is the protection of human rights. This means that Moscow should continue to learn the lessons of the Prague Spring.