When the people of Prague woke up on the morning of August 21, 1968, they saw that Warsaw Pact tanks had occupied key parts of the city. It was the end of the "socialism with a human face" experiment, which began on January 5, 1968, when Alexander Dubcek took over as secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Shortly thereafter, on April 9, the program for the Czechoslovak road to socialism was published, and on June 27, two thousand Czechoslovak figures signed a manifesto, calling for more freedoms and a faster pace of democratic reforms.
BY SAKI MOUMZI
SOURCE:DAILY
This course of events confirms the thesis that in totalitarian regimes a small hole of freedom quickly turns into a huge rift that threatens to topple the regime. The Soviet leadership had realized this since the Hungarian uprising in October-November 1956 and would not allow any Warsaw Pact country to experiment with new patterns of organizing the political, economic and social life of its citizens.
It is precisely for this reason that Leonid Brezhnev formulated the doctrine of "limited national sovereignty", which was specified with the position that "if a serious problem appears in a popular democracy, this is a problem for all popular democracies" which have an obligation to resolve by all means, before it spreads. All the Soviet leaderships considered anything that challenged the way socialism was built in the USSR and its model of power to be a problem.
The ignominious end of the "Prague Spring" proved that socialism with a human face could not exist. It may be that this "humane" socialism is constantly sought by some incurable romantics, but the facts make this wandering of theirs ultimately a psychotherapy. They chase utopia within the dystopian legacy of the "existent". Historically, it turned out that the central dilemma was and remains one:socialist barbarism or liberal bourgeois democracy?
Indisputable proof was the end of the Eurocommunist current that disintegrated as soon as the existing socialism collapsed. His justification was only apparent, because he never questioned the Marxist theory, which was the matrix of evil. He was merely seeking to review her. Its leaders never admitted that the problem of socialist barbarism lay in the theory, which was criminal, and not in its implementation.