Abstract

The Prague Spring has heen characterized as a national crisis, as a technocratic plan that failed, as an antibureaucratic revolution with a humanistic ideology, as a revolution from the top, as a revolt of the intellectuals, as a hasty improvisation, as a creeping counterrevolution, as a rebellion against Leninism, as a concrete Utopia, as an ill-timed experiment, as a traffic accident of history, or — as a miracle.

The Prague Spring inaugurated the period of democratic revolutions in the “socialist” societies. It was the first phase of an extraordinary, historically important attempt for a socialist revolution of a new type in the spirit of European Marxist humanism.