CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The Soviet occupation and society’s weariness of political developments started bringing the conservative forces their first, and in the meantime modest, successes. Society was falling back into silence. The self-immolation of Jan Palach in front of the National Museum in Prague on 16 January and the subsequent self-immolation of Jan Zajíc on 25 February temporarily galvanized society from its lethargy, but by now the collaborationist and conservative forces within the KSČ were ready to usurp power. A good pretext was the so-called "ice-hockey" events of 28 March 1969 following Czechoslovakia’s victory over the Soviet Union, when unknown attackers demolished the Soviet Aeroflot offices on Wenceslas Square. As early as 17 April, Dubček was replaced at the head of the KSČ by Gustáv Husák who, despite his promise to maintain as much as possible of the Prague Spring, quickly took care of the unprecedented "normalization" of conditions. Everything quickly gathered pace – in one fell swoop the KSČ Central Committee and the National Assembly repealed documents adopted prior to the Warsaw Pact’s intervention, and mass demonstrations marking the first anniversary of the occupation were dispersed by Czechoslovak security forces. The Prague Spring was well and truly over.

POLAND

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was once dubbed the greatest 20th century Polish prose writer; others snubbed him for his sarcasm, lack of patriotism and ironic aloofness from the national myths, which in several of his works are presented in grotesque caricature. Both Communists and guardians of tradition had problems with his cosmopolitanism. Some of his work was published in pre-war Poland (Ferdydurke), the rest in other countries following his emigration in the run-up to the Second World War. His longest stay was in Argentina, where he worked as a bank clerk and occasional journalist. He spent his last years in Berlin and France. His work, influenced by existentialism and questioning Polish romantic messianism, was translated into 30 languages and won international renown. His main publisher became Jerzy Giedroyc’s Paris-based Literary Institute, which published most of his émigré output (Trans-Atlantyk, Pornografia, Kosmos, Dzienniki [Diaries]), and he also published in serial form in the periodical Kultura. The history of his progressive literary repatriation after 1956 reflects the political changes in his home country. Gombrowicz died on 25 July 1969 in Vence, near Nice.

HUNGARY

In response to Hungary’s participation in the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies, on 20 January 1969 seventeen-year-old apprentice Sándor Bauer torched himself in front of the National Museum in Budapest. His model was Jan Palach, who had self-immolated a few days earlier in Prague to protest against the Soviet occupation and the growing indifference of Czechs and Slovaks to the nascent “normalization” process. On 10 March, Hungarian television began broadcasting in colour, and at the end of the year the luxury Duna Intercontinental Hotel was opened in Budapest.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Following the changes in the KSČ leadership in the previous year, Husák began the steady dismantling of all the direct and indirect results of the Prague Spring. On 28 January, the Central Committee decided it was time for some purges in the KSČ’s ranks, euphemistically concealed by the need to “replace membership cards”. The aim was to "vet" KSČ members’ views on the reforms and to expel all those unwilling to accept the Soviet occupation and the "normalization" procedure which had just been launched. Everyone connected with the Prague Spring who failed to engage in appropriate Party-regulated “self-criticism” was subject to various forms of bullying. Those in question and their families were at risk of losing their jobs, being banned from publishing, being prevented from studying, and much more. The deployment of undercover agents, denouncements, and attempts to recruit as many confidants and informers as possible became a characteristic of the regime until its demise in 1989. No wonder, then, that Czechoslovakia experienced a wave of emigration, with 130,000 people – mostly elite, highly-educated professionals – taking flight. The signing of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union at Prague Castle on 6 May 1970 simply confirmed the re-direction of Czechoslovak policy into the depths of the Soviet Bloc. The dismal course of the whole of 1970 was underscored by the events towards the end of the year. First, in November (9-11 November), the Constituent Conference of the Socialist Youth Union was held. This organization replaced the Czechoslovak Youth Union, which had been completely disassembled, and guaranteed the restoration of the KSČ’s control over how young people were brought up. In December (10-11 December), the KSČ Central Committee took stock of internal developments following the replacement of Party membership cards. It was this Central Committee meeting that approved the contents of the document Lessons from the Crisis in the Party and Society after the 13th KSČ Congress. In terms of policy, this hardline text rejected the course of democratization steered by Dubček’s leadership and accepted full genuflection to the Moscow administration. The Lessons subsequently became the only possible interpretation of all events connected with the Prague Spring. Those who wanted to get ahead in Czechoslovakia’s “normalization” period were not allowed even to question the correctness of the Lessons.

POLAND

The drama of post-war Polish history cannot be understood without highlighting the tension between elite art and the culture of mass consumption, the moderate position on the intellectual opposition and the drastic power-fuelled interventions in cases of open revolt. In the second half of the 1960s, several popular serials were shown on Polish television (which started broadcasting on October 1952), including some which focused on the war. Captain Kloss (Stawka większe niż życie) was broadcast in two series in 1965-1968 and its main character, played by the popular Stanisław Mikulski, waged an intrepid war against the Third Reich, while Four from a Tank and a Dog (1966-1970) relentlessly made their way to Berlin (from the right side of world) accompanied by the Soviet Alsatian Sharik. Events at the end the year, however, deflected attention away from the television idyll. In response to increasing prices of basic foodstuffs, workers from several Polish port cities – Gdansk, Gdynia, Szczecin, and others – decided to engage in open, spontaneous rebellion, during which the Voivod Party Committee offices in the first-mentioned city burned to the ground. Following the deployment of the army, at least 41 people were killed and a further thousand injured up to 18 December. Part of the Party leadership, after securing the Kremlin’s support, took a risky step – the removal of the First Secretary. Gomułka was replaced by the Katowice Party Secretary Edward Gierek, the leader of a group known as "Katanga". Thus began a new era of "consumer socialism".

HUNGARY

The painter and graphic artist Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), a native of Pécs who spent his youth in Piešťany and then, in 1930, settled permanently in Paris, began to gain world fame in the mid-20th century when he published his Yellow Manifesto. His artistic experiments and play with visual kinetics, in which he drew on inspiration from the German Bauhaus and the Dutch De Stijl group, not only made their mark in the history of painting, but also influenced design, applied arts and architecture, where Vasarely’s favoured black-and-white contrasts and alternating regular geometric shapes enjoyed widespread use. He was helped in his work by his wife Klara and by emerging computer technology. He later collaborated with another outstanding Hungarian artist - Ernő Rubik. From the 1970s, Vasarely Museums began springing up around the world. The first was established on 5 June 1970 in Gordes, Provence; the opening of another, in Aix-en-Provence, was attended by President Georges Pompidou. Before the fall of Communism, two Vasarely Museums even appeared in Hungary, but an initiative to set up a centre in Piešťany, Slovakia, was thwarted by the rigid cultural conditions in Czechoslovakia.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The Fourteenth KSČ Congress held in May (25-29 May) intensified the normalization process in both its economic and societal aspects. The 1,183 delegates represented the 1,194,191 members remaining in the Party following the uncompromising purges (the Thirteenth KSČ Congress held in 1966 reported 1,698,002 members). Gustáv Husák, elected Secretary-General at the congress, consolidated his position here, and the KSČ broke free of its reformist past once and for all. This was reflected in the fact that, just prior to the KSČ Congress (19 May) the Party’s Central Committee definitively brought an end to the issue of the political trials of the 1950s without fully admitting that the KSČ was guilty of such judicial crimes. From the economic perspective, the Congress approved the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1971-1975), which was essentially a very moderate shift from the economic experiments of the Prague Spring to "tried-and-tested" command economy methods, with a particular accent on respect for the needs of the population. Paradoxically, as a result this compromise plan was, in principle, the only Czechoslovak Five-Year Plan to be achieved. Agriculture developed particularly rapidly in this period; this was a popular theme of the regime, intended to document the dynamic “socialist” standard of living. The regime glossed over the flip side of "socialist large-scale agricultural production": entirely unprecedented and drastic environmental damage and unreasonable use of artificial fertilizers. Environmental issues, neglected for a long time, were now being reflected directly in the health of the public. In the long term, another element designed to showcase real socialist Czechoslovakia – the mass construction of prefabricated high-rise blocks of flats – also had a devastating effect, disrupting the natural city planning of towns and destroying normal human relations with their anonymity. On the other hand, anonymity and alienation generally suited the needs of the regime, at least at first.

POLAND

Gierek’s reign (1970-1980) was ironically described by the historian Andrzej Paczkowski as la belle époque. The relaxation of passport policy, limited scope for private initiative in services and crafts, and liberalization in relation to the Church and culture initially concealed other, more unpleasant circumstances, such as debt. Compared to other "popular democracies", there were remarkable developments in the publishing business. The book Genealogy of the Unbowed (Rodowody niepokornych) by the Catholic journalist and subsequent opposition leader Bohdan Cywiński (1939), published in 1971, was not just a historical essay, but also a political gesture. The Polish tradition of revolution and revolt was interpreted by the author in a way that made it attractive to Catholics and conservatives. Although the intellectual influence of the book was unusual, it was not the only attempt to exploit a lack of vigilance in censorship and to offer an alternative view of the past, discussing the materialistic interpretation of history. Extensive historical work by a former member of the anti-Communist resistance from the 1940s, Paweł Jasienica (1909-1970) strengthened respect for the national past, although his 1969 defence of the French counter-revolution in Vendée in Thought on Civil War (Rozważania o wojnie domowej) was made available only ten years later in samizdat.

HUNGARY

Mátyás Rákosi (1892-1971) was one of the founding figures of the Hungarian Communist Party. In the pre-war period, due to his involvement in the Hungarian Republic of Councils and illegal actions, he was a star of the international Communist movement. Horthy’s regime handed him a long prison sentence, but in 1940 he was exchanged for battle-flags of the Hungarian rebel army, which the Tsar’s intervention troops had taken as spoils of war in 1848-49. After a spell in Soviet exile, in 1945 he returned to Hungary and became the indisputable leader of the Hungarian Communists. Under his leadership, the dictatorship of the proletariat quickly transformed into a personal dictatorship run by a narrow circle of individuals. In 1953, Rákosi was forced to concede the premiership to his rival, Imre Nagy. Even so, as the First Secretary of the Party he kept hold of power and, until the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, he successfully steered a path between disingenuous self-criticism and tough action against any opposition. His career was ended by the Kremlin, which in July 1956 agreed that "Matvey", the intimate name used by the Soviet Communists for Rákosi, must go. “For health reasons.” Immediately after, he flew into exile in the Soviet Union. After the defeat of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Kádár repeatedly refused to repeal Rákosi’s exile status, and in 1962, on the basis of an investigation into the illegal trials of the 1950s, had him expelled from the Party. Rákosi died on 5 February 1970.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The normalization process constantly and deliberately ate away at all remnants of the Prague Spring. The regime was hostile to and suspicious of any expression of free thought, work of art or simple innovation. Society was split into “us” and “them”: the all-powerful ruling political class and the silent citizens seeking – in the security of their private lives – an escape from oppressive reality. This is the source of the Czech obsession with weekend cabins and cottages and many similar phenomena. The normalization scheme was just as "beneficial" for the grey economy, small-time and large-scale corruption, and all kinds of bribery. Compulsory participation in Party and state rituals, such as the May Day celebrations, the peculiar celebration of International Women's Day, the Bolshevik October Revolution, and Czechoslovakia’s very own "Victorious" February, was rigorously monitored and assessed. At the KSČ Central Committee’s October meeting, the Party ideologist Vasiľ Bilak was thus able to praise the complete defeat of the rightwing even in terms of ideology, and highlight the need to "pay attention to socialist legitimacy, morality, lifestyle and the creation of socialist relations among people". This is also why, on 7 November 1972, the regime had no qualms about officially opening the exhibition "50 years of the Soviet Union" in Prague, which schools, work collectives, social organizations within the National Front, etc., were required to visit. Inertia, disillusionment and general suspicion became par for the course in the days of normalization. On the international stage, normalized Czechoslovakia, together with Poland and East Germany, began forming an "iron triangle" in Central Europe to make the region entirely and unreservedly devoted to the Soviet military and Soviet political interests. This included support for various extremist groups in the neighbouring "capitalist" states. The military preparedness of the bloc was symbolized, among other things, by a joint exercise involving the Warsaw Pact armies, called Shield 72, which took place in Czechoslovakia from 12 to 16 September.

POLAND

In Polish, the word "maluch" (“small one”) has several meanings – for example, it is a way of talking about young children. Under the PLR, this was the term most often used to refer to the small unmistakable Polish Fiat 126p. The history of this car is typical for the time – visions of consumerism and broken dreams. The new ruling class, seeking to “meet the needs of workers”, signed a contract with the Italian carmaker, which in 1972 began producing and exporting “Maluchs”, soon followed by Polish factories in Bielsko-Biała and Tychy. The Fiat 126 survived the fall of Communism, with production lasting until 2000, by which time more than 4.5 million had been manufactured. It was just a shame there were not many good roads. Until 1972, Poland had 380 km of motorways in Pomerania, Masuria and Silesia, which it inherited from the Germans, but failed to channel further investment into this area. The largest cities, including Warsaw, remained outside the motorway network. Ambitious projects launched in 1972 have still not been implemented today.

HUNGARY

A significant Hungarian minority lived in the Soviet Union, specifically in the territory of Sub-Carpathian Ukraine, which Stalin had taken from Czechoslovakia in 1945. Straight after the end of the Second World War, many people were deported to the Siberian gulags. In 1941, 245,000 inhabitants in this territory were registered as having Hungarian nationality; by 1959, the figure had dwindled to 146,000, before rising to 156,000 in 1989. The minority’s cultural and educational situation slowly improved after the distribution of Hungarian periodicals in this territory was permitted. In 1963, a Department of Hungarian Philology was opened at Uzhgorod State University, and three years later partial broadcasting in Hungarian was launched. In 1972, the Transcarpathian Hungarians tried to send the Soviet Politburo a petition drawing attention to the minority’s problems in the field of education, but were rebuffed.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

This, another year of normalization, resulted in unexpected success for the regime. The re-election of General Ludvík Svoboda, who by now had forgotten he ever supported the Prague Spring, as President of the Republic by the Federal Assembly on 22 March 1973 passed off slickly and without any problems. Constant improvements in the standard of living enjoyed by “normalized” society were clearly evidenced by the launch of regular colour broadcasting on Czechoslovak Television. The launch took place (unsurprisingly) on 9 May, the day regularly devoted to compulsory expressions of gratitude to the Soviet Union for liberating the country from the German occupation. A major foreign policy success was the reestablishment of normal relations with the neighbouring Federal Republic of Germany. After protracted negotiations initiated on 7 May, a Treaty on Mutual Relations between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany was finally signed in Prague on 11 December. This Treaty, inter alia, rejected the Munich Agreement as null and void. On the same day, the two countries established diplomatic relations at embassy level. On the Czechoslovak side, the restoration of normal relations was then, rather oddly, framed by Otakar Vávra’s two-part feature film Days of Betrayal (“Dny zrady”) aspiring to an authentic artistic interpretation of the Munich events, but peppered with the worst possible propagandistic clichés. Czechoslovakia failed in its attempts to reclaim 18.4 tonnes of monetary gold stolen by the Nazis in 1939 and seized in the United States after the war. This gold was eventually returned to Prague in February 1982. Conversely, complications persisted inside the "socialist" bloc – in particular in the economic field, where the overall technological gap suffered by the Sovietized economies was starting to make itself felt. The 27th Comecon Session in Prague, seeking to deepen socialist integration and coordination (5-8 June), was unable to rectify this situation. The pompous statement by members that "Comecon is emerging as a decisive factor in world development ..." could do nothing to alter this.

POLAND

Pop music was one of those artistic genres which the state authorities in the post-Stalinist era of real socialism did not mind too much. Indeed, it was regarded as a good export commodity. Although Maryla Rodowicz was never as popular in Czechoslovakia as, say, Karel Gott was in Germany, she gained new admirers after releasing Supraphon released her first record in 1972 and after she appeared a year later at the Bratislavská lyra festival, where she won the Grand Prix du Disque. The Polish had an opportunity to find out more about singers from other countries at the International Song Festival in Sopot, the glory years of which were in the second half of the 1970s. In 1978, the Czech singer Helena Vondráčková (the Czech Republic’s most successful female singer on the international stage) won the Grand prix here for her song Malovaný džbánku, and thirty years later her Polish star continues to shine brightly. The government was a lot less inclined towards "exports" of protest songs and other forms of alternative music, although songwriters such as Karel Kryl and Czesław Niemen find an audience on the other side of the Giant Mountains.

HUNGARY

The start of the 1970s saw the next round of political struggle, in which the conservative anti-reformists tried to strengthen their control over the intellectual sphere. One of those affected was Miklós Haraszti (1945), who, in his essay Darabbér, published in English in 1977, summed up his uncomplimentary memories of socialist work brigades. The essay had started circulating in samizdat form in 1973, and Haraszti was briefly arrested. The following year, Ivan Szelényi was arrested for his work Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979), written together with György Konrád, which described the unflattering prospects of the socialist system. Eventually, the regime forced Szelényi to emigrate. Szellem és erőszak (Spirit and Violence, 1978), a novel by the well-known writer Gyula Illyés, was banned. In 1973, moreover, the police dispersed demonstrators who, on 15 March, had come to celebrate the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 without official permission and with rather different slogans from those the regime propaganda would have thought up. .

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The United Nations International Conference in Stockholm initiated the declaration of 1974 as the Year of the Environment. This initiative was well received, even in the “normalization” conditions of Czechoslovakia, where environmental problems had been disparaged for many years. With help from the Institute of Landscape Ecology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the editorship of Mladý svět (necessarily fronted by the Socialist Youth Union), a new movement – Action Brontosaurus – was formed on 15 January 1974 with the aim of providing comprehensive and voluntary assistance to nature. The official motto was “The brontosaurus became extinct because it outgrew its options”. This unexpectedly thriving movement, drawing on the patronage of the Socialist Youth Union for essentially non-political activities that were unpleasant for the regime, trained the spotlight on many environmental issues and often met with significant success. Moreover, it did so during the devastating era of normalization. One famous case, at the beginning of the 1980s, was the fight to save the North Bohemian Jezeří Castle and its unique botanical garden, initially intended for demolition and removal. On 9 May 1974, the normalization process enjoyed one of its popular propagandistic "triumphs": the first part of the Prague metro – Line C – was put into operation as a project of “Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship”. The 6.6 km section of track included nine stations and, for the time, it was an interesting piece of architecture directly linked to the functionalist tradition. However, the Soviet Union’s "Friendship" was not exactly selfless, especially as the Czechoslovak government passed over the domestically developed R1 trains in favour of technologically obsolete Soviet Echs cars based on original German designs from 1934.

POLAND

Despite their fundamental ideological opposition, the Communists were pragmatic about trading with the West, and under Gierek’s government were positively eager. The profits returned by this venture, however, proved short-lived. Lenin said that the "capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them", but in Poland in the 1970s it was not the capitalists around whose necks the noose was being tightened. Foreign debt, which Gomułka had kept in check, constantly rose after Gierek arrived on the scene, climbing from 1.1 billion dollars in 1970 to 8.4 billion in 1976 and 24.1 billion in 1980. The structure of debt, over half of which started to be absorbed by credit repayments, was also developing unfavourably. Lack of economic responsibility was underlined by the fact that only 20% of credit facilities were used for investments that would generate the profits needed to finance repayment. The rest was poured into the purchase of raw materials and foodstuffs which domestic production was unable to manufacture in sufficient quantities to meet demand. Poland began to live on the never-never. The government elite, who did not know how to deal with social unrest other than by deploying repressive forces, was caught in its own trap. The level of indebtedness was a thorn in the side of democratic governments after 1989.

HUNGARY

Fifty-four squares and six colours – this is the world-famous three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, one of the world’s best-selling toys (by 2005, 300 million cubes were reported to have been sold), which was invented by Ernő Rubik (1944) in 1974. Rubik graduated from the Technical University in Budapest and between 1971 and 1975 worked as an architect. He then became a professor at the Budapest University of Applied Arts. In 1990, he was elected president of the Hungarian Engineering Academy.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The relentlessly progressing normalization process celebrated success when normalized society was shown, among other things, to be in the grip of steadily growing consumerism. One of the symbols of the apparent prosperity of socialist society was Kotva, the largest department store of the time, which was opened in Prague on 10 February 1975. Its roof was soon decorated with an ugly banner bearing the terse slogan “Glory to the KSČ“. Paradoxically, the wilting Czechoslovak economy never succeeded in completely supplying all corners of the oversized department store. No one was left in any doubt about the future direction of Czechoslovakia when the gravely ill President, General Ludvík Svoboda, was deposed and in his place, on 28-29 May 1975, the then Secretary General of the KSČ Central Committee Gustáv Husák was "elected", thus making him the most powerful man in the country. Between 30 September and 27 October 1975, a rare and unique technical operation took place in Most, North Bohemia, when the Gothic decanal Church of the Assumption was moved 841 metres to save it from destruction as a result of plans to extend the surface mining of brown coal. In other words, it was transferred before it had to “make way for mining operations”, as the regime’s media routinely referred to the liquidation of towns, villages and major monuments. This excellent technical achievement was proof of the regime’s exemplary care of the country’s cultural heritage. It must be said that, indeed, the re-siting of a structure weighing 12,000 tonnes was unprecedented in the world. On the other hand, the whole matter concealed the true nature of things – the unparalleled, barbaric decision to destroy the historically important North Bohemian town of Most. In fact, Government Resolution No 180 of 26 March 1964 "sufficed" to demolish the town. The value of the brown coal extracted in the newly acquired quarry was about 12 billion crowns, while the cost of demolishing the town, constructing a new town, rehabilitating the land, etc., amounted to 9 billion crowns. The net profit was thus limited to 3 billion crowns. Surprisingly, this cultural and environmental crime of the Communist regime was not mentioned much even after 1989, even though nothing of its like had been seen in Europe. The brutal liquidation of Most (completed in 1982) at least subsequently activated civil environmental movements that drew attention to a series of underrated environmental problems.

POLAND

After the defeat of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the democratic world tried to adapt its strategy to the changing conditions in the Cold War. Western strategists began to pursue a differentiated approach to the Communist countries. This was manifested by an expansion, or conversely restriction, of trade cooperation (most favoured nation status was granted to Poland by Eisenhower and removed by Reagan), and by the visits of foreign statesmen, which were viewed as propaganda opportunities. Even Gomułka achieved a certain degree of success, boasting diplomatic accomplishments such as President de Gaulle’s visit to Poland in September 1967 and, in particular, the signing of a treaty with the Federal Republic of Germany during Chancellor Brandt’s trip to Warsaw on 7 December 1970 which recognized border on the Oder and the Nysa. In a certain sense, the diplomatic activity of Gierek’s government peaked in 1975. Warsaw was visited by the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky (with whom Gierek met five times), the Yugoslav President Tito, the Belgian Prime Minister Tindemans, the French President Giscard d'Estaing, the Portuguese President Costa Gomes and, on his way to Helsinki to attend the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the US President Gerald Ford. Warsaw even hosted Leonid Brezhnev. Contact with the Americans was intensive considering the conditions in the Eastern Bloc, and these relations aided influential Polish lobbying in the US. Carter’s adviser on national security, Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928), played a particularly important role. In the 1970s, all three American presidents of the period came to Warsaw. During the democratic changes, George Bush senior immediately picked up on this tradition in June 1989. Gierek, wife and large entourage in tow, also ostentatiously travelled the world.

HUNGARY

The Czechoslovak crisis in 1968 saw the Kremlin step up opposition to all reform efforts, a policy underscored by the 23rd Congress of Soviet Communists in 1971. These trends also encouraged opponents of reform in Hungary. The first half of the 1970s here was a period in which the Party’s "conservatives" (Béla Biszku, Zoltán Komócsin, Árpád Pullai) went on the offensive; openly backed by the Soviets, they criticized the “new economic programme” as a distortion of the original plans that would lead to the “promotion of petty-bourgeois tendencies” and “violation of the principles of socialism and the interests of the working class”. Restrictions on the relative autonomy of enterprises and the pumping of large subsidies into loss-making sectors of the economy were accompanied by a significant cooling in the field of ideology, as confirmed by the 11th Congress of the MSDS in 1975. The reformers were left out in the cold – Rezső Nyers became Director of the Economics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Prime Minister Jenő Fock was replaced in 1975 by Győrgy Lázár (1924), a man wary of reforms.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

On 28 January 1976, a press conference was held in Prague with the Czechoslovak intelligence agent Captain Pavel Minařík. He was "returning" from an agency posting at Radio Free Europe, where he had worked since 1969 and which he had recommended for a bomb attack to his superiors in Prague on several occasions. There really was an attack, but not until 1981. To celebrate Minařík’s "heroism", a naive and grotesque propaganda song, "Letter to Free Europe", was written.

Its lyrics included the following refrain:

Thank you! Thank you,
brave man,
for your courage, wisdom and strength!
You are our captain
- they are useless!
You've added azure
to the wings of peace!

The last verse was a clear message to the whole of Free Europe:

Above our boundaries the sky is clean,
we don’t want a station
with "Manure" as its sign
Shout yourself hoarse, you dirty tick,
and keep your nose out of the verses
Where my home is!!!

In the spirit of Lessons from the Crisis..., the KSČ, consolidated and systematically purged of all reform forces, was now essentially sure of its monopoly on power. This was reflected in the talks of the 15th KSČ Congress, held in Prague in April 1976. The main paper was delivered by Gustáv Husák, who was re-elected General Secretary of the KSČ Central Committee. Perhaps the Congress slogan best describes the atmosphere here: "The KSČ and the people stand in solid unity ready for further success in building a developed socialist society". Husák himself then spoke of the need to complete "the conversion of the old bourgeois society into a new, socialist society...". In October 1976, the KSČ’s renewed power status was underscored in elections to all levels of representative bodies. In all, 99.7% of eligible voters took part in the flawed elections. The growing economic difficulties were supposed to be resolved by the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1976-1980). However, the unrealistically set economic tasks, again geared towards energy-intensive production, could not revive the sick state economy. Deepening technological backwardness and the inability to respond rapidly to the world oil crisis resulted in further protracted economic difficulties. Similar problems emerged in the agricultural sector, where the regime revelled in setting opulently sounding annual food consumption per capita. Thus, in 1976, the plans laid for per-capita consumption in 1980 stipulated 93 kg of meat, 221 litres of milk and milk products, 320 eggs, 80 kg of vegetables and 62 kg of fruit. A similar mania was applied to the constantly increasing production and consumption of fertilizers in agricultural production.

POLAND

The Communists signed the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference in the belief that the gains (such as recognition of stable post-war borders) outweighed the potential risks (e.g. the adoption of the “third basket” on human rights). In Poland, however, the emergence of new opposition initiatives contributed to internal drama – a new wave of workers causing trouble in Radom and in the Warsaw-based Ursus tractor factory in June. The state’s stereotypical reaction resulted in the sacking of thousands of workers, the detention of 2,500 participants in the riots, and the initiation of 500 trials. Of the numerous protests and petitions, the most important was "Appeal to society and the governing bodies of the PLR" of 23 September, which was signed by 14 people, among them the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski, Jan Józef Lipski, Antoni Macierewicz and Jacek Kuroń. This document was instrumental in the formation of the Committee for the Defence of Workers (KOR), which in 1976-1980 became the most visible initiative of the Polish opposition, especially from a foreign perspective. Adam Michnik’s stay in the West for several months also boosted the initiative’s popularity. The KOR tried to establish cooperation with other independent activities in Eastern Europe; for example, it held two meetings with representatives of Charter 77 at Sněžka, and Zbigniew Romaszewski visited Andrei Sakharov. After the KOR was joined by other activists from the ranks of writers, there was a strong impetus to engage in independent publishing activities. The independent publisher NOWa and the literary periodical Zapis, featuring the texts of authors who had previously officially been published, even preferred, by the Party, earned major respect in the samizdat world. The works of Czech authors such as Hrabal, Škvorecký, Kundera and Havel started appearing in samizdat literature in Poland. The Polish Sejm’s approval of constitutional amendments to the leading role of the PSDS, socialism and alliance with the Soviet Union strengthened the impression that Gierek was the same puppet of foreign powers that all his predecessors had been.

HUNGARY

While Protestant churches quickly reached a consensus with the new Communist arrangement, the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal József Mindszenty, refused to give way. In response, the state took large-scale punitive action. Mindszenty was arrested in December 1948 and sentenced in February 1949 for subversion of the republic. At the beginning of 1950, more than 10,000 nuns and 3,000 monks were incarcerated and forcibly relocated. Deprived of its leader, in August 1950 the Catholic Church signed a declaration recognizing the new people's democratic regime. However, in June 1951 the majority of bishops, headed by the acting Primate, the Archbishop of Kalocsa József Grosz, were imprisoned for their disagreement with the Constitution. Further talks were held and an agreement was reached between the Church and the state in 1959. The Church received increased state subsidies and, for the first time since 1951, the Vatican was allowed to appoint new bishops. In return, the Church supported the Constitution. Some of the faithful and the clergy, however, opposed the agreement. The full "normalization" of relations was also hindered by the presence of Cardinal Mindszenty on the soil of the America Embassy in Budapest, where he had fled after the defeat of the insurgency and which he was unable to leave. Finally an agreement was reached for the Cardinal, despite his opposition, to leave Hungary in 1971, and the Pope sent him into retirement (1973). In February 1976, the Pope was thus able to appoint László Lékai (1910-1986) Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of the Hungarian Catholic Church. The church hierarchy was restored in Hungary.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe on 1 August 1975 in Helsinki established European efforts to tackle a wide range of security, economic and humanitarian issues. The Eastern Bloc countries’ commitment to respect human rights subsequently paved the way for independent civil activities. In December 1976, a civil group was established which, inter alia, intended to support the detained members of the music group The Plastic People of the Universe. Its efforts resulted in a text published on 6 and 7 January 1977. The first 242 signatories of Charter 77 signed the document at the end of December 1976, but cited the date as 1 January 1977. The Declaration of Charter 77 criticized the failure to respect human rights and civil liberties in the then Czechoslovakia and demanded that this situation be redressed and that dialogue be initiated between the state and its citizens. The first spokespersons of Charter 77 were Václav Havel, Jiří Hájek and Jan Patočka. The last of these, the important Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, had a major influence on the formulation of the pronounced civil and moral dimension throughout the document. The ruling power’s response to the creation of Charter 77 was unusually hysterical. On 12 January, the daily Rudé právo, as the regime’s mouthpiece, published its still famous article Losers and usurpers, a coarse attack on the Charter signatories and the document itself. A few days later (on 28 January 1977) the KSČ organized a tragicomic gathering of the "Cultural Front" at the National Theatre, where, on behalf of those present, the actress Jiřina Švorcová, one of the stars of the conformist culture of the time, theatrically distanced herself from Charter 77. The hate propaganda did not end there. In an anonymous editorial published in Rudé právo on 2 Red April 1977 under the title “Us and them”, the author came to an elegant solution – the moaners should be deducted from the population: "A motherland for 15 million. A motherland for the citizen of the socialist state. This is a great concept, because the real motherland is not only a country that has national boundaries, a name, a flag, but a country where the working man feels free, happy […] And if, from those fifteen million, we have to deduct a few dozen, perhaps even a few hundred, the blame cannot rest with us." How this “deduction” could work in practice was shown by the tragic fate of Jan Patočka, who, after several brutal interrogations at the hands of the State Security, died of a stroke on 13 March 1977.

POLAND

No one – not even after 1989 – was charged with involvement in the violent death of the Jagiellonian University student and KOR associate Stanisław Pyjas (1953-1977) on 7 May, even though he quite clearly died of multiple injuries. According to the police, the cause of death was a “fall down the stairs”. However, it was obvious from the public reaction that times were changing and the social pact from the first half of the 1970s was becoming less tenable. The funeral march was attended by 10,000 students, and the founding manifesto of the Student Solidarity Committee (the name of the initiative included a word that would galvanize the whole country in the coming years) was read out under Wawel. With the tacit consent of their bishops, priests, such as John Zieja, the Dominican Ludwik Wiśniewski and others, became more involved in the opposition; besides the Council-promoted focus on human rights, to some extent this made the representatives of the secular left more courteous, as evidenced by Adam Michnik’s Church, Left, Dialogue, published in samizdat in 1977.

HUNGARY

Hungarian dissent was concentrated mainly in Budapest. Strong impetus was provided by the Czechoslovak regime’s repression of Charter 77. On 9 January 1977, 34 Hungarian intellectuals and artists signed a declaration in support of Charter 77. The signatories included the poets, writers and scientists Sándor Csoóri (1930), István Eörsi (1931-2005), Miklós Meszőly (1921), János Kis and Péter Nadás. A much larger event expressing solidarity with Charter 77 took place two years later, when, on 29 October 1979, a petition signed by 250 people was sent to the Hungarian leaders protesting against the persecution of the representatives of Charter 77.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

On 27 April 1978, the group of Charter 77 signatories established the Committee on the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). The Committee members tried to secure legal representation and financial, moral and material assistance for those suffering from persecution. At the same time, they appealed to the official authorities to rectify the situation (within the scope of laws in force), and distributed reports on political persecution to other countries. The state authorities replied a year later, when six VONS signatories were convicted for subversion (Václav Havel, Petr Uhl, Jiří Dienstbier, Otka Bednářová, Václav Benda and Dana Němcová). 1978 was planned mainly to be a year of major achievements for socialist Czechoslovakia. As part of the Intercosmos programme - a scientific space programme controlled by the Soviet Union – Vladimír Remek became the first Czechoslovak astronaut when he joined the crew of the Soyuz 28. The joint Soviet-Czechoslovak spaceflight was another propagandistic trump for Husák’s regime, as Czechoslovakia became just the third state in the world to have its own astronaut. In October the same year, the first Czechoslovak satellite, Magion 1, was launched into orbit as part of the Soviet satellite Intercosmos-18. The 15 kg satellite remained in orbit until September 1981, when it burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. Finally, on 17 December, the first Czechoslovak nuclear power plant in Bohunice was put into trial operation. Despite these proclamatory successes of Czechoslovak science and economic management, the economy as a whole was very vulnerable and fragile. The cruel winter at the turn of 1978 and 1979 was very telling. For several weeks, the domestic economy and, especially, the energy network were completely paralyzed. An almost forgotten concept – the coal holidays – returned to the schools.

POLAND

Although Poland also participated in the international Intercosmos project directed by the Soviet Union, Mirosław Hermaszewski’s July space flight was overshadowed – as were all other events this year – by the election of a Polish cardinal as Pope. Karol Wojtyła (1920-2005), who on 16 October adopted the name John Paul II as winner of the conclave, was a moral theologian with a coherent anthropological vision of human dignity and with an interest in social teachings, and as such was well equipped to make significant changes to the spiritual and moral climate of his country and elsewhere. Twenty years as a bishop had taught him to be wary of political power and nurtured in him a clear idea of the boundaries of compromise, beyond which the Church, in negotiations with political representatives, should not step. The new Pope soon began to revise the current Vatican Ostpolitik, which many believers behind the Iron Curtain regarded as a compromised stance. Polish Communists, who had regarded Cardinal Wojtyła as an "adventurous intellectual" for some time, were completely surprised by the election. Members of the leadership’s inner circle reassured themselves that “it is better for him to be Pope there than Primate here”, but these words proved to be a delusion. Three visits to the Pope's homeland during the next decade (1979, 1983 and 1987) were just one of many ways (albeit the most visible method) of maintaining hope for better times, not only in Poland.

HUNGARY

Religion had played an important role in pre-Communist Hungary. According to the general census in 1949, more than 67% of the Hungarian population said they were Catholics, 22% were Reformed Calvinists, and five per cent were Lutheran Evangelicals. However, the Communist regime significantly reduced the institutional and material base of the churches, persecuted rebellious religious leaders, opposed the restoration of the church hierarchy, excluded the churches from the educational, social and charity system, prevented them from wielding an influence over the younger generation, and subjected them to police surveillance and strict state supervision. These factors, together with the general trend away from faith, were reflected in the religious affiliation of the entire population. In a survey carried out in 1978, only 37% of the adult population claimed to be believers. There was a certain reversal during the 1980s, when the churches became one of the centres of opposition to the regime. When the regime fell, the natural position of the churches was restored, symbolically confirmed by John Paul II’s visit to the country in 1991.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Czechoslovakia was becoming increasingly ingested by economic stagnation, reflecting the general immobility of society and the KSČ’s impotence to adequately address the challenges that were arising. At the end of the 1970s, the normalization regime’s ambitious attempt at an active pro-reproduction policy ended unsuccessfully. The wave of “Husák’s children” – a strong wave of reproduction starting at the beginning of the 1970s and peaking in 1974 and 1975 – had definitively subsided. The backdrop to the pro-reproduction policy was clear – an attempt to replace losses due to mass emigration after 1968, and an attempt to revive the economy through large-scale investments in housing and improved services. Furthermore, the state provided cheap loans for newlyweds and significantly increased the monthly child allowances. Other significant factors were the reduced possibility of self-fulfilment in emaciated normalization society and efforts to draw citizens' attention to “proven” and non-conflictual values, i.e. including the family. In the Czech part of the state alone, 200,000 babies were born in 1974, compared with the previous norm of 120,000. A lack of financial resources for the investment necessary to maintain the pro-reproduction policy caused its failure, problems with congestion at schools and nurseries and insufficient numbers of flats for young couples. At the end of the 1970s, the birth rate had returned to 150,000 newborns. By then, the generation of “Husák’s children” was an established term in the country’s vocabulary.

POLAND

Despite serious warnings from the Kremlin, the regime did nothing to prevent the Pope’s trip to Poland on 2-10 June. For the state authorities, neither of the choices available to it was particularly good, and so it opted for the route of least resistance. John Paul II’s masses were attended by millions of people, with hundreds of thousands lining the planned routes he would pass. “Don’t worry”, words often cited to the assembled residents of Warsaw, had a deeper significance than appears at first glance. According to eyewitness accounts, everyone had known who “they” were for a long time, and now it had become obvious who “we” were. The shift from resignation to positive activity is well documented statistically: in 1979, for the first time, the year-on-year growth of per-capita alcohol consumption halted, having risen from 3.2 litres of pure alcohol in 1956 to 8.2 litres in 1979. This was the first year of operation for the Cruciatum of the Liberation of Man (KWC), an organization to help alcoholics which was set up by the priest Franciszek Błachnicki (1921-1987), founder of the opposition-associated Light and Life Movement. Alcoholism (in particular, the drinking of vodka), however, remained a serious social problem in the 1980s, so the military government had intervene in October 1982 with legislation to guide people towards sobriety and suppress alcoholism.

HUNGARY

In 1979, the director Miklós Erdély, working on an idea by the writer Gyula Krúdy, made a remarkable experimental docu-drama called Verzió (Version, 1979) about an alleged ritual murder said to have taken place in 1882, where young Móric Scharf was forced by the authorities to testify against his father. The film was banned because the censors thought that it evoked the show trials from the 1950s – the investigator in the film was played by László Rajk, the son of László Rajk, executed in 1949. However, Erdély’s intention was to focus on the hidden anti-Semitism that still lingered in Hungarian society because of unresolved issues from the war and due to the fact that the Communist authorities had made this theme taboo. The Hungarian Jewish community was one of the largest in Central Europe. Deportation to extermination camps, during which 210,000 Hungarian Jews died, did not begin until 1944, and so in 1946 there were still 143,500 people claiming Jewish identity. This number remained more or less unchanged up to 1990 (150,000). Under pressure from state authorities, the separate Jewish religious organizations merged in 1950 into the National Representation of Hungarian Israelites (Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviselete, MIOK) and succumbed to state supervision.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The celebrations of the 35th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Czechoslovakia were framed by another presidential election with a single nominated and elected candidate – Gustáv Husák – and by the 1980 Czechoslovak Spartakiad. This event unfolded at Strahov Stadium in Prague on 26-29 June 1980, with the participation of a record 180,000 gymnasts. The mass gymnastic presentations were designed to demonstrate the regime's legitimacy and society’s consent to its existence. In addition, for a long time the Spartakiads wiped memories of the Sokol Rallies (inconvenient for the regime) from general awareness. Between 1955 (when the first national Spartakiad took place) and 1985, the state organized six of these sports demonstrations of force at five-year intervals. Only the 1970 Spartakiad was cancelled to prevent it from becoming a demonstration against the normalization regime.

POLAND

Increases in food prices and other economic problems gave rise to a wave of strikes in July and August that spread throughout the country. In July alone, 81,000 people from 177 plants went on strike. In the second half of August, workers from the Gdansk Lenin Shipyards took the initiative. They were led by the skilful Lech Wałęsa (1943), who had gained his first political experience during protests in 1970. Under his leadership, the coordinating Inter-enterprise Strike Committee was formed to elaborate on social and political demands and to prevent the striking forces from fragmenting. A major change from the previous revolts was the interlinking of the striking workers with the intellectual political opposition, in whose ranks a major role was played by representatives of the KOR and activists from the Confederation of Independent Poland (KPN) and the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO). Gdansk was also the home of the powerful Young Poland Movement (RMP), which drew on pre-war traditions. The resoluteness of the opposition, the coordination of its activities and the ability to reach agreement on demands, combined with the hesitation of the regime, contributed to the success of the movement. The political opposition had the support of a significant number of Catholic intellectuals grouped around the periodicals Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak and Więż, or in local Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs, which were legally permitted in large Polish cities from 1956. Personnel changes in the PSDS leadership (Gierek was soon replaced as First Secretary by Stanisław Kania) underscored the shilly-shallying of the political leaders who, in a situation of strong social pressure and a lack of clear guidelines from the Soviet Union, which was occupied with the war in Afghanistan, decided to retreat. The signing of the Gdansk Accords on 31 August between Lech Wałęsa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczysław Jagielski was a landmark in the history of East European Communism. The Solidarity Independent Trade Union (NSZZ "Solidarnosc"), which enjoyed the support of 10 million people at the time of its greatest popularity, broke free of totalitarian control. The Polish government, the Soviet Politburo and the leaders of other Communist countries were faced with the question of whether this development, which could have repercussions threatening the entire bloc, would be tolerated, or whether they should take action, and if so in what form.

HUNGARY

After the Second World War, Hungary experienced two waves of emigration: in 1945-48 and post- 1956. The Hungarian community abroad was very active, as demonstrated by the hundreds of periodicals and books published (by 1975, 2,800 titles in Hungarian had been published abroad). In Munich, for example, there was the periodical Új Látóhatár (New Horizon), in London and subsequently in Paris Irodalmi Újság (Literary News), and in Rome as of 1949 Katolikus Szemle (Catholic Newsletter). A number of Hungarians who were forced to leave their country brought major attention to themselves in the business and scientific world. IT experts must have heard of Andy Grove, alias András Gróf (1936), one of the founders of Intel. After the 1956 uprising, he emigrated to the USA and in 1987 became the company’s CEO. György (George) Oláh left the country after 1956 and in 1994 won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He thus joined an unmistakable group of scientists of Hungarian origin to have won this exceptional award: Richard Zsigmondy (1865-1929), George de Hevesy (1885-1966), John Polányi (1929) and Avram Hershko (1937) (chemistry), Fülöp von Lenárd (1862-1947), Isidor Rabi (1898 - 1988), Eugene Wigner (1902) and Dennis Gábor (1900-1979) (physics), Robert Bárány (1876-1936), Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrápolt (1893) and George von Békésy (1899) (medicine), John Harsányi (1920) (economics), Elie Wiesel (1928) (peace) and Imre Kertész (2002) (literature).

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

This was the year of the 16th KSČ Congress (6-10 April). The Congress could not obscure the progressively worsening problems of the Czechoslovak economy and was forced to concede the failure "of certain tasks under the Sixth Five-Year Plan". These outstanding issues were to be addressed by the Seventh Five-Year Plan, just as oversized as its predecessor and relying too much on the output of heavy industry and ill-prepared housing construction. Despite these weaknesses, by the end of the year the Federal Assembly had passed the law on the problematic Seventh Five-Year Plan. The 1,447 delegates at the Congress represented 1,538,179 Party members, and the proceedings were mainly a spectacular demonstration of the KSČ’s strength and unity. This was confirmed by the elections to all levels of people’s committees and Czechoslovak representative bodies. These elections were held in June the same year (5-6 June) and followed the long-established rigged routine. Officially, 99.51% of eligible voters took part in the elections and the only authorized electoral list – that of the National Front, in which KSČ members automatically prevailed – "won" shares of the vote ranging from 99.69% to the almost absolute 99.98%. The ruling KSČ had decided to liven up this congressional and election year with an expensive toy – the construction of the “Palace of Culture” in Prague, within view of the historical Vyšehrad, and it was here that the Party Congress became the inaugural event. The over-dimensioned building was meant to symbolize the achievements of Husák’s "real" socialism and "consumer-based" reconciliation with society. The Palace of Culture, officially opened with the participation of the highest state and Party leaders on 2 April 1981, was a contract awarded to the then Military Project Institute (Vojenský projektový ústav) to raise its prestige. At the ceremonial opening, the head of the Prague Communists, Antonín Kapek, did not hesitate to liken the building to Prague Castle and the National Theatre. Similar acknowledgements were espoused by Husák, who spoke of a “dignified testimony to our socialist present, the maturity of Czechoslovak architecture, the capabilities of the architects, engineers, and artists, and the skills of our workers”. The fact that the Palace was basically a copy of the Congress Centre in Hamburg, West Germany, was not voiced particularly loudly in this context.

POLAND

The declaration of martial law was one way to maintain power which the PSDS leadership debated for many months. The existence of independent trade unions in all areas of life (Rural Solidarity was regarded as particularly dangerous because it could control supplies), and the paralysis of censorship played as significant a role in its preparations as the continued pressure from Moscow, East Berlin and Prague, which were irritated, among other things, by the Call to the Nations of Eastern Europe, which Solidarity approved at its first congress in Gdansk at the beginning of September. Foreign military intervention, prepared under Operation Giant Mountains, was a backup solution if the Polish government failed to take radical action itself. The man of the moment was General Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923), former Defence Minister from the time the Prague Spring was suppressed, who was appointed Prime Minister on 11 February and First Secretary of the PSDS on 18 October. When, at the beginning of November, the negotiations of the "Big Three", comprising Wałęsa, Jaruzelski and the new Archbishop of Warsaw and Polish Primate Józef Glemp, came to a stalemate, the government decided to launch military operations against its own country. Jaruzelski declared martial law in a television address at 6:00 a.m. on 13 December. Parts of state administration and the media were now to be managed by eight thousand military commissioners, of whom four hundred controlled central institutions and departments. In addition to direct “pacifying” actions involving 70,000 soldiers, the most tragic case of which was the shooting of nine miners at Wujek Mine, Katowice, the Ministry of Defence called into service tens of thousands of reservists. Post was censored, borders and civilian airports were closed, and the telephone network was temporarily disconnected. TV and radio premises were occupied by the army – this was the first time in their lives that citizens had watched the news delivered by uniformed newscasters. Apart from the two Party newspapers, Trybuna Ludu and Żołnierz Wolności, all press was suspended. The dissolution of all social organizations and a ban on assembly came as no surprise. Thousands of Solidarity leaders found themselves in internment camps. Martial law, an important figure of which (besides the First Secretary) was Interior Minister Czesław Kiszczak (1925), continued until 22 July 1983, despite the fact that it had been “suspended” in December 1982, but the generality, basing its legitimacy on the newly created Military Council for National Security (WRON), remained in power throughout the 1980s.

HUNGARY

In 1981, a Hungarian film achieved worldwide success. The director István Szabó won an American Film Academy Award – an Oscar – for Mephisto, his parable of totalitarian manipulation, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer. During the 1980s, previously taboo areas of Hungarian history were gradually and very carefully pried open, especially in film. Filmmakers were looking for a way of embracing these themes initially from the position of experimental film, often using a documentary approach. One of the pioneering works was Péter Gothár’s film Megáll az idő (Time Stands Still, 1981), hinting at the 1956 uprising. In the new decade, the historical traumas of the 1950s made their way onto the big screen increasingly often and openly in the works of the brothers János (1946) and Gyula (1944) Gyulás Törvénysértés nélkül (In Keeping with the Law, 1987) and Balladák filmje (Ballads, 1988), Sándor Sára’s Pergőtűz (Dam, 1987) and 'Sír az út előttem' (The Road Before Me Weeps, 1987) and Géza Böszörményi’s Recsk 1950-1953 (1988). These movies found an attentive audience in the Hungarian public. In the same year, Gábor Demszky started publishing the opposition samizdat Beszelő (Spokesman).

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The apostolic administrator of the Prague Diocese, František Tomášek, banned the regime-orchestrated association of Catholic priests called Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth). Its activists earned the derogatory nickname of "paxterriers". Nor did he have any qualms about taking action against the periodical Katolické noviny (Catholic News), which the association had taken over and was using as a mouthpiece. The association was founded at the beginning of the 1970s and was meant to reflect the "normalization" of relations between the State and the Catholic Church after the defeat of the Prague Spring. The regime’s biggest success with the collaborating association came in 1985, when, after a massive lobbying campaign by Czechoslovak diplomacy, the UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar granted the association the honorary title "Messenger of Peace", to the outrage of Catholics in Czechoslovakia. Throughout the 1980s, the moribund association was a symbol of unsuccessful state efforts to control the Catholic Church and a symbol of František Tomášek’s never-ending fight with state authorities, in the course of which he earned unusually strong civic and moral credit. Pacem in Terris disappeared together with its provider by winding up its activities in early December 1989. Before the end of the year, i.e. on 10 November, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, passed away. The disintegration of the Soviet Bloc was set in motion.

POLAND

The political changes at the end of the decade also influenced what was happening in culture. The "cinema of moral unrest” gained an international reputation in the world of film. It was associated with a debate opened in the mid-1970s by Andrzej Wajda (1926), director of the X film studio, which sought to find an answer to the question of how it was possible that reality is often completely different from stated objectives. The cinema of moral unrest existed between 1976 and 1981; by drawing on “small realism”, it took a critical look at public life, ethical issues related to career-building, refusal to take personal responsibility and the role of intellectuals in society. This film movement was reflected primarily in the works of Krzysztof Zanussi (The Illumination, Camouflage, The Constant Factor), Agnieszka Holland (Provincial Actors, A Lonely Woman), the early films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (Camera Buff, Blind Chance), and other works. Films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1976) and Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation (1982) impressively took Polish Stalinism as their theme. The collapse of censorship in previous years made it possible in Poland to popularize the émigré poet and essayist Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Martial law triggered a wave of artistic reflection on the oppression and hopelessness in the country; Zbigniew Herbert’s poetic Report from a Besieged City (1983) stands out in particular.

HUNGARY

The regime, which needed to maintain the social peace, the low cost of everyday needs, and full employment, was forced into ever increasing debt. At the end of the 1980s, the debt amounted to USD 20 billion, one of the highest per-capita levels of debt in the world. In 1982, the country was on the brink of state bankruptcy, which it avoided only by being admitted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and receiving a soft short-term loan to sanitize its state finances. However, the social situation among a large section of the population did not show much sign of improvement and even according to official data 20% of the population was living just about the subsistence level in 1987.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The constantly rising tension between the Soviet Union and the United States, where the technologically weaker Moscow began to run out of steam in the expensive arms race, had a significant influence on both domestic and foreign KSČ policy. The official support for the peace movement became an important component of state propaganda in the “fight for peace”. This "fight for peace" was the main theme of foreign policy across the Soviet Bloc. Therefore, it is not surprising that in June 1983 (21-26 June) Prague hosted a meeting of the World Assembly for Peace and Life, against Nuclear War. The meeting attracted 3,625 delegates from 132 countries. After all, the use of the Prague Palace of Culture could not be limited to years in which the KSČ Congress was held, and congress tourism existed even in those times. Numerous peace marches and peace festivals became a normal part of life at this time. The regime’s true policy emerged on 24 October, when the Soviet Union announced its decision to deploy mid-range missiles in the GDR and Czechoslovakia in response to the deployment of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Western Europe, a move made by NATO in an attempt to offset the USSR’s superiority in conventional weapons.

POLAND

On 12 May, Grzegorz Przemyk (1964-1983), a 19-year-old student from a Warsaw lyceum, was celebrating graduation his with friends in the centre of Warsaw when he was arrested by a police patrol. At the police station, he was brutally beaten. The commanding officer, according to the testimony of one of the other students, told the others “Do it so it leaves no traces”. To two days later, Przemyk died on the operating table in a Warsaw hospital. Grzegorz was the only son of the divorced poet Barbara Sadowska (1940-1986), a Solidarity activist who, during martial law, assisted prisoners and their families. The case caused uproar because there was an indication it was a planned strike against the opposition. According to the historian Andrzej Paczkowski, Przemyk was a “random victim of statutory conduct”. The Ministry of the Interior organized an extensive campaign against "denigration" and public opinion, and pointed the finger at two ambulance men, who were brought before the courts. It was not until July 2008, a quarter of a century after the crime, that the police officer Ireneusz Kościuk was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison (the commanding officer’s trial took place in 1997 and ended in a two-year sentence). Barbara Sadowska died of cancer three years after the death of her son. The end martial law, the Pope's second pilgrimage to Poland and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Lech Wałęsa brought flashes of hope into public life.

HUNGARY

In addition to the intellectual opposition concentrated in Budapest, accenting the issues of human rights, freedom of speech and system reform, a strong current of opposition was also being crystallized by the populists, who focused on widely understood themes related to national interests. These included the Hungarian minorities, religious freedoms, socially negative phenomena and the impact of socialism on the overall moral fibre of society. In 1983, Sándor Csóori was at the forefront of this movement.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The Soviet-American conflict assumed many forms. One of them was the Soviet boycott of the 23rd Olympic Games in Los Angeles, officially announced on 8 May 1984. Naturally, the majority of the Soviet satellites, including Czechoslovakia, joined the boycott. On 12 October, the prominent Czech poet, journalist and translator Jaroslav Seifert was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the co-founders of “poetism” and, inter alia, a Charter 77 signatory, he was one of the most important figures of 20th-century Czech literature. The award of a Nobel Prize to a Charter 77 signatory placed the regime in a difficult position. The poet, for health reasons, was unable to receive the award in person, which triggered unsuccessful efforts by official cultural representatives to send a delegation of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union to accept the prize on Seifert’s behalf. In the end, fortunately, the Swedish King handed over the award to Jaroslav Seifert’s daughter, Jana Seifertová-Plichtová. When Jaroslav Seifert died in January 1986, his state funeral at the Rudolfinum threatened to escalate into an anti-state demonstration and therefore the poet's whole family was excluded from the preparations. The organization of the funeral was entrusted to the Ministry of the Interior...

POLAND

Public opinion was shaken by the death of the Catholic priest Jerzy Popieluszko (1948-1984), whose dead body, following his abduction and torture by the special Security Service intelligence services, was dumped in Vistula Reservoir near Włocławek. Father Popieluszko was known for his fearless speaking at regular "sermons for the homeland", which took place in an open space by the Church of St Stanislaus Kostka in the Żoliborz district of Warsaw. In the depressive years of military rule, his services attracted tens of thousands of people from all over Poland. Popieluszko was a target of intimidation, and the Church itself, fearing for his safety, tried to neutralize him by offering him the chance to study in Rome. The shock sparked by the death of a Catholic priest at the hands of the secret services ("lay not your hand on the Lord's anointed!") was so strong in this religiously highly sentient country that this time the authorities were forced to sacrifice the executors in order to save the intellectual instigator: at the Torun Trial, several officers of the Fourth Administration of the Interior Ministry were given long sentences for kidnapping, torture and murder. The last of them to be freed was Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski in 2001. Attempts to establish the criminal liability of several generals failed. Popieluszko’s fate inspired To Kill a Priest (1988), a film by the Prague FAMU alumna Agnieszka Holland (the daughter of Henryk Holland) and Rafał Wieczyński’s Popieluszko: Freedom is in Us, which premiered on 16 February this year.

HUNGARY

The image of Hungarian society would not be complete without the Roma minority, which, despite high losses suffered during the Holocaust, was one of the largest in the country. In 1971, 320,000 people registered as members of the Roma minority, rising to 434,000 in 1993. According to a survey from 1984, Roma communities could be found in 1,748 of the 3,000 Hungarian towns and villages. The relationship between the majority population and the Roma under the socialist regime was, and remains today, a litmus test of society’s tolerance and maturity. There is still some hostility and discrimination against the Roma resulting from differences in the way of life and different cultures.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

9 May 1985 marked the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army. According to the ruling regime, this was to be another year devoted to building a "developed socialist society". The necessary shine was to be provided by enormous celebrations associated with the anniversary of liberation and by an equally over-the-top Spartakiad. The hearts of the ruling gerontocracy were particularly warmed by a composition featuring girls from the higher grades of elementary schools – "flower buds", named after the accompanying song composed by the regime-approved pop star Michal David. However, among the ordinary people of socialist Czechoslovakia worrying cracks were appearing in Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship. This was sharply reflected at the European and World Ice-Hockey Championships held in Prague at the end of April and beginning of May 1985. The Czechoslovak team managed to beat the unpopular "Ruskies" and win gold medals at the World Championship. In the same spirit of political immobility and as a demonstration of commitment, presidential elections were held (on 23 May 1985) in which Husák emerged as the winner, again as the sole candidate. Even so, this year marked a major turning point. After the brief governments of Brezhnev’s successors – Andropov and Chernenko, ancient, terminally ill bureaucrats, on 11 March 1985 the ambitious and reformist-inclined Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His policy of economic and social Perestroika ("restructuring") rapidly transformed into the dismantling of the entire Moscow-controlled bloc, including the Soviet Union itself. From the outset, Perestroika filled the conservative KSČ with dread, and the Party tried unsuccessfully to ward off this policy by promoting arguments on the diversity of the background and traditions in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. That in itself, however, was a denial of many of the previously publicized unshakable ideological truths about internationalism, shared responsibility for the defence of socialism, etc.

POLAND

Frustration and despair accompanies most Poles through the 1980s, and the emergence of the new leadership in the Soviet Union did not alter their situation that much. Material need, combined with a liberal passport policy (in comparison to other countries in the Bloc), meant that emigration started to become a serious social problem that even affected the cultural elite. When Teatr Ósmego Dnia, founded in Poznań in 1964 as a student company, was closed down for its critical attitude to the regime in 1985, its artistic director Lech Raczak. along with the majority of the actors, decided to emigrate to Italy (in 1989 the company renewed its activities in Poznań). During and after martial law, the Church showed a positive attitude towards theatre people, and lent its buildings to a number of theatre groups as a place to hold performances. Administrative intimidation was accompanied by judicial repression after the onset of "Perestroika". The trial of the opposition activists Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis and Władysław Frasyniuk, held in Gdansk on 23 May to 14 June, ended with long sentences (for the time) of 2.5-3.5 years (the dissidents were released early after intercession by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). The case of Marek Adamkiewicz, convicted and sentenced to two and a half years in prison the previous year for refusing military service, had a positive effect – the protests against his imprisonment gave rise to a new opposition initiative, Peace and Freedom (Wolność i Pokój), which was formed in Krakow on 14 April. This movement, which attracted largely young people, puzzled the state apparatus with its unusual methods of work and inspired the creation of similar groups in other Eastern Bloc countries.

HUNGARY

In the 1980s, Hungary did not belong to the group of conservative socialist regimes in the axis of the GDR – Czechoslovakia – Bulgaria. There was a certain truth behind the talk of Hungary as the "most cheerful hut" in the socialist camp. Nevertheless, the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev was not a welcome change even for Kádár. The fact that Gorbachev de facto rejected military interventions in events within the bloc was a clear sign that 1956 Hungary and 1968 Czechoslovakia were unlikely to recur. These Soviet steps more or less questioned and detracted from the legitimacy of regimes that arose thanks to the Soviet tanks. Kádár sensed fatal danger. In Hungary, minor democratization not possible elsewhere in Eastern Europe continued. For example, in 1983 the regime agreed to multiple electoral lists, thanks to which ten per cent of the vote in the 1985 parliamentary elections went to independents.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The Seventeenth KSČ Congress was held in Prague (23-28 March 1986). This Congress was meant to respond to changes in Soviet policy and to propose solutions to the growing economic problems. Despite the mandatory celebrations of the results achieved, it was clear that the Seventh Five-Year Plan had not been met and the package of measures to improve the centrally planned economy, adopted after 1980, had ended in failure. The growth of national income was slowing down and external debt was constantly climbing. Significant problems were the overblown, inefficient heavy industry and the accumulation of unsalable stocks of obsolete and poor quality products. Nevertheless, the KSČ attempted to solve these problems by proposing the unrealistically conceived Eighth Five-Year Plan. In May, further parliamentary elections were held to confirm the Party’s position of power. The results were again "successful" – voter participation was 99.9% and 99.4% of voters "voted" for candidates on the National Front’s electoral list. However, the hazardous disparagement of the aftermath of the Soviet nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986, when radioactive fallout spread into Czechoslovakia, again raised the issue of how credible the KSČ was, especially when, after initial hesitation, the Soviet media began to publish news about the disaster very intensively and openly (for local conditions).

POLAND

Although martial law severely hit the Solidarity movement, some activists soon started the illicit formation of Underground Solidarity structures. These structures had no uniform regional or organizational basis, and there were even differences regarding the methods and goals of political struggle. There were intensive discussions on the possibility of declaring a general strike, but most activists rejected this, afraid that the tightened laws would lead to a massacre. The movement’s radical wing was Fighting Solidarity, which raised the issue of the potential for armed confrontation with the authorities and preferred zadyma (street fighting) tactics. Various structures were set up to facilitate communication and to make the process of reaching a consensus easier; these included the Interim Coordinating Commission (TKK) in 1982 and the National Executive Committee (KKW) in 1987. A legendary figure of the underground opposition movement after 13 December 1981 was Zbigniew Bujak (1954), a member of the above bodies, who went into hiding after martial law was declared. In May 1986, he fell into the hands of the security services and was placed in custody. He was charged with preparing the violent overthrow of the system, for which he could theoretically be executed. Bujak’s release in an amnesty in September 1986 revealed the growing pragmatism of the regime’s elite, which was starting to grasp the possible consequences of Perestroika and its own future.

HUNGARY

A burning issue for Budapest was the status of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, Romania. According to the census, in Romania there were 1.55 million Hungarians in 1948, 1.62 million in 1966, 1.69 million in 1977, and 1.59 million in 1990. From the end of the 1940s, its political leaders were subject to persecution and assimilation practices. Cultural and scientific institutions had their activities suspended, and the teaching of the Hungarian language was suppressed. Periods of concentrated assimilation and centralization policy occurred immediately after 1956 and then after Nicolae Ceausescu came to power. Starting in the 1980s, Ceausescu strenuously advocated a policy of homogenization (national unification) and systematization (forcible urbanization of villages focused mainly on the Hungarian and German peasants in Transylvania). The Hungarian intellectuals tried to draw attention to this policy in international forums, e.g. in the samizdat publications Ellenpontok and Kiáltó szó. During the 1980s, the fate of the Transylvanian Hungarians caused great indignation among the Hungarian public (for example, demonstrations were held in Budapest in June 1988), which could not be ignored even by the Communist leadership. As such, it was forced to make official protests against the discriminatory ethnic policy. Hungarian society felt solidarity with its minorities, which, despite the passivity of official policy, was primarily expressed in musical and cultural life.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

In April (9-11 April), Soviet Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to Prague on an official visit. The public’s enthusiastic welcome and obvious affection for the charismatic Soviet leader, accompanied by his civil wife, perhaps astonished Husák’s domestic Party leadership the most. The difference between the quickly and immediately responsive Gorbachev and the rigidity of the domestic Communists was clear at every turn. Everyone was expecting profound change, even though it was to be initiated by the representative of the de facto occupying power in Czechoslovakia. The visit of the Spanish King Juan Carlos I to Prague in July 1987 also aroused great attention. The spreading avalanche of economic problems forced the KSČ into further concessions – following the Soviet model, a State Enterprises Bill was drawn up and submitted for public consultation. The KSČ also pursued a parallel policy seeking to build a "neo-Stalinist" community with Romania and the GDR, which could then be used as a defence against the overly liberal attitudes of Poland and Hungary, as well as against other unpleasant surprises that might be sprung by the erratic Gorbachev. Finally, in December, internal disputes reached a head and Gustáv Husák resigned from his position as Party leader, retaining only the presidency. Miloš (Milouš) Jakeš was "elected" in his place. He was a talentless bureaucrat and apparatchik who was expected to carry out the dreaded restructuring without jeopardizing the functionality of the existing system. The wavering economy was subsequently meant to be healed by a document with a rather strange title: Comprehensive Guidelines for Rebuilding the Economic Mechanism.

POLAND

During his third pilgrimage to Poland in the first half of June, Pope John Paul II was now in a position to do something the authorities would never have permitted four years before: he visited Gdansk and, in a homily in front of a million people, proclaimed the right to the existence of autonomous and independent trade unions. The meeting with Lech Wałęsa at the seat of the archbishop, although not part of the official program, sent an eloquent message of encouragement to the public, as did the Pope's private visit to the tomb of Jerzy Popieluszko. Liberalization steps, such as the legalization of the samizdat conservatively liberal periodical Res Publica and the November referendum on economic and democratic reforms, the positive outcome of which was branded by the government as "indicative only" due to the low turnout, were not of great importance individually, but were a good indicator of the encouraging shifts in public opinion. In this more relaxed atmosphere, elements of cabaret and theatre started to return to the streets of Polish towns. The newly formed Wrocław-based independent initiative Orange Alternative, led by Waldemar "Major" Fydrych, was boldest in this field. The humorous political productions it staged on various occasions – on St Nicholas’ Day, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, on May Day – offered a lighter view of the world and society.

HUNGARY

The Hungarians’ relative prosperity and well-being came at a cost of growing internal debt. Economic crisis was always on the agenda and was always assuaged with new foreign loans. In 1987, György Lázár was removed as Prime Minister, to be replaced by the predatory technocrat with reformist ambitions, Károly Grósz (1930-1996). He could draw on the Soviet model, i.e. on Gorbachev’s penchant for economic reform. He tried to open the socialist economy to other forms of ownership. As a result, the private sector was no longer a subject of open discrimination, but was tolerated. At the same time, he cancelled some of the subsidized prices and introduced a new tax system. A new political system also emerged. The reform Communists, led by Imre Pozsgay, set up the Hungarian Democratic Front (MDF), which expressed a desire to reform the political system. In June 1987, János Kis, Ottilia Solt and Ferenc Kőszeg presented, in the periodical Beszelő, an opposition programme called the Social Treaty, in which they called for political pluralism and the departure of the current leadership. The fact that relations were rapidly thawing was underlined in 1987, when the Open Society Foundation, founded in 1982 by the American financier of Hungarian origin George Soros, officially opened an office in Budapest. Its aim was to provide and fund social and educational programmes.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The collapse of the regime was becoming a reality. The plunge into the abyss could not even be halted by the efforts of some of the more astute Party elite to introduce social and economic reforms. Although representatives of the uncompromising normalization process (Antonín Kapek, Vasiľ Bilak and Josef Haman) had been removed from the KSČ leadership, as a whole the Party’s higher echelons remained stubbornly conservative. The long-standing Federal Prime Minister Lubomír Štrougal was forced to resign when he failed to assert himself as a professed Gorbachev-style reformer. On 12 October 1988, Husák appointed the capable economist and reformist Ladislav Adamec as the new prime minister of the federal government. However, this move was woefully inadequate to rescue the regime. The KSČ was no longer in control of society and was forced to make frequent concessions. This was boldly and rapidly reflected in culture, where, for example, art exhibitions were held that, just a few years before, would have been unthinkable. These included Forum '88, taking place at the Prague Market-hall in Holešovice from 8 September to 4 October 1988, and Lubenec 88 (Lubenec, Cultural Centre, 12 November to 28 December) with a preview performance of Tomáš Ruller’s “Pre-cital”. The anniversaries of 21 August 1968 and 28 October 1918 were marked by the first major public demonstrations demanding the democratization of society. Even in this period, however, any conflict with the regime remained very dangerous and could have the most tragic ramifications. Proof of this is the fate of the civic activist Pavel Wonka (23 January 1953 - 24 April 1988). For political reasons, he was prevented from studying at the Faculty of Law, Charles University, and so he studied law on his own and soon became a genuine "lawyer of the poor“. He was first arrested in 1982. In 1986, he planned to run as an independent candidate in the elections to the Federal Assembly, but the Central Election Commission refused to register him. Four days after his last conviction, Wonka died under unexplained circumstances in prison in Hradec Králové.

POLAND

The public transport strike on 26 April in Inowrocław and Bydgoszcz was the first in a wave of strikes – lasting until early May – at the Lenin Steelworks in Krakow and the shipyards in Gdansk. In some cases, students expressed their solidarity with workers by holding sit-ins. The movement was accompanied by a number of rallies and marches, such as the "defiance marches" during the May Day celebrations. The state authorities, pressured by adverse economic circumstances and developments in the Soviet Union, where the leadership had rejected Brezhnev’s doctrine of limited sovereignty, decided to hold talks with the opposition. In the autumn, Lech Wałęsa twice met Minister Kiszczak in Magdalenka, near Warsaw. Events gathered momentum following Wałęsa’s victory in a television duel with the representative of the OPZZ, the official trade union, Alfred Miodowicz, who was a member of the Party Politburo. The very fact that the regime permitted such a debate would have been unthinkable not long before. The Civic Committee, formed on 18 December and backed by the chairman of Solidarity, drew together workers’ leaders and opposition intellectuals, such as Bronisław Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and laid the foundations of undisguised ambition for the next year. "Spring is ours," was the opposition’s rallying cry.

HUNGARY

The final changing of the guard occurred in 1988. Kádár, sick and no longer able to respond to the rapid pace of events, was steered into the titular office of Party Chairman. Károly Grósz was made the Executive Secretary of the Party on 22 May 1988. In 1974, he had become Chief Secretary of the propaganda and agitation department within the MSDS Central Committee, and ten years later he was Party Secretary in Budapest. In 1985, he was elected to the Politburo, and two years later he was appointed Prime Minister. In the same year, however, he vacated the premiership for Miklós Németh (1948), who remained in office until 23 May 1990. János Kádár (1912-1989) embodied the key period of Hungarian socialism, with all its rises and falls. Ever since his youth, he had been involved in the Communist movement, and during the war he de factor became the leader of the underground Communist Party in Hungary. After the war, he became the deputy of the Party’s General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and, briefly, Minister of the Interior. In 1951, he was caught up in a wave of Party purges and spent two years in prison. During the uprising in 1956, he again became First Secretary of the Party for a short while. Initially, he was in favour of reform, but on 1 November 1956 he switched allegiance to the Soviets, who then made him the Prime Minister of the new “worker-peasant” government, which was tasked with consolidating the country and suppressing the insurgency. He became First Secretary of the renewed Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, and remained in this position until May 1988. Political developments, however, quickly led to the dismantling of Kádár’s system. The first political parties, such as the Alliance of Young Democrats (FIDESz), led by the future Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (30 March 1988), started to form. People also began to demonstrate en masse – in June 1988 in support of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, Romania, and in October against the planned construction of the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros dam.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Despite its many concessions, the KSČ was determined to defend its monopoly on power. However, the situation was unsustainable. The economy was stagnating and the hesitant implementation of the principles of “economic restructuring” only increased the overall confusion. Politically, the KSČ found itself in complete isolation, and the public increasingly expressed its dissatisfaction with events at home. The KSČ lacked support from the Soviet Union and the surrounding "fraternal" regimes were in a similar boat. Party leader Jakeš also came across as a tragicomic figure, especially after his private speech at Červený Hrádek, near Plzeň, on 17 July 1989. An illegally smuggled recording of the speech bewildered listeners with its clumsy verbal style, and the words “... and not just so we were a lonely fence-post there, without a word of support… and they could have pitted us against the people...” became symbolic. The repressive apparatus, however, still worked, as amply demonstrated as early as January 1989 by the suppression of demonstrations in “Palach Week” (the 30th anniversary of the self-immolation of the student Jan Palach), and by the approval of the “truncheon laws” in February 1989. This set of legislation made unannounced demonstrations in the centre of Prague illegal and reinforced the powers of the police forces in quelling such events. The KSČ’s theatrical approval of the massacre of Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, was an unconcealed threat to the emerging civil opposition. Everything culminated on 25 July 1989 when the samizdat newspaper Lidové noviny published an appeal, A Few Sentences (Několik vět), calling for an end to repression and the initiation of political dialogue. Jakeš’s leadership, however, resolutely refused this. In a way, the response was the issue of new hundred-crown banknotes by the State Bank in October 1989, which bore a portrait of Klement Gottwald. The brutal action against the student demonstration on 17 November 1989 ended the life not only of this disliked banknote, but also of the whole totalitarian regime.

The rapid, efficient and remarkably problem-free dismantling of the KSČ surprised perhaps nearly everyone – both the conservative Communists and the civil activists themselves. Thus began the famous "Velvet Revolution". The police brutality of 17 November became untenable, and everyone who could distanced themselves from it. In the end, responsibility remained in the hands of several members of the Ministry of Interior and the unpopular chief of the Prague Communists, Miroslav Štěpán. During the night of 19-20 November, several opposition groups established Civic Forum (in Bratislava the Public against Violence movement was established at virtually the same time) and on 21 November the reform-minded Federal Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec initiated a round table with the newly institutionalized opposition. Three days later, the compromised Jakeš resigned from the head of the KSČ and was replaced by the bland, unknown Karel Urbánek.

The pace of change, however, slowed to the extent that the Civic Forum called for a general strike. This was supported on 26 November by a gathering of more than half a million people on Letná Plain. The general strike successfully took place the following day and initiated a swift agreement between the civil opposition and the KSČ on the prompt reconstruction of the government. Now the task was not to rehabilitate the Prague Spring reforms, but to bring down the entire system. Nevertheless, of the 21 ministerial seats available in the restructured government (of 3 December 1989), only six were reserved for non-Communists. This undermined its credibility from the outset and on 7 December Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec resigned. A few days later, at an extraordinary congress, he became the new chairman of the KSČ, which he generally successfully steered through the post-revolution period and preserved as a significant political force. At this time, the KSČ completely lost control of the attributes of power – the police, the army, the media, and the National Front – and found itself deep on the defensive. The degradation of the Party even affected its own armed unit – the People's Militia, which not that long before, in October 1989, had obediently dispersed demonstrators in Wenceslas Square. A definitive decision was reached just before the end of the year. On 28 November Alexander Dubček was elected chairman of the Federal Assembly, to which he was co-opted with other representatives of the opposition. Finally, on 10 December, the government of national understanding was formed and was led by the pragmatic Communist technocrat Marián Čalfa. In the end, on 29 December 1989, the partially replaced Federal Assembly unanimously elected Václav Havel the new president (still President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic at the time), his predecessor, Husák, having resigned immediately after the appointment of Čalfa’s government. The regime of normalization and the KSČ itself were at an end.

POLAND

As in other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, 1989 was a year of fundamental regime change. Discussions at a round table – held from the beginning of February and lasting for the next two months – between the government and the opposition and formally mediated by the Church resulted in the legalization of Solidarity, and gave rise to an agreement on elections and the transformation of the highest state authorities. The elections held on 4 June gave the Civic Committee a decisive victory, enabling it to occupy 33% of the seats in the Sejm (the maximum allowed under the agreement) and 99 seats out of 100 in the restored Senate, while the ruling coalition, comprising the PSDS, the Democratic Party and the Polish People’s Party, suffered an overwhelmingly defeat. The term of office of the Sejm, identified as a “contractual” period, had been set at two years. There was a dilemma as to whether the Communists would remain in power or whether a “Grand Coalition” transitional government would be formed. Adam Michnik, editor of the newly established newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza (literally "Election News"), had a significant influence on the debate with his article Your President, our Prime Minister, published on 3 July. On 19 July, at a joint session of both parliamentary chambers General Jaruzelski was elected to the restored presidential office with the help of votes from the ranks of the Civic Committee. Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, whose cabinet won a vote of confidence in the Sejm on 19 September, was forced to keep Communist ministers (Czesław Kiszczak and Florian Siwicki) the two so-called “presidential ministries” – and the interior and defence ministries. The era of the Communist regime was symbolically closed on 28 December with a return to the original name of the country – the Republic of Poland. The PLR – but not its legacy – had been consigned to the past.

HUNGARY

Károly Grósz was in favour of moderate, controlled changes in both the economic and political spheres. He wanted to reform socialism without affecting its fundamentals. However, the rapid developments in 1989, also accelerated in other Eastern Bloc countries, ran ahead of him. In October 1989, the more radically-minded Party members Gyula Horn, Miklós Németh and Imre Pozsgay pushed through the reorganization and renaming of the Party to the Hungarian Socialist Party. An important role in the Hungarian transition to democracy was played by the now dead Imre Nagy. At the end of the 1980s, he turned into a symbolic Charon, ferrying Hungarians in a collective transition ritual from Communism to post-Communism. In the spring of 1989, his remains were exhumed and on 16 June 1989, during a ceremony at Heroes’ Square as the whole nation looked on, directly and indirectly, he was solemnly buried. The chilling symbolism of the whole ceremony was compounded by the fact that on the same day that the official rehabilitation of Imre Nagy was announced (6 June 1989), the "traitor" of the nation, János Kádár, died. An outline plan for smooth transition was then thrashed out by representatives of the opposition and the Communists at a National Round Table. On 18 September 1989, they signed an agreement establishing legal conditions for the transition to a pluralist democracy and an amendment to the Constitution. Symbolically, on 23 October 1989, a new Constitution was promulgated, which ended the leading role of the Communist Party.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The traditional New Year speech by the President of the Republic – this time by the newly elected Václav Havel – had to convince everyone that the world had changed for good. New phenomena emerged in everyday political practice: condemnation of the Soviet invasion of August 1968 (by the last Adamec government), a parliamentary commission to investigate the events of 17 November 1989, and the start of negotiations on the withdrawal of Soviet occupation troops from Czechoslovakia. That was the "moment of glory" of the musician and MP Michael Kocáb.

As early as 23 January 1990, the reconstructed Federal Assembly adopted a constitutional law on the removal and appointment of its new members, based on which 120 new members occupied parliamentary seats, and a very liberal law on political parties. As a result, at the beginning of 1990 there were 200 political entities in Czechoslovakia seeking the favour of potential voters. On 27 February, an electoral law was approved that followed up on the traditions of the First Republic (a system of proportional representation) with a five per cent threshold for entry into Parliament. Elections were held on 8 and 9 June 1990. With 96% of eligible voters taking part, it was also a sui generis national referendum on the rejection of the old order and the constitutional cessation of the totalitarian regime. As expected, the KSČ overwhelmingly lost the elections, although its approximately 14% of the vote ensured its future political existence. The winner of the election was a coalition of the Czech Civic Forum (OF) and the Slovak Public against Violence (VPN), which gained about 47% of all votes. The election results soon confirmed the re-election of Alexander Dubček to the head of the Federal Assembly, the formation of a coalition government led by the skilful bureaucrat Marián Čalfa and, on 5 July 1990, the re-election of Vaclav Havel as the federal president. The immediate fate of the federation seemed to be predetermined by the famous "hyphen" battle between the Czech and Slovak members of Parliament in March 1990 regarding a new name for the common state. The result was a hasty compromise, where the joint federation had one name in Czech (Československá federativní republika – the Czechoslovak Federative Republic) and another in Slovak (Česko-Slovenská Federatívna Republika – Czech-Slovak Federative Republic). However, a month later, the name of the state shared by the Czechs and Slovaks was definitively changed to the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, which lasted until the federation’s amicable split on 31 December 1992.

POLAND

Poland closed the 40-year Communist chapter of its history and the decade-long struggle for regime change. Abolishing censorship and establishing full freedom of expression was easy. Nor were there any problems in the creation of a multiparty political system, where the former parties of the National Unity Front achieved some success, but nothing compared to the former opposition initiatives and some completely new parties. Transforming the economy from a state-controlled economy into a free market proved more difficult. This tricky task was placed in the hands of Leszek Balcerowicz, Deputy Prime Minister for the Economy. With the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact still lingering, foreign-policy orientation could not be changed overnight, and therefore the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski at least tried to establish friendly relations with Western countries. At a time of major upheaval this was not difficult. Polish diplomacy scored a success when Poland was invited into the 4+2 Group, which addressed the question of German reunification. A sensitive topic which soon began to split politicians and the public was reconciliation with the past. Widely perceived dissatisfaction with the pace of change was tackled by Wałęsa who, with his colleagues, initiated the so-called “war on top”. The most visible outcome was the resignation of General Jaruzelski as President and the introduction of a two-round direct election, which was won on 9 December by Wałęsa. An unpleasant surprise for the “August Camp” was that Tadeusz Mazowiecki did not even reach the second round, instead, Wałęsa’s main rival was the mysterious Stanisław Tymiński, a returnee from exile who held a Peruvian passport and had recently founded the just as odd Party "X". For many former opposition activists this was a completely new experience: what are the possibilities for political populism in free conditions? And how far could they go in conditions where freedom of speech prevailed if they wanted to put up barriers to political populism?

HUNGARY

The elections held on 25 March 1990 were won by the Hungarian Democratic Forum, which formed a right-of-centre coalition with other parties and created a stable new democratic government headed by József Antall. Árpád Göncz was subsequently elected President. The Hungarian transition from socialism to a pluralist democracy was almost complete. In 1991, the Soviet troops left the country and Comecon was dissolved.