The Genesis of Political Distrust Towards the “Sixty-Eighters” in Czech Politics Over the Course of 1989
The Genesis of Political Distrust Towards the “Sixty-Eighters” in Czech Politics Over the Course of 1989

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the genesis of political distrust against the so-called sixty-eighters-former reform communists-after 1989, outlining in detail the political trajectories of the Prague Spring communist actors. These politicians-the so-called socialist opposition-represented an important part of the Czechoslovak democratic opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though many of the reform communists also stood at the inception of Charter 77, non-communist dissent was politically distrustful of the socialist opposition, centred around the journal Listy. Unlike the “non-political” Charter 77, Czechoslovak socialist opposition has always advocated for a profiled political program of democratic socialism. Thus, this distrust towards the reform communists persisted after 1989. In a situation where Marxism and socialism had completely lost political power and much of society rejected the socialist left as a dangerous remnant of the communist dictatorship, the advocates of post-communist democratic socialism found themselves on the margins of political discourse.

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