The '''Prague Spring '''was a protest wave and period of liberalization
in Czechoslovakia under [Stalinism](Leninism "wikilink") in
[1968](Timeline_of_Libertarian_Socialism "wikilink").

[Colin Ward](Colin_Ward "wikilink") describes it as:

> In a broadcast on the anniversary of the Soviet Invasion of
> Czechoslovakia a speaker looked back to the summer of 1968 in Prague
> as one in which, as she put it, "Everyone had become more gentle, more
> considerate. Crime and violence diminished. We all seemed to be making
> a special effort to make life tolerable, just because it had been so
> intolerable before".

> Now that the Prague Spring and the Czechoslovak long hot summer have
> retreated into history, we tend to forget - though the Czechs will not
> forget - the change in the *quality* of ordinary life, while the
> historians, busy with the politicians floating on the surface of
> events, or this or that memorandum from a Central Committee or a
> Praesidium, tell us nothing about what it felt like for people in the
> streets. At the time John Berger wrote of the immense impression made
> on him by the transformation of values: "Workers in many places
> spontaneously offered to work for nothing on Saturdays in order to
> contribute to the national fund. Those for whom, a few months before,
> the highest ideal was a consumer society, offered money and gold to
> help save the national economy. (Economically a naive gesture but
> ideologically a significant one.) I saw crowds of workers in the
> streets of Prague, their faces lit by an evident sense of opportunity
> and achievement. Such an atmosphere was bound to be temporary. But it
> was an unforgettable indication of the previously unused potential of
> a people: of the speed with which demoralisation may be overcome." And
> Harry Schwartz of the New York Times reminds us that "Gay,
> spontaneous, informal and relaxed were the words foreign
> correspondents used to described the vast outpouring of merry Prague
> citizens." What was Dubcek doing at the time? "He was trying to set
> limits on the spontaneous revolution that had been set in motion and
> tried to curb it. No doubt he had hoped to honour the promises he had
> given at Dresden that he would impose order on what more and more
> conservative Communists were calling
> '[anarchy](Anarchism "wikilink")'". When the Soviet tanks rolled in to
> impose *their* order, the spontaneous order gave way to a spontaneous
> resistance. Of Prague, Kamil Winter declared, "I must confess to you
> that nothing was organised at all. Everything went on spontaneously
> ..." And of the second day of the invasion of Bratislava, Ladislav
> Mnacko wrote: "Nobody has given any order. Nobody was giving any
> orders at all. People knew of their own accord what needed to be done.
> Each and every one of them was their own government, with its orders
> and regulations, while the government itself was somewhere very far
> away, probably in Moscow. Everything the occupation forces tried to
> paralyse went on working and even worked better than in normal times;
> by the evening the people had even managed to deal with the bread
> situation."

> In November, when the students staged a sit-in at the universities,
> "the sympathy of the population with the students was shown by the
> dozens of trucks sent in from the factories to bring about food free
> of charge," and "Prague's railway workers threatened to strike if the
> government took reprisal measures against the students. Workers of
> various state organisations supplied them with food. The buses of the
> urban transport workers were placed at the strikers disposal ...
> Postal workers established certain free telephone communications
> between university towns."\[1\]

## References

<references />

1.  [Colin Ward](Colin_Ward "wikilink") (1973) [Anarchy in
    Action](Anarchy_in_Action "wikilink")