Post-Totalitarian Amnesia
The Prague Spring in Russian Public Opinion
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The Prague Spring, the intervention of Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia, and the suppression of the democratisation process, which was connected with the rejection of “Socialism with a human face” and later the idea of Socialism itself, have left hardly any traces on Russian public opinion. Not only does this give expression to specific shortcomings in Soviet society, where there was neither a free press, nor a free public, but totalitarian propaganda instead. The far-reaching repression of the memory of Prague ‘68 and its consequences also have something to do with the fact that an imperial attitude still persists in broad segments of the population.
(Osteuropa 7/2008, pp. 57–66)