Intellectual History of Czech Reform Communism 1968 - 1990

The main topic of the dissertation is the development and changes in the political thinking of Czech reform communism from 1968. While in the 1960s reform communism represented the dominant intellectual and political current, after the military invasion in August 1968 it gradually disappeared from the public discourse and was later completely suppressed by normalization propaganda and labeled as "counter- revolutionary" and "right-wing opportunist" ideology. The central questions of the thesis explore the changes that the political project of reform communism underwent during the twenty-one-year normalization period and the shifts that took place in the "horizon of expectation" of the Czechoslovak socialist opposition in the context of the intellectual and political changes of the 1970s and 1980s. The aim of the thesis is to explain the political perspectives of reform-communist intellectuals in the Czechoslovak opposition after 1968. They represented an important part of both domestic and especially exile opposition, which formed around the journal Listy. Some of them also played an important role in the creation of Charter 77 and its legalistic criticism. Nevertheless, their story does not fully fit into the traditional narrative of Czechoslovak dissent, as they never completely parted ways with..