Programmatic Documents of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party From 1948 to 1989

In the present study, we seek to analyse the Czechoslovak Socialist Party’s programmatic documents during the era of the “building of a socialist society” in Czechoslovakia (1948 – 1989). The party emerged from the ruins of the long-standing Czechoslovak National Socialist Party in the aftermath of the February 1948 communist coup. As a new political party, it distanced itself from the programmatic principles of its predecessor, which had pursued a vision of establishing national socialism as a product of the reformist efforts of people committed, in essence, to the idea of a welfare state built on national traditions, espousing the ideas of humanism, democracy, and human freedom, while spurning the concept of Marxism-Leninism and the replication of the Soviet model of socialism and communism. Thus, one of its foremost priorities after its constitution was to devise its own programme. In the early years of its existence, it subscribed to the Czech Socialist Party’s 1918 programme, but this makeshift solution was replaced in short order by a series of declarations in which it aligned itself with the programmatic goals of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1949, it adopted its rules of organisation, in the introduction of which it inserted tenets about its core programmatic focus, which, understandably, did not reflect the full breadth of its interests and opinions on issues of political, economic, social, cultural, and other aspects of life. Nevertheless, for years the party portrayed this introduction as a fundamental and representative statement standing in for a standard party manifesto, stemming from the fact that, after the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1949, which defined the “general line for the building of a socialist society in Czechoslovakia”, and which the Czechoslovak Socialist Party adopted as a guide for its own policy and activities, the drafting of a programme for Czechoslovak Socialists became pointless, perhaps undesirable. All the way through to 1989, the Czechoslovak Socialist Party had no standard congress-adopted programme of its own. In the thawing of the political situation in 1968 that created a window of opportunity for change, an outline of a programme emerged that was heavily influenced by the contemporary climate seeking to construct a democratic model of socialism (“socialism with a human face”), but this was nothing more than a passing phase quickly suppressed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent era of “normalisation”. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kučera’s leadership of the party attempted to counter national-socialist ideology and the tendency for the party to declare itself non-Marxist by adopting the ideology of scientific socialism as a blueprint for the party’s approach to building a socialist society. Yet, at the same time, it proclaimed scientific socialism a doctrine that was not binding on party members and permitted them to lean towards a different ideological outlook. It was not until further political upheaval in 1989 that the party had a chance to formulate a standard programme. The leadership, however, recommitted itself to a vision of socialism, which, even in its reworked guise, no longer had the power to resonate with the public and, after many vicissitudes, the party ended up a marginal component of the Czech political system that coalesced after 1989.