The Prague Spring Archive (CREEES) Main Menu The Prague Spring Archive An online portal for the Prague Spring archival materials within Texas ScholarWorks and the LBJ Presidential Library. Key Figures Descriptions and photographs of key figures involved in the Prague Spring events, with links to relevant documents in Texas ScholarWorks. Guide and Finding Aid A guide to the Texas ScholarWorks online repository, along with a finding aid to the physical archival collections. Box 179 Many of the documents in Box 179 are communications from and to U.S. officials and high-level Czechoslovak politicians, illustrating internal and international discussions about regional geopolitics and potential futures during the eight months of the "Czechoslovak Crisis," which we now know as the Prague Spring. Box 180 Brief descriptions of the 8 folders in Box 180 of the LBJ Presidential Library's archives are below, along with links to more detailed descriptions, their full contents in Texas ScholarWorks, and key documents they contain. Box 181 Brief descriptions of the 9 folders in Box 181 of the LBJ Presidential Library's archives are below, along with links to more detailed descriptions, their full contents in Texas ScholarWorks, and key documents they contain. Key Documents A curated selection of key documents from Box 179 and Box 180 of the Prague Spring Archive. Documents from the Keston Center Prague Spring-related documents from beyond the UT Austin collections. About Contains information about the creators of the site and attribution for used images. The University of Texas at Austin Libraries

LBJ and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic

39302 The Prague Spring Archive
When LBJ took office in late 1963, the recently-formed Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was cautiously undergoing the de-Stalinization process, headed by then-president and first secretary of the Czech Communist Party, Antonin Novotny, who had been selected by Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. Novotny was a founding member of the Czech Communist Party, and a hard-line Communist who benefited from the favor of Soviet leadership in his rise to power. Novotny repaid the Soviet apparatus by minimizing democratic structures and installing a new, more explicitly Soviet-style constitution in July of 1960, bringing governmental rhetoric and structure further into line with the reality of life in the CSR.

Official relations between Johnson and Novotny were cordial — the two exchanged semi-regular correspondence on scientific and political matters of the day, as the United States hoped to draw the CSR towards the West. LBJ settled into office in late 1963, a year and change after the collapse of the USSR's third Five Year Plan in the CSR and soon preceding a Czechoslovak leadership crisis, which the CIA considered largely "of [Novotny's] own making" due to his perceived reticence to effectively de-Stalinize. The crisis rendered Novotny's popularity and grasp on power tenuous, and U.S. analysts assumed that the Soviet apparatus would have to find a suitable replacement who could effectively liberalize and de-Stalinize the country. Unexpectedly, however, Soviet leadership "dispatched Brezhnev to Prague" to resolve the crisis, and Novotny was unanimously reelected in November of 1964 by the CSR's National Assembly.

Novotny was forced to resign after public displeasure with his leadership reached a fever pitch in early 1968, and was succeeded as first secretary by the reformist Alexander Dubček. Under Dubček's guidance, the CSR saw great increases in political and economic liberalization and de-Stalinization. Dubček's leadership attempted to counter unimaginative, quantity-focused production practices propagated by the Soviet leadership that were entirely unfit for Czechoslovakia's levels of industrial development, and lessened levels of censorship and secret police oversight, bringing the CSR closer to the contemporary West, and increasingly alienating the Soviet apparatus.

The first eight months of Dubček's regime were characterized by ebbs and flows in Czech-Soviet relations, as the CSR drifted towards democracy, countered by consistent threats of Soviet military intervention. A June 1968 CIA special memorandum speculated that "the related crises in internal Czechoslovak politics and in Soviet-Czechoslovak relations seem to have eased," but concluded that "there is a good change that relations between Prague and Moscow will again become very tense." Tensions continued mounting, and in August of 1968, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was invaded by the Soviet Union and the Polish, Bulgarian, and Hungarian Peoples' Republics, and Dubček was arrested. International reactions were swift, as democratic governments and workers' groups the world over expressed their sympathy for the citizens of the CSR and their pursuit of freedom. 

After the invasion, Dubček's reforms were reversed, in a period of Czech history now referred to as "normalization," and the Soviet apparatus installed a more conservative government unlikely to challenge Moscow's dominance. An October 1968 treaty allowed for a decreased Soviet military presence to remain on Czechoslovak territory to "keep the peace" during transition.

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