The spokesmen for the Soviet leadership try to hide this fact by referring exclusively to a political problem. The threat of counter-revolution arose, they claim, because the Czechoslovak Communist Party had increasingly ceased to play its leading role in the state and in society and " right-wing anti-socialist forces" were coming to the forefront in the mass media, the educational system, etc. Apart from the fact that such developments, even if they were true, cannot be divorced from deeper social currents, and express in themselves great social conflicts and tensions it is, to say the least, remarkable that the overwhelming majority of the Czechoslovak working class didn't seem to notice at all these " anti-socialist " trends, that the supporters of the Soviet leaders' line inside the C.P.C. were completely unable to mobilise that working class to " defend socialism " that they had to appeal to outside forces instead of appealing to the workers to realise that " burning task ". This in itself is an admission that the workers were in the best case — from the standpoint of the Soviet leaders — passive, and in the worse case active supporters of " counterrevolution ". Surely, the remarkable situation in which socialism could be overthrown and capitalism could be restored without the Czechoslovak workers either noticing or opposing it, would suggest an extraordinary low level of political consciousness and activity — after twenty years of the communist regime! Surely, this very fact would express for anybody who continues to think in social categories, not to speak of Marxist class categories, a deepgoing social and political crisis in the country.
Deviation from the Interests of Socialism
What is the explanation of this crisis? To bring in outside factors, as the apologists of the Warsaw Pact powers' military intervention usually do, is unconvincing to say the least. Surely the outside threats bearing down on Czechoslovakia from the NATO aggressive alliance and West German militarism were not less in the period of the Cold War or at the time of the Berlin Wall crisis than they are today. To say that the change of strategy of the imperialist powers — from direct military threat of "roll back" to attempts at "internal subversion" — were more dangerous for the "people's democracies" implies in reality a recognition of great internal instability, and leads us back to the initial question, instead of answering it.
When the "errors" of the Novotny regime are mentioned, and the way they were "corrected" is criticised, we come nearer to the heart of the matter. But surely "errors" which can create in a socialist country a situation in which the bulk of the working class becomes either unaware of or sympathetic towards a restoration of capitalism