This article is part of the special cluster titled Generation ’68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective). 1968 is universally considered as the year that Marxism and socialism achieved significant political legitimacy amongst the younger generation. This is only partly true for Czechoslovakia, where the younger generations—students in their early twenties, but also young intellectuals, artists, and political activists entering their professional careers—brought about the emancipation of non-Marxist political thinking in public discourse. In this article, I demonstrate the intellectual clash of the generations of 1968: the older generation that represented Dubček’s famous “socialism with a human face” and that made the Prague Spring liberalization possible by introducing a set of reforms, and new political generations—of students and young intellectuals who rejected the idea of Reform Communism as insufficient for real democratic order. Examining each generation’s understanding of key political concepts such as “opposition” or “political pluralism” reveals that the younger generations had vastly different expectations of “socialism with a human face.”

Recognizing Václav Havel’s essentially dramatic and paradoxical perception of reality can help us to resolve apparent contradictions in his thought before and after 1989, revealing fundamental continuities. The authors trace Havel’s thinking and its reception—both at home and abroad—from The Power of the Powerless to his Czechoslovak and Czech presidencies, explaining how his thinking changed and did not change over the quarter century from 1978 to 2003. Throughout this period, the authors argue, Havel remained committed to certain core ideas of The Power of the Powerless (perhaps most notably “post-democracy”) though perestroika and especially the revolution of 1989 altered possibilities for their realization. While Havel’s sense for ambivalence and paradoxical tension was often fruitful, it could also have problematic implications for political practice and political culture.

ANDĚLOVÁ, Kristina. The Genesis of Political Distrust Towards the "Sixty-Eighters" in Czech Politics Over the Course of 1989. This article focuses on the genesis of political distrust against the so-called sixty-eighters-former reform communists-after 1989, outlining in detail the political trajectories of the Prague Spring communist actors. These politicians-the so-called socialist opposition-represented an important part of the Czechoslovak democratic opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though many of the reform communists also stood at the inception of Charter 77, non-communist dissent was politically distrustful of the socialist opposition, centred around the journal Listy. Unlike the "non-political" Charter 77, Czechoslovak socialist opposition has always advocated for a profiled political program of democratic socialism. Thus, this distrust towards the reform communists persisted after 1989. In a situation where Marxism and socialism had completely lost political power and much of society rejected the socialist left as a dangerous remnant of the communist dictatorship, the advocates of post-communist democratic socialism found themselves on the margins of political discourse.

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