Zdeněk Mlynář and the Search for Socialist Opposition. From an Active Politician to a Dissident to Editorial Work in Exile

The author points out that Mlynář has today been largely ousted from Czech historical memory, even though he was amongst the leading opponents of the Communist régime after its collapse, and tried to regain a place in Czechoslovak politics. The author recalls Mlynář’s becoming a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party early on, his law studies in Moscow in the first half of the 1950s, where he formed a lasting friendship with his fellow-student Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), as an expert researching the prospects of the socialist political system in the 1960s. He then concentrates on Mlynář’s work during the Prague Spring of 1968, when he became a member of the reformist leadership of the Communist Party at the side of Alexander Dubček (1921–1992). After the August intervention by armies of five Warsaw Pact states, Mlynář gradually became disillusioned with the possibilities of continuing reform, and he resigned from the Party leadership. In the early 1970s, he found employment in the Department of Entomology at the National Museum, Prague, and avoided political life. Nevertheless, he gradually joined in debates with other reformists expelled from the Party about the possibilities of influencing developments in Czechoslovakia with the help of leftwing parties in western Europe. The author discusses Mlynář’s analyses of the situation at the time, the development of his views, and his integration into the nascent dissident movement, which appeared after the founding of Charter 77. A few months later, in June 1977, Mlynář emigrated to Austria in consequence of a smear campaign against the Chartists. The author focuses on Mlynář’s close work amongst Czech exiles, particularly with the increasingly diverse Listy group, which was established by Jiří Pelikán (1923–1999). The group was centred on the exile periodical of the same name, which was published in Rome and formed the core of the Czechoslovak socialist opposition in exile. In addition, the author considers the efforts of Mlynář and his colleagues to win support in Western left-wing circles, particularly in relation to the Italian Communists and Socialists and later the West German Social Democrats. He also considers Mlynář’s political essays, which met with a considerable response amongst the public of Western Europe, and the clear shift in opinion from the initial model of a political system with Communist Party hegemony to political pluralism. In this context, the author then gives a comprehensive account of two large research and publishing projects coordinated by Mlynář. The first project, from 1979 to 1982, was ‘Experiences of the Prague Spring of 1968’; its participants were almost exclusively Czech sociologists, historians, economists, jurists, and other specialists in exile. The project resulted in almost thirty mimeographed volumes in three language versions (mostly Italian, French, and English), which were distributed by several hundred carefully selected left-wing individuals and institutions in the West, and it culminated in a congress in Paris. According to the author, this little known project represents one of the most profound and essentially never-published reflections on the origins, development, and failure of the Prague Spring. The second project, ‘Crises in Soviet-type Systems’, ran from 1982 to the late 1980s, and presented the perspectives of authors from a wider range of central European countries. It resulted in sixteen works by Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and East German authors, published by the leading Czech exile publishing house, Index, as small paperback editions in English, French, and German. The number of its subscribers grew to about 2,000. The project included giving papers at conferences and other international forums. Both of the projects, according to the author, demonstrate Mlynář and his colleagues’ persistent orientation to exclusive circles of the political left in the West, whom, in their efforts to change things in Czechoslovakia, they preferred to the dissidents still in Czechoslovakia.