On the road. Re-discovering Yugoslavia in Czechoslovak Opinion Periodicals in the Reform Period of Spring 1968
Abstract
The rise of reform tendencies within Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1968 started a broad process of researching ways to modify the political system and a society-wide debates about possibilities of redefinition of state's socialism model. References to the Yugoslav socialist self-management system as a possible way to following often appeared in reflections on reform options. Yugoslavia was a frequented topic in Czechoslovak press throughout whole period of the Prague Spring. However, general spirit of mobilization in the society included also a range of politically less explicit expressions of interest on "Yugoslav way", which was manifested in journalism. In this regard, a very interesting example is activity of the weekly Reportér, where several articles devoted to the Yugoslav history and a serie of reportages from Yugoslavia were published.
The paper will focus on selected expressions of re-discovering Yugoslavia in Czechoslovak journalism in 1968 and its relation to searching for "Socialism with a human face". We will follow the content of those articles and a general image of Yugoslavia presented by the authors. We will thus try to answer the question of significance of Yugoslavia as a ideological reference for the overall intellectual atmosphere of that time.