Abstrakt
In the 1980s socialist Czechoslovakia was sinking into an especially difficult economic crisis. The communist leadership rejected the reform movement of the 1960s and was wary about enacting any kind of reform at first.
Nevertheless, the deepening problems and the changes in the Soviet Union showed the necessity of some action. This enabled reform-oriented circles to try to enact some kind of reform.
The previous development was based on immutability, but with time, solutions, which would have been deemed unacceptable just a few years ago, were proposed - e.g. a market economy. The radicalism of the solutions culminated in 1989, which was also the year when Czechoslovak government, and many others, faced the harshest trials.
The state socialist system did not manage to overcome its structural problems and lost its external guarantor - the Soviet Union. This led to demise of this system and its transformation into a variety of capitalism.
What ended up being a capitalist transformation was built on socialist grounds and drew from earlier proposals, which were submitted to the communist leadership as reform plans. I will focus on the crisis threshold and the continuity of reform plans as well as actors who devised and promoted or even enacted such plans.