http://praguemonitor.com/2010/01/06/protagonist-recollects-prague-spring
6 January 2010
Prague, Jan 5 (CTK) - Cestmir Cisar, politician, diplomat, historian
and sociologist and one of the protagonists of the Prague Spring
reform process, who turned 90 this month, said yesterday that the
Prague Spring at the end of the 1960s was one of the most beautiful
periods in his life.
The reform process in the former communist Czechoslovakia then
attracted not only the entire Europe but the whole world, Cisar told
journalists.
On the occasion of his 90th birthday Cisar was yesterday received by
Chamber of Deputies chairman Miloslav Vlcek (Social Democrats, CSSD)
who presented him with a memorial letter and a medal.
In 1968 Cisar was elected the first chairman of the Czech National
Council (Czech parliament) within the Czechoslovak Federation.
Cisar did not stay long in the post of Czech parliament head and was
replaced by Evzen Erban under the regime of Gustav Husak in 1969 when
the period of normalisation or the crackdown on the reform communists
followed the suppression of the Prague Spring movement by the former
Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968.
Cisar entered high politics in 1963 and he was secretary of the
former Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSC) central committee. He was
education and culture minister in 1963-1965.
Cisar told journalists yesterday that in the capacity of culture
minister he sought to transfer the programme of democratisation into
the intellectual area.
"The system could not function well without intelligentsia," Cisar,
who was dismissed from his ministerial posts for his liberal views
and sent to Romania as Czechoslovak ambassador, said yesterday.
Alexander Dubcek, the main protagonist of the Prague Spring reform
movement called him back in the spring of 1968.
Cisar says 1968 was primarily the period of the renaissance of Czech
intellectual community.
After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops Cisar
was stripped of all political posts in the period of normalisation.
Cisar was expelled from the KSC in 1970 and he was one of the
founders of the Club for a Democratic Socialism, Revival.
Cisar said yesterday that he saw the opportunity to prepare a new
reform process under the model of Gorbachev's perestroika and return
to some Prague Spring ideals in the second half of the 1980s.
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