Postwar

In December 1967 Party members constituted 16.9 percent of the Czechoslovak population—the highest share of any Communist state.

188

Jiri Pelikan, ed., The Czechoslovak Political Trials. The Suppressed Report of the Dubcek Government’s Commisson of Inquiry, 1968 (Stanford, 1971), p. 17.

189

The request was hardly spontaneous. Two weeks earlier—at a secret meeting near Lake Balaton in Hungary hosted by Janos Kadar—Vasil Bil’ak (one of Dubcek’s opponents within the Czechoslovak Party leadership) was advised by Shelest that Moscow would like a ‘letter of invitation’. The ensuing letter refers explicitly to the Party’s ‘loss of control’, the likelihood of a ‘counter-revolutionary coup’ and the ‘risks to socialism’ before inviting Moscow’s ‘intervention and all round assistance’. It ends: ‘we request that you treat our statement with the utmost secrecy, and for that reason we are writing to you, personally, in Russian.’

190

Because Ceausescu refused to take part in the invasion or allow Warsaw Pact troops to cross Romanian territory, the Bulgarian contingent had to be airlifted to Ukraine instead. Their presence hardly justified the trouble; but the importance of spreading responsibility for the attack across the largest possible number of fraternal states overrode other considerations.

191

After 1989 it emerged that the Czech Secret Police in the normalization years had established a special unit to monitor and target the country’s Jews: an echo of Czechoslovakia’s own past as well as contemporary Poland. It had not escaped the authorities’ notice that only one of Dubcek’s leading colleagues had refused to sign the Moscow document renouncing his actions. He was Frantisek Kriegel—the only Jew in the group.

192

Milan Simecka, Obnoveni Poradku (The Restoration of Order), (Bratislava, 1984—in samizdat). Eighty thousand Czechs and Slovaks fled into exile following the Soviet invasion.

193

The baby-boom generation itself never wanted for employment. It was its immediate successor, the cohort born after 1953, which entered the employment market just as jobs were getting harder to find. Not surprisingly, the politics of the successor generation were markedly different.

194

Only in Spain, where the cycle of social protest lasted into the mid-Seventies before blending into the movement for a return to parliamentary democracy, did the upheavals of the Sixties herald a genuine political transformation—a story to be taken up in Chapter 16.

195

Britain’s Profumo Affair of 1963—a deliciously multifaceted scandal of sex, class, drugs, race, politics and spies that absorbed the country for months—would have been unthinkable a few years later. The peccadilloes of a fallen elite might continue to arouse a certain prurient interest, but after the Sixties they could no longer shock.

196

The US federal budget deficit grew from $1.6 billion in 1965 to $25.2 billion in 1968.

197

As a point of comparison American oil imports, at the height of the 1973 crisis, represented no more than 36 percent of US domestic consumption.

198

An average, of course, is just an average. In the particularly bleak year of 1976, when British unemployment passed one million for the first time since the war and annual inflation approached 25 percent, rates of growth everywhere hit a low point—in Italy the national economy actually shrank, for the first time since the war.

199

National Association of Local Government Officers; National Union of Public Employees; Association of