Restoration of Order : The Normalization of Czechoslovakia

For most Czechs and Slovaks the Prague Spring was an exciting experiment in socialist democracy. For conservative apparatchiks throughout Eastern Europe, it represented a frightening slide into the politics of disorder and chaos — the bureaucrat's Babylon. The dramatic Soviet invasion of August 1968 was but the first small step towards 'normalization' — the restoration of order.<br><br>This process, which was begun in 1969, involved one of the most extensive social and political purges ever undertaken in post-war Eastern Europe. Having experienced their methods himself, Milan Simecka has been able to dissect the work of the 'normalizers' as they single-mindedly eradicated the last traces of independent thinking from the Party and conducted a ruthless onslaught against the cultural intelligentsia. Simecka's account will not only be of use to students of Czechoslovakia: it also invites comparison with Poland and other East European Countries, focusing as it does on the relationship between state and intellgentsia.<br><br>For the English edition Zdenek Mlynar, author of <i>Night Frost in Prague</i> and the highest-ranking Czechoslovak Communist Party official to emigrate to the West, has written a special introduction.