Obituary: Zdenek Mlynar

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Partos, Gabriel
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 21.04.1997
• ISSN: 0951-9467

[Zdenek] Mlynar was a close associate of Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz), whose short-lived experiment to launch "socialism with a human face" was brought to an abrupt end by the Soviet- led military invasion in August 1968. As the top intellectual in the CPCz leadership, Mlynar was in many ways the brains behind the charismatic Dubcek. Their fate - and that of the Prague Spring - was sealed by the fact that the Czechoslovak reforms were being shaped at a time when the Soviet empire was reaching its most expansionist phase; and that the Kremlin's incumbent at the time was not Mikhail Gorbachev but Leonid Brezhnev who had zero tolerance towards more liberal forms of Communism. A year after his return to Prague, Mlynar joined the Institute for State and Law of the Academy of Sciences. In the mid-1960s, as the long winter of Communist orthodoxy was beginning to be assailed by the first harbingers of the Prague Spring, Mlynar became a senior official in the CPCz's legal affairs department. The economic downturn in the early 1960s and the failure of Antonin Novotny, the long-standing CPCz leader, to follow the de-Stalinisation programmes of some of his Communist neighbours, had fuelled widespread discontent which, in turn, prompted growing demands for change within and outside the party.