ABSTRACT
The development of economics in the communist era of Czechoslovakia (1948–89) was determined by the political conditions that influenced the spiritual climate. 2 Hence the seigniorage of power by the communists forced the liquidation of any economic ideas that were contradictory to the Stalinist version of political economy. The functional weakness of the command system, accompanied by the emerging reform climate in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, initiated criticism of the ruling doctrine. The increasing democratization of Czechoslovak society in the 1960s, accompanied by emancipation from Soviet supremacy, opened the way for new ideas in economics that finally led to concepts of an alternative economic system (‘plan—market model') culminating in the Prague Spring of 1968.
