Czech economic thought during 1948 - 1969 (from the Stalinist terror to the Prague spring)

Czech economic thought during the 1948 - 1969 was full of sudden turns. Its development was determined by political conditions and spiritual climate that were result of Stalinist soviet type socialism. During the first half of the 1950s the plurality of economic ideas was substituted by the Stalinist version of marxist-leninist political economy using violent methods. Low efficiency of the command system and emerging reform climate in the USSR under N. S. Khrushchev opened the door to the reform thinking of the second half of 1950s and the 1960s in Czechoslovakia. During the 1960s the development of the reform thinking together with renaissance of the theoretical economic thinking culminated in the economic reform of Otto Šik and his team, and democratization process of the Prague Spring of 1968. Promising developments ended as a consequence of the Warsaw Treaty troops invasion in August 1968.

Keywords: history of the Czech economic thought, marxian political economy, economic reform, soviet-type socialism, market socialism, central planning, plan and market