As peace talks between the North and South Vietnamese failed, the US draft was extended, resulting in anti-war protests across the USA (pictured below). The hippy scene gathered steam as American youth embraced ‘flower power’, frequently clashing with the police, and culminating in the shooting of demonstrators at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in August 1968. Race riots took place as the civil rights movement gained momentum, the lowest point being the shooting of Martin Luther King in April 1968. With the assassination two months later of Democrat presidential hopeful, Robert Kennedy, the nation seemed to be in chaos.
Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, 1967
Frank Wolfe
In Europe too there were demonstrations and riots in London and Paris. In Britain the growing strength of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and the annual marches to Britain’s primary nuclear base at Aldermaston alarmed the government. In the Soviet Union life was typified by economic stagnation, overcrowding and long queues for the most basic of commodities. Khrushchev’s attempts at introducing new initiatives, such as harvesting grain in Central Asia, backfired despite some initial success, leaving whole tracts of land useless. This was also the time of softening up, when Khrushchev released from the gulags prominent political prisoners, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who was allowed to publish his books, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Soviet youth, known as beatniki, listened to Western music, especially The Beatles, and painted and wrote as they saw fit. But it was during a visit to an exhibition of avant-garde art that Khrushchev brought this relative freedom to an abrupt end. Dismayed at what the Soviet youth was producing he ordered an immediate clampdown and a return to firm party discipline.
In January 1968 in Czechoslovakia, amidst growing discontent at economic failure, the Communist Party appointed Alexander Dubček as chairman. Dubček promised reform, democratization and ‘socialism with a human face’. Having begun the process, the ‘Prague Spring’, Moscow feared he had gone too far and ordered Dubček to rein in his ‘counter-revolutionary’ methods. His failure to bring Czechoslovakia back in line angered the Soviet Union’s new leader, Leonid Brezhnev, who, on 20 August, with support from other Warsaw Pact leaders, ordered in the tanks. Dubček, rendered powerless, was arrested and later exiled to a minor post, and replaced by a hardliner, loyal to Moscow. Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring was over. Brezhnev, in a speech in November 1968, reiterated the right of the Warsaw Pact to intervene if any Soviet satellite compromised the hegemony of the Eastern Bloc by looking west. Known as the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, it ushered in another period of suppression, the straitjacking of the arts and ideological strictness.