This article focuses primarily on the period 1948-1968 in Czechoslovakia in order to provide an understanding of the efforts to revive Czech sociology in the 1960s. The author documents how, after a brief post-war revival, Czech sociology was suppressed and abolished at universities and other institutions after the 1948 communist coup. When policy-makers and planners then realised the need for a type of social information not provided by official statistics, a social survey, representing a kind of rudimentary form of empirical sociology, albeit one serving the regime, was created and carried out by state institutions. In 1956 a revisionist version of Marxist sociology emerged, and the change in the political and intellectual climate in the late 1950s enabled the renewal of some empirically oriented branches of sociology. While in the full sense sociology never officially existed as a theoretical, critical and free academic discipline throughout the period of the communist regime, in the sense that 'sociology' is understood as the application of sociological approaches and methods to specific social issues sociological research did exist in a limited form in Czechoslovakia from the end of the 1950s, and in the 1960s began addressing key social issues. At the end of the Prague Spring any hope of renewing sociology ended with it.
