The study focuses on Marxist critique of Soviet systems in Czech oppositional thought during the period of so-called normalization (1970s–1980s). This analytical discourse was characterized by efforts to re-establish the critical debates that started as a part of Czechoslovak social-scientific critique in the 1960s and intended to provide a detailed analysis of the nature of the so-called Soviet-type systems (STS, i.e. the political systems of the Warsaw Pact countries). Thus, the STS theory was geopolitically defined and did not deal with analyzes of other communist regimes (for example, Yugoslavia or China). On the example of selected Czechoslovak thinkers (e.g. Pelikán, Mlynář, Strmiska, Hájek) the first part of the study addresses attempts to evaluate Czechoslovak development in the 1960s as a specific case of democratization of the Soviet-type system; in the second part I focus on interpretations of these discussions from the perspective of East-European totalitarian paradigm. Finally, the third part describes how these analyzes contributed to the formulation of possible political changes in the Eastern Bloc.