Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

The research demands of this Boltzmann Institute project also found wonderful supporters at the Austrian embassy in Moscow. Special thanks must go to Ambassadors Franz Cede and Martin Vukovich who both offered their contact networks unstintingly to direct us toward valuable resources. They kindly offered embassy facilities on more than one occasion to project coordinators for meetings with Russian counterparts. While we are indebted to many kind staffers at the embassy, this applies especially to attaché Sieglinde Presslinger for the help she has unfailingly given us over several years. In Vienna, we have always been able to count on the help from the Russian embassy, especially from Ambassador Stanislav Ossadtchii.

The Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft in Vienna, above all President Christian Konrad and Managing Director Claudia Lingner, have been extremely helpful with this project throughout its duration. We owe them a great debt of gratitude.

At CenterAustria in New Orleans, where the English version of this book was completed, we would like to thank Gertraud Griessner, Marion Wieser, Sandra Scherl, Michael Maier, and Christina Sturn. Susan Krantz, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, quietly gave CenterAustria her support when needed. Scott Manguno assisted Günter Bischof in his research. Jennifer Shimek of Loyola University performed her usual wonders as copy editor of this volume. In Graz, Harald Knoll and Silke Stern came through whenever their help was needed. We would like to thank Otmar Binder, Vienna, for his smooth translations of nine of the articles in this volume from German into english. We are extremely grateful to Mark Kramer for including this volume in his Cold War History Series with Lexington Books without any hesitation and with much good cheer to help us pull through the final production effort.

1. Stefan Karner, Natalja Tomilina, Alexander Tschubarjan, Günter Bischof, Viktor Iščenko, Michail Prozumenščikov, Peter Ruggenthaler, Oldřich Tůma, Manfred Wilke, eds., Prager Frühling. Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968: Beiträge , Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung, Sonderband 9/1 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008) (hereinafter abbreviated throughout this book as Karner et al., Beiträge , with corresponding page numbers).

2. Stefan Karner, Natalja Tomilina, Alexander Tschubarjan, Viktor Iščenko, Michail Prozumenščikov, Peter Ruggenthaler, Oldřich Tůma, Manfred Wilke, with the support of Irina Kazarina, Silke Stern, Günter Bischof, Aleksei Filitov, and Harald Knoll, eds., Prager Frühling. Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968. Dokumente. Prazhskaya vesna. Mezhdunarodnyi krizis 1968 goda. 2. Dokumenty , Veröffentlichungen des Ludwig Boltzmann-Instituts für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung. Sonderband 9/2 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008) (hereinafter abbreviated throughout this book as Karner et al., Dokumente , with corresponding document number in the collection).

3. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 211–13; Jeremi Suri, “Lyndon Johnson and the Global Disruption of 1968,” in Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light , ed. Mitchell B. Lerner (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 53–57.

4. Norbert Frei, Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich: DTV, 2008), 50; see also Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, 1968: Eine Zeitreise (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008); Wolfgang Kraushaar, Achtundsechzig: Eine Bilanz (Berlin: Propyläen, 2008).

5. On the crisis year 1968, see Mark Kurlanski, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine, 2004); Ronald Fraser, ed., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988). For the larger context of the 1960s, see Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Bruner, Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Udo Wengst, “‘1968’—40 Jahre danach. Ein Literaturbericht,” Sehepunkte 9, no. 1 (2009), http://www.sehepunkte.de/2009/01/14414.html(accessed 26 January 2009).

6. Mitchell Lerner, “Trying to Find the Guy Who Invited Them: Lyndon B. Johnson, Bridge Building and the End of the Prague Spring,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 3 (2008): 77–103.

7. Alan Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 210–22; H. W. Brands, ed., The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson beyond Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 118–21.

8. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 , The Oxford History of the United States, ed. David M. Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 756.

9. John Prados, “Prague Spring and SALT II,” in Brands, The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson beyond Vietnam , 32–35.

10. Vojtech Mastny, “Was 1968 a Strategic Watershed of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 1 (2005): 149–77, here 176.

11. H. W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 254–64; George C. Herring, “Tet and the Crisis of Hegemony,” in 1968: The World Transformed , ed. Carole Fink et al., Publications of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31–53.

12. Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Mark Kramer, “The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine,” in Fink et al., 1968: The World Transformed , 111–72; Robert A. Divine, The Johnson Years , vol. 3, LBJ at Home and Abroad , ed. Robert Divine (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), 239–79; Mitchell B. Lerner, ed., Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, eds., Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy , 1963–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Lawrence Kaplan et al., eds., NATO after Forty Years (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1990); Hal Brands, “Progress Unseen: U.S. Arms Control Policy and the Origins of Détente, 1963–1968,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (2006): 253–85; John C. McGinn, “The Politics of Collective Inaction: NATO’s Response to the Prague Spring,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 3 (1999): 111–38; A. Paul Kubricht, “Confronting Liberalization and Military Invasion: America and the Johnson Administration Respond to the 1968 Prague Summer,” Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 40, no. 2 (1992): 197–212; Andreas Daum et al., eds., America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives , Publications of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Alexandra Friedrich, “Awakenings: The Impact of the Vietnam War on West German-American Relations in the 1960s” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2000).

13. Jaromír Navrátil et al., eds., The Prague Spring 1968 , National Security Archive Cold War Readers (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998); Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds., A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 , National Security Archives Cold War Readers (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005); on new sources, see also the chapter by Mark Kramer in this volume.