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

The Prague events intersected with this contradiction because they contained a disruptive potential for the détente that was the premise for the two parties’ access to the government and because they also contained a potential for their genuine emancipation from Moscow and even for a rejuvenated or new kind of revolutionary spirit in the West. Philosopher JeanPaul Sartre, in a rather unusual defense of the establishment in 1956, had described Hungary’s revolution as infected by a “rightist spirit.” Hungarian refugee François Fejtö rebutted that the Stalinists were the right-wing reaction to an experiment to improve communism from within. 24Few French radical intellectuals would question the latter’s interpretation during the Prague Spring of 1968.

Prague was the second chance for the greater autonomy of Western Communists as well. Each time a crisis had arisen in the East, the two parties, the PCI especially, tried to relaunch their own initiative in the West. The first of such attempts at coalition building among Western Communist parties was a conference in San Remo, Italy, in May 1956. Palmiro Togliatti’s speech on polycentrism came right after the publication of Khrushchev’s report in June. A key part of that speech, even more than its claim of greater autonomy from Moscow, was the assertion that the path to socialism could occur without the Communist parties being the leading ones in a coalition. This was the first genuine step toward a reformed socialism incorporating some social democratic forms.

The PCI reiterated its principle of unity within diversity after the repression in Hungary. French and Italian Communists concurred in denouncing the “imperialist plot” in Hungary, but only the PCI also admitted the mistakes made by the Hungarian Communists. The French Communists clashed with their Italian comrades more in 1956 than in 1968, accusing Togliatti of revisionism (at the world conference of sixty-eight parties in November 1957). It should be noted, though, that the PCI remained more loyal than the PCF to Khrushchev, for the Soviet leader was for a while seen as an agent of social renewal at home. In this sense, the French Communists, pledging loyalty to Stalinism, asserted their nationalist position more strongly than the Italian Left. In 1956, intellectuals started a slow hemorrhage in the PCF, and a more abrupt withdrawal from the PCI, with a famous document signed by one hundred intellectuals specifically addressing the issue of democratization in the East. Most of that group defected by the end of the year. 25

A major reason for both parties promoting a sharper break with Moscow in 1968 was the pursuit of internal legitimacy. They both had to demonstrate that their own brand of communism was compatible with the democratic process. The electoral situation had favored this moderation for the PCI, but not as much for the PCF. With national elections held in May 1968, the PCI actually gained votes, proving it had, in part, channeled the radicalism of students and workers. In the French elections of the following month, the PCF lost one-tenth of its electorate, showing above all its inability to harness the youth movement.

The PCF’s support of Alexander Dubček’s reforms was very “ temperé .” In July, Waldeck Rochet warned the Czech leader of the dangers of counterrevolution, so strongly that Dubček wondered whether the warning came from the PCF or the USSR. There is no conclusive evidence of Moscow’s success in using the PCF as mediator. But a big scandal erupted in France in 1970 after it was revealed that the French Communist leadership had given the “normalized” Czech government documents from the exchange between Rochet and Dubček, which resulted in trials of several members of the dissident group Club 231. The PCI was more ostensibly sympathetic to the winds of change in Prague, but Luigi Longo in July asked his party’s political bureau to warn Dubček that there were “dangerous positions within the movement (of the Prague Spring)… that threaten[ed] the very basis of socialism” and against which it was “necessary to fight.” 26Both parties condemned the joint intervention of the Warsaw Pact powers in August. Notable dissidents included Jeannette Thorez-Veermesch, Emilio Colombi, and Pietro Secchia on the “orthodox” side, and Roger Garaudy, Umberto Terracini, and the PCI’s Manifesto group further breaching the wall of party orthodoxy. 27

Reconciliation for the PCF with the USSR came as early as 3 November 1968. The French party accepted normalization. Although it also endorsed the summoning of a conference of Communist parties in Moscow the next June, the PCF rejected any formal international agency along the lines of the previous Cominform. The PCI refused to sign the common declaration (it approved only the document condemning imperialism). Also, the Italian Communists condemned the normalization and upheld the notion of “pluralism,” though only within a Socialist framework. The party leadership, however, still expressed solidarity with the world of socialism and the Soviet Union. 28

The crushing of the Prague Spring was, however, traumatic for the leadership of both Western parties. This impact was, perhaps, best exemplified by the similar passionate reactions of the two party secretaries, Rochet and Longo. Consternated by the Soviets’ conduct, they both fell ill soon after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The simultaneous deaths of Togliatti and Thorez in 1964 had not led to significant transformations in the two parties. Instead, the new leadership emerging in the late 1960s further explained the two parties’ increasingly diverging paths. Georges Marchais was, in many respects, more orthodox than Rochet, and Berlinguer was considerably more flexible than Longo. The Italian leader had already anticipated his departure from the bond with Moscow, predicting immediately after the invasion of Czechoslovakia that the “USSR suffer[ed] from an ideological retrenchment”; therefore, it was likely that the Western Communists would “engage in a political confrontation with the Soviet comrades.” 29

Several reasons dictated a moderate response by the two parties to the Soviet repression of the reform movement. Concisely, they can be ascribed to their leaders’ concerns about various possible domino effects should they actually fully express their criticism.

1. Fear of Domino Effects in the East: French and Italian Communist leaders upheld the connection between détente and “controlled” Socialist reform: the radical forces from below, or, after Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, from China, could be upsetting in the West, but they could be devastating in the East. For both parties, the choice of muffling the antiestablishment pressures (from any direction) reflected their slogan of “neither orthodoxy nor heresy.” 30

2. Fear of Domino Effect One in the West: Moderation was also dictated by the fear that an ideological domino effect originating from the discredited East might easily affect the Western Communists as well. An utter condemnation of Moscow could have meant a loss of credibility for socialism altogether, argued the most orthodox members in both parties. 31

3. Fear of Domino Effect Two in the West: The domino effect could also come from the extreme Left. The PCI in part balked because of the position of the Manifesto group within the party and of other extraparliamentarian groups that favored China over the Soviet Union. So pressures from radicalism reinforced a tactical orthodoxy. 32

4. Fear of Political Domino Effects at Home: A moral equivalent between the United States and the Soviet Union might force the PCI and especially the PCF to compromise at home with the Socialists, or with regard to their own practice of “democratic centralism.” A break with the Soviet Union, PCF leaders admonished Garaudy in January 1969, would only serve the cause of Western imperialism. By the end of 1969, Marchais condemned Garaudy after the publication of his book Le grand tournant du socialisme because its denunciation of totalitarian excesses included all of Eastern Europe and even Latin America’s Marxist movements “so bravely fighting their own bourgeoisie and American imperialism.” Garaudy’s book was also censured for its acceptance of the “Marcusian” argument that after the working class had been “integrated” into the “consumer society” it had lost its role as the guide to revolution, which was now waged by the still “excluded” students and other “social or intellectual outcasts.” 33