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

The TASS files already mentioned on “Bonn’s subversive activities directed against Czechoslovakia” quoted an even higher number of West German visitors to Czechoslovakia, “The West German Intelligence Service has a considerable potential for recruiting agents to spy on the ČSSR. According to press reports, 368,000 German citizens have entered Czechoslovakia in the first half of this year alone” (emphasis added). 35It goes without saying that such a massive influx of Western tourists could not possibly be adequately monitored, even if one accepts the most conservative estimate of their number. This inevitably posed certain security problems for the Warsaw Pact countries.

Shortly prior to the beginning of the invasion, new reports on economic contacts between the ČSSR and the FRG surfaced. An announcement issued by Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Frankfurt/Main on 14 August stated that “a group of Czechoslovak finance experts are due to arrive here for talks with the Deutsche Bundesbank.” 36The talks were officially classified as “technical”; loans were explicitly excluded from the agenda, and the precise topics of the talks remained unspecified. It is understandable that such reports could only increase the suspicions Moscow harbored toward the plans of the Czechoslovak reformers, particularly if they were not offset by official information.

A comparable lack of information also prevailed regarding the visits of West German politicians to the ČSSR. It was even the case that the country’s diplomats were not informed in time, which led to bizarre incidents. One example concerns the ČSSR ambassador to Austria, Novotný, who was showing considerable irritation with Austria’s media during a conversation with his Soviet colleague, Podtserob, on 22 July, at the peak of the crisis in Czechoslovakia. The media, according to Novotný, “spread all kinds of lies and try thereby to influence politics in Czechoslovakia and the country’s relations with the Socialist countries.” From the transcript of the conversation, it is apparent to what the envoy of the ČSSR was referring. “Austria’s media are carrying reports on a visit of the leader of the West German FDP, Scheel, to Czechoslovakia. This report is a pure and unmitigated fabrication.” 37However, the news of Scheel’s visit had already been published by TASS on 13 July, and on the day of the conversation between Podtserob and Novotný, it was published by ČTK, which added that the visit was a nonofficial one. The result was that the ambassador was forced to retract his words the following day. The problem of the relationship between leading exponents of the ČSSR’s foreign politics and the country’s diplomats is beyond the scope of this article, but the above example shows very clearly that not all was well in this respect. This placed an additional burden on the Soviets in forming an objective, unbiased assessment of the Prague reformers and their political and foreign political goals. It was very difficult not to lose one’s bearings given this mêlée of reports, rumors, retractions, and the like.

So far this chapter’s discussion has only concerned image questions. But what were the actual stages in the development of Soviet–West German relations? What role did the events in Czechoslovakia play in this development?

As far as the relations between Bonn and Moscow were concerned, the year 1968 began with the jarring, tough-worded diplomatic note of 6 January 1968 on the topic of West Berlin, in which the Soviet government expressed its vehement disapproval of FRG policy. Bonn’s reply, handed to Soviet Ambassador Tsarapkin by Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger on 1 March, limited itself to expressing “surprise” at “the accusations filed by the government of the USSR”; it made no constructive contribution. 38West Germany’s reaction on 15 January to a Soviet proposal (made as early as 15 August 1967) concerning the establishment of a direct airlink between the USSR and the FRG was more satisfactory in operational and constructive terms. This positive reaction was obviously part of the policy of “small steps,” the essence of Bonn’s Eastern politics, and a kind of hallmark of the Great Coalition. Unsurprisingly, Bonn’s diplomats in their reply hewed to West Germany’s claim to sole representation; they even managed to ascribe this position to the Soviet side. In concrete terms, the reply stated that the FRG government “welcomed the Soviet proposal to start talks involving the relevant ministries of both countries on the establishment of a direct German-Soviet airlink.” The Soviet proposal had, of course, referred to this goal as the establishment of “direct flights between the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany.” A positive Soviet reply did not arrive until the end of the year, a development that figures into the chain of events discussed later in this article.

In many talks on both official and unofficial levels, FRG representatives affirmed their wish for the USSR to demonstrate a modicum of acceptance of the FRG and its politics; this was accompanied by denials of the existence in the FRG of revanchism , a neo-Nazi threat, and so forth. The USSR reacted to this by repeating the same catalogue of demands: the existing borders had not yet been recognized; the other German state had not yet been recognized; there were unwarranted claims on West Berlin; the development of neo-Nazism did not meet with an adequate response; the country was banking on nuclear energy; the country was evading the issue of the Munich Agreement; and the country was preparing “extraordinary legislation.”

The Soviet side supported the strict measures taken against revanchistes by the GDR, as is evidenced by a conversation between the Polish ambassador to Moscow, Paszkowski, and the head of the 3rd European Department of the Foreign Ministry of the USSR, Anatolii Blatov, on 17 April 1968. 39At the same time, care was taken at the Soviet Foreign Ministry not to demonstrate too much solidarity with their GDR comrades:

As regards the missive of the ambassador of the USSR to the GDR, Comrade Pyotr Abrasimov, on the revelations of the FRG’s revanchiste and expansionist legislation, we want to make the following statements:

1. The announcement of the GDR government concerning this topic was published in the GDR on 20 February this year. On 21 February, the Pravda carried an article entitled ‘The Taming of the Revanchists ’ commenting on this announcement.

2. At the beginning of March, several GDR experts on International Law were in Moscow to discuss with Soviet colleagues the text of a joint declaration formulated by International Law experts from a number of Socialist countries concerning the GDR law dating from 3 August 1967… a delegation is expected on 4 April to vote on the draft document.

For the time being, we consider a declaration supporting the announcement of the GDR government concerning several new laws passed in the FRG inopportune. 40

The most important topics in the talks held between staff members of the 3rd European Department and FRG diplomats, namely Ambassador Allardt and the embassy’s two ministers, Sante and Rudolf Wolff, were problems related to the FRG’s position on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and to its renunciation of the use of force. The discussion of the two problems proved fraught with difficulties, but was not hindered by polemics.

The situation in Czechoslovakia was not touched upon in these talks, as this author can testify. The same can be said of talks of the Soviet ambassador to the FRG, Tsarapkin, with politicians and representatives of public life in the FRG. These revolved around domestic issues of the FRG: neoNazism, extraordinary legislation, the student movement, and so forth. The only mention of events in Czechoslovakia in the documents that have been examined is in connection with the federal minister for Scientific Research in the FRG, Gerhard Stoltenberg, in the course of a talk with the Soviet ambassador on 18 July 1968: