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

Concerning the situation in Czechoslovakia Stoltenberg said that the European nations were spellbound by the changes occurring in Eastern Europe. Important and irreversible developments are unfolding in Czechoslovakia that will have a great impact on the entire situation in Europe. These changes are, of course, occurring within the framework of Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime. Stoltenberg conveyed that the FRG government was not going to make radical alterations with reference to its Ostpolitik until the outcome of the Czechoslovak developments was beyond dispute. 41

One interpretation of this deliberately vague statement is that the West German minister had a compromise in mind: further steps away from Adenauer’s old Ostpolitik would be possible, provided the USSR acknowledged the irreversibility of the developments that originated in Czechoslovakia and were now affecting all of Eastern Europe. If this interpretation hits the mark, a new set of possibilities for decoding the statement becomes available. Was this an inadmissible attempt to blackmail the USSR, or a well-meaning attempt to warn those in charge against taking violent action? The answer will depend on the viewpoint of whoever is interpreting the statement. Whatever the result, Stoltenberg’s attempt has to be called a failure at least on account of the date of 18 September 1968 that the minutes of the meeting bear; in addition to this, it was not received by the Soviet Foreign Ministry until much later. Such a delay between an actual talk and its record being committed to the ambassador’s official log is rather unusual. Again, a range of different explanations is possible, one of them being that Soviet diplomats in third countries were loath to address topics on which they felt out of their depth and which they assumed were also causing unease in Moscow. An indirect corroboration of this explanation derives from the fact that the ambassador added no comment of his own to his interlocutor’s statement quoted above.

The conversation, however, took place at a time when the crisis that was brewing in the relations between Czechoslovakia and most of the other Warsaw Pact countries and its fallout, which would also affect SovietGerman relations, was approaching its climax. Almost simultaneously, the Soviet government dispatched strongly worded notes to the Czechoslovak government and a memorandum to the government of the FRG. In the latter the FRG was taken to task for making public the contents of the documents concerning a bilateral exchange of opinions on the topic of the renunciation of the use of force—notwithstanding the fact that at the same time the contents of these documents had been published in their entirety in the Soviet press. It has to be borne in mind that when Tsarapkin explained the purpose of the Soviet action to the Dutch ambassador, he did not mention Czechoslovak affairs with a single word. He confined himself to the remark that the action had been a “retaliatory measure” because the West German side had ignored the confidentiality principle in the dialogue. A further passage that is of interest in Tsarapkin’s minutes of this brief conversation on 16 July is the one where he describes the reaction of his interlocutor and his own answer to his colleague’s by no means trivial question: “The Dutch ambassador declared himself to be in agreement with my arguments and asked whether I concurred in thinking that the publication of the documents by both sides spelled the end of negotiations. I replied that the door to a continued exchange of opinions had not been closed.” 42

A comparable position was the one held by the 3rd European Department. In a memorandum dated 22 June and addressed to Andrei Gromyko by Anatolii Kovalev and Garal’d Gorinovich, the minister is given the advice to receive Ambassador Allardt and to inform him that the government of the USSR “is ready for a further exchange of opinions on the topic of the renunciation of the use of force.” The memorandum also noted that “it is presumably helpful to raise the issue of the FRG’s accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in order not to provide a basis for the other side to claim the Soviet Union is bringing pressure to bear in some way.” 43

By now, the FRG had already shifted the polemical exploitation of the Czechoslovak question to an official intergovernmental level. The declaration of the FRG’s government spokesman, Günther Dill, which was issued on 18 July 1968, must be considered the first “broadside” that was fired in this campaign. In it, he gave short shrift to the Soviet government’s declaration of 5 July and noted that the details of this note “suggested the presence of pitch black humor” and that confidence in Moscow had thereby “been seriously undermined.”

The exchange of protest notes between the Foreign Ministry of the FRG and the Soviet embassy in Bonn, which was to follow two weeks later, was the next step. It has proven impossible for this author to locate Soviet documents about this episode; the only document available is a version of a DPA report, which may, however, be considered reliable. It was in any case published without commentary in the daily edition of TASS under the title “On the Relations between the USSR and the FRG.” 44The following text is a translation from the Russian version: “Despite the federal government’s protests, the Soviet Union remains convinced that ‘certain circles’ within the Federal Republic are meddling in the events in Czechoslovakia and want to exert ‘hostile’ influence on the relations between Moscow and Prague.”

On the following day, Bonn filed a protest against such accusations; a day later, on a Thursday, the Soviet embassy in Bonn issued a communiqué to the effect that Ambassador Tsarapkin rebutted the protest “in the most categorical terms.” In its rebuttal, the embassy referred to a talk that had taken place between Undersecretary Georg-Ferdinand Dukwitz and the Soviet ambassador at the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday. On that occasion, Dukwitz had registered a protest against the Soviet accusations and deplored the campaign that was being waged against the Federal Republic in the Soviet press.

In the communiqué based on this talk, the ambassador emphatically sided with the Soviet press with regard to the accusations against the FRG. The ambassador could not but rebuff the protest because “the evidence used by the Soviet press is based on facts amounting to proof that certain circles in the FRG are determined to interfere in a number of ways in the relations pertaining between the USSR and the ČSSR as well as in the internal affairs of the ČSSR.” The interference was undertaken with the “express purpose of undermining Soviet-Czechoslovak relations.”

The communiqué went on to say that Soviet-Czechoslovak relations and the situation in Czechoslovakia were not on the agenda in talks with the Federal Republic.

According to diplomatic observers, the Soviet-German “controversies” about putative German interference signaled Moscow’s increasingly rigid attitude toward Bonn during the escalation of the situation in Czechoslovakia. This can also be inferred from the federal government’s white book, which was published after negotiations with Moscow on the renunciation of the use of force stalled unexpectedly on 11 July.

The white book is significant in several ways. First, it provides definitive proof for the hypothesis that it was, in fact, the West German side that initiated official polemics centering on the Czechoslovak question. Second, the controversy followed a trajectory that was highly unusual given the traditional relations between the USSR and capitalist countries. Normally, the Soviet side would protest diverse articles published by the Western press; this drew a routine answer to the effect that the government involved in the matter, being unable to interfere in the affairs of independent media, was unable to assume responsibility. In the case under discussion, it was the other way round. Third, the Soviet side did not resort to the argument it habitually used on other, rare occasions when it was confronted with claims on the basis of positions put forward by Soviet media. It tacitly admitted that in this case the viewpoints of the Soviet press and the Soviet government were identical. This transformed the accusations leveled against the FRG by the press into a kind of official intervention. Fourth, in this case, accusations were not leveled against the government, but against “certain circles” in the FRG, which is indicative of Soviet diplomats’ determination to minimize the conflict. Finally, the main thrust of the Soviet counterprotest was no more than an explication of the Brezhnev Doctrine.