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

With that, the political problem of collective action appeared for Brezhnev to be solved. Should Dubček, as expected, not adhere to the agreements, there was now an alternative. A few days later, an SED delegation traveled to Karlsbad for bilateral discussions with Dubček. 89The situation seemed to ease up, but Ulbricht was, in fact, implementing an exploratory mission for the Politburo of the CPSU. He wanted to examine how the agreement of Čierna nad Tisou was put into practice. Two points were particularly important: (1) “[m]easures for controlling the media” (Ulbricht for this reason dug his heals in toward Dubček during a joint press conference) and (2) whether or not the activity of the Social Democratic Party would be prevented and the clubs disbanded.

The content of the report to Moscow is not known, but under the circumstances Ulbricht could only confirm that party control over the media had not yet been reestablished.

The period of joint debates was over. 90On 16 August, the Politburo of the CPSU established that the KSČ had broken the agreements of Čierna nad Tisou. The CPSU listed in detail which ones in their letter to the Presidium of the KSČ from 17 August, at which time it decided to respond to the “call for help” from Prague. The Soviet ambassador in Prague was at the same time instructed to hand the draft of a “Declaration of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the KSČ and the Government of the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic” to Bil’ak and Indra. 91The draft was to serve as the political foundation for their bureaucratic putsch plan, the carrying out of which they had promised the Soviet leadership for the Presidium session on 20 August. 92The Politburo transferred the military high command to Grechko, the Soviet defense minister, and it decided to call a further meeting with the “Warsaw Five” in Moscow for 18 August with a single point on the agenda. The four parties were to assume uncritically the decisions made for their parties and countries and with it guarantee their participation in the “collective action.” The assent of the SED was a simple “yes” from Ulbricht, which he reinforced with his signature beneath the minutes. Brezhnev demanded silence regarding this session, including toward the respective national party leaderships. The first secretaries of the four parties had to sign a set of minutes that stayed in Moscow. 93Ulbricht’s “yes” remained in force; the GDR supported the intervention and helped in forcing through the “normalization” in the ČSSR, with which the restoration of the monopoly on power of the Communist Party and its cleansing of “revisionists” was party-officially rewritten. 94

The suppression of Communist self-reform in the ČSSR in 1968 was a Pyrrhic victory for the Warsaw Five. They did not succeed in enduringly securing the Communist Party’s monopoly on power in Czechoslovakia and in their own states.

Twenty years after the violent suppression on 21 August 1968 of the democratization of the Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia emanating from the KSČ, the spirit of reformist communism was abroad anew. 95One year before peaceful revolutions in the GDR and Czechoslovakia ended their rule, two protagonists of the restoration of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power in Czechoslovakia from 1968, Bil’ak and Erich Honecker, spoke in East Berlin full of concern for their own power about the new evaluation of the history of Communist rule taking place in the Soviet Union. It concerned the debate on Stalin in the Soviet Union. In 1968, Bil’ak had belonged to the “healthy forces” within the KSČ who had “solicited” the intervention of the “five sister states” for the protection of socialism in the ČSSR. As then Central Committee secretary for security in the SED Politburo, Honecker had unreservedly supported the intervention policy of the SED.

Now, in view of the Soviet policy of reform, they were haunted by the memories of the crimes in the history of communism, to which the suppression of the “Prague Spring” doubtlessly belonged. In 1988, the memories had a name for Honecker and Bil’ak: Mikhail Gorbachev. The general secretary of the CPSU pursued a policy of democratization; Stalin’s victims were rehabilitated and censorship abolished. Soviet historians spoke and wrote openly about the Terror of the 1930s and asked what part Stalin’s politics had in Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power. 96

According to the SED’s memorandum on the discussion, Bil’ak complained about the dangerous political consequences that could arise from the Soviet history debate.

The Soviet comrades would rather not admit that nasty developments can take place. He, Comrade Bil’ak, has explained to them: “If one hits a rabbit over the head, it is dead; if that befalls a bear, nothing happens. We, however, are a rabbit.” An enormous pressure developed in the direction of a destabilization of the Socialist countries. For this reason, he, Comrade Bil’ak, also asked the Soviet comrades whether they realize that the attacks against Stalin ultimately—as in 1968 in the ČSSR—target the party? They are supposed to call into question the legitimacy of the Party of the Bolsheviks. 97

Bil’ak was dismayed about the presence of the history of the Prague Spring in the Soviet reform debate. He reported “some Soviet representatives demanded that the events of 1968 be re-evaluated. The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Estonia had advised this internally; Comrade Gorbachev also advanced that the events must be re-evaluated, but the Czechoslovakian comrades are not prepared to do that.” 98To Honecker, Bil’ak expressed the feeling of losing his “hinterland.”

These quotations prove that, for the leaders of the ruling Communist parties, the history of their own rule primarily served the historical legitimization of their own power. The question to which historians are bound, namely that of the historical truth regarding the methods with which power was gained and held, always turned from this point of view into an attack on the dictatorial power of the Communist Party. Only from this perspective can the significance of the “Prague Spring” in the history of the Soviet Empire also be explained. It was no coincidence that the Soviet reformers of 1987–1988 contemplated a “reevaluation” of these Czechoslovakian reforms: the Prague reform Communists were their forerunners. Precisely because of its violent ending, the history of the “Prague Spring” remained politically current and was one of the causes of the peaceful revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe and in the GDR in 1989. Robert Havemann predicted this at the end of 1970, in order to encourage himself and others to continue the struggle with this hope in mind: “It is in the long run quite inevitable that the ideas of the KSČ precisely as a result of the intervention will also spread within the countries of the interveners. Freedom is the disease from which Stalinism will die.” 99

Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.

1. On this, see the texts from Rüdiger Wenzke, “Die Nationale Volksarmee der DDR. Kein Einsatz in Prag,” 673–86, and Thomas Großbölting, “Die Niederschlagung des ‘Prager Frühlings’ und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit der DDR,” 807–22, both in Karner et al., Beiträge .

2. Lutz Prieß, “Der ‘Einladungsbrief’ zur Intervention in der ČSSR 1968,” Deutschland Archiv 12 (1994): 1253; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 197, pp. 3–14, Politburo resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU P 95 (I), 17 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente , #62.