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

The Brezhnev Doctrine thus reflected the Soviet Union’s profound hostility to any meaningful change in the political complexion of EastCentral Europe, regardless of whether such change was achieved through nonviolent civil resistance or violent rebellion. But this engrained attitude did not necessarily mean that Soviet troops would intervene promptly or indiscriminately during future crises in the Soviet Bloc, any more than they had in 1968. Brezhnev went to great lengths in 1968 to pursue an internal solution in Czechoslovakia that would preclude the need for a full-scale invasion. He and other Soviet officials tried for months to pressure Dubček to crack down, and it was only when their repeated efforts failed and when the dates of party congresses in Czechoslovakia were looming (congresses that would have resulted in sweeping replacements of KSČ hardliners) that the Soviet Politburo finally approved the dispatch of Soviet troops. This pattern of trying every option to find an internal solution before resorting to military force was repeated during all subsequent crises in East-Central Europe under Brezhnev.

In retrospect, given what the latest evidence reveals about the Soviet Union’s objectives at the time, we can safely conclude that no real opportunity existed in 1968 for truly radical change in Czechoslovakia. Significant reforms would of course have been possible, as had been occurring in Hungary since 1962. But the much more far-reaching transformation envisaged by the boldest reformers in Czechoslovakia was unacceptable to the leaders in Moscow. Because Brezhnev and his Soviet colleagues had sufficient power to determine the political fate of Czechoslovakia, their preferences ultimately prevailed in 1968. Fundamental change in Czechoslovakia and in other Central and East European countries required a fundamental change in Soviet policy, and this did not occur until the end of the 1980s. Only then were the ideals and central elements of the Prague Spring, especially its democratic thrust, allowed to bear full fruit.

Nonetheless, even if radical change could not have taken lasting hold in Central and Eastern Europe under the circumstances that existed in Moscow in 1968, this does not diminish the drama and audacity of the Prague Spring. Soviet leaders rightly sensed that the far-reaching reforms in Czechoslovakia would have a fissiparous effect within the Communist Bloc. To be sure, it is impossible to know whether the reform program in Czechoslovakia would eventually have produced a genuinely democratic polity. Even if the external environment had been more benign, the internal obstacles to radical change were formidable. The well-known Czech writer Antonín Liehm, who was a leading reformer in 1968, recently acknowledged that “skepticism and disillusion” might eventually have ensued in Czechoslovakia, even without the external pressure. 59But Liehm also aptly noted that the boldest of the reformers were “sincere” in wanting to “abandon militarized socialism” and to “push for real political freedom.”

In that respect, it is unfair and misleading for Czech officials nowadays to dismiss the Prague Spring as merely an insignificant exercise in “warmedover communism”—the sort of dismissal voiced often by Václav Klaus and some other Czech politicians who themselves kept their heads down in 1968. (Klaus was a twenty-seven-year-old economist in 1968 and took no part in the reform efforts.) Klaus has been wont to condemn the leaders of the Prague Spring for having “believed in socialism with a human face” rather than genuine democracy, but this sort of criticism is largely ahistorical. 60Given the constraints posed by the Soviet Union’s hegemonic position in the Warsaw Pact, “socialism with a human face” ( socialismus s lidskou tváří ) was a remarkably bold goal for an East European country to seek. The slogan itself—“socialism with a human face”—not only heralded the sweeping changes that Czechs and Slovaks were hoping to achieve, but also implied that socialism elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc lacked a “human face.” Oldřich Černík, the Czechoslovak prime minister in 1968, later recalled that Brezhnev angrily confronted Dubček over precisely this issue in May 1968: “In one of the Kremlin corridors [Brezhnev] kept asking Alexander Dubček: ‘What’s with this human face? What kind of faces do you think we have in Moscow?’ Dubček sought to mollify him by answering that this, you know, is just some catchy phrase that the people like.” 61

Even though the slogan meant different things to different people in Czechoslovakia, opinion polls taken in 1968 revealed that a large majority of Czechs and Slovaks were supportive of Western-style democracy. 62Soviet troops put a forceful end to those aspirations, but the goal never really disappeared. Thus, looking back, we can view the spirited attempts at reform in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the tragic way in which they ended, as adumbrating the eventual downfall of the Communist Bloc and of the USSR itself.

1. U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA Intelligence Supplement: Soviet Electronic Countermeasures during Invasion of Czechoslovakia , DIAIS UP-275-68 (Secret—No Foreign Dissemination), 1 October 1968, declassified October 2002, in Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, National Security File, Europe and USSR, Czechoslovkia, Czechoslovakia Memos, Vol. IV: 9/68–1/69.

2. H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).

3. Karen Dawisha, The Kremlin and the Prague Spring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

4. “Cesty ke svobodě,” Rudé právo (Prague), 13 May 1968, p. 1.

5. “Rabochaya zapis’ zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 15 marta 1968 g.,” verbatim transcript (top secret), 15 March 1968, in Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF), Fond (F.) 3, Opis’ (Op.) 45, Delo (D.) 99, Listy (Ll.) 123–24.

6. “Rabochaya zapis’ zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 15 marta 1968 g.,” L. 127.

7. “Rabochaya zapis’ zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 21 marta 1968 g.,” verbatim transcript (top secret), 21 March 1968, in APRF, F. 3, Op. 45, D. 99, Ll. 147–58.

8. “Rabochaya zapis’ zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 21 marta 1968 g.,” Ll. 148, 151–53, 156.

9. See the materials pertaining to these discussions in Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Warsaw, Archiwum Komitetu Centralnego Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Rabotniczej (Arch. KC PZPR), Paczka (P.) 32, Tom (T.) 114.

10. “Protokół z rozmowy Pierwszego Sekretarza KC PZPR tow. Władysława Gomułki z Pierwszym Sekretarzem KC KPCz tow. Aleksandrem Dubczekem,” 7 February 1968 (Secret), in AAN, Arch. KC PZPR, P. 193, T. 24, Dok. 3.

11. A. M. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva: Vospominaniya diplomata, sovetnika A. A. Gromyko, pomoshchnika L. I. Brezhneva, Yu. V. Andropova, K. U. Chernenko i M. S. Gorbacheva (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1994), 147–49.

12. “Rabochaya zapis’ zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 23 maya 1968,” verbatim transcript (top secret), 23 May 1968, in APRF, F. 3, Op. 45, L. 262.

13. Cited in “TsK KPSS,” memorandum no. 1/22 (top secret) from P. Shelest to the CPSU Politburo, 21 March 1968, in Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads’kykh Ob’ednan’ Ukrainy (TsDAHOU), Kyiv, F. 1, Op. 25, Sprava (Spr.) 27, Ll. 18–23. See also Emil Šip, “Prvomájové referendum,” Rudé právo (Prague), 3 May 1968, p. 2.

14. “Doklad P. E. Shelesta ‘Ob itogakh aprel’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS,’” speech text (top secret), 25 April 1968, in TsDAHOU, F. 1, Op. 25, Spr. 97, Ll. 8–9.

15. “Doklad P. E. Shelesta ‘Ob itogakh aprel’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS,’” L. 11.