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

The invasion of Czechoslovakia surprised official Washington. The reforms of the Prague Spring had been going on for months without direct Soviet interference. Many keen observers expected a Soviet intervention. When it did not come, they thought the Czechoslovaks might get away with their reforms. Yet during the night of 20/21 August 1968, troops of the Warsaw Pact from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria marched into Czechoslovakia, which was also a member of the pact. In doing so, they aborted the Prague Spring, the attempted democratization of the Communist system of the ČSSR under its leader, Alexander Dubček. 18The political goals of the military intervention had been defined by the Communist Party leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries at several meetings in the months that preceded the intervention: putting an end to the reform process (“socialism with a human face”), defeating the “counterrevolution,” putting the ČSSR back on a course loyal to Moscow, preventing the democratization of Czechoslovakia and the country’s leaving the Warsaw Pact, and staging a “bureaucratic” coup of the “healthy forces” loyal to Moscow against the reformers within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia ( Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ). 19The result is well known.

The reforms initiated by the KSČ, of course, were suspiciously viewed from the very beginning by the “fraternal states,” notably the hard-line Communist regimes in East Berlin, but also in Warsaw and Sofia. In the Soviet Union’s satellite states, political decision making resembled that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza or CPSU ) in that it took place above all as a series of reactions to reformist developments in Czechoslovakia. The German Democratic Republic’s Socialist Unity Party ( Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED) under Walter Ulbricht was the first fraternal party to declare the reforms of the Prague Spring counterrevolutionary in character as early as March 1968. 20Support for and validation of the SED’s diagnosis was forthcoming above all from Leonid Brezhnev himself and from the Communist Party heads of Poland and Bulgaria, Władysław Gomułka and Todor Zhivkov. From March 1968 onward, stopping the “counterrevolutionary” reform process in Prague was the line to which the fraternal countries adhered. The weaker Warsaw Pact allies exerted considerable leverage on the imperial center in Moscow.

The Kremlin’s “politics of intervention” during the Czechoslovak crisis in 1968 can be subdivided into five phases. Phase I spans the time from January to March 1968, when Moscow “still kept relatively quiet regarding the events in the ČSSR.” 21Moscow confined itself to calling the situation in the country difficult and contradictory. The Kremlin was offering “maximum help to the Czechoslovak leadership.” The abolition of censorship in Czechoslovakia and the mass dismissal of party functionaries of the middle and lower levels caused alarm bells to start ringing in Moscow. 22In the runup to the March conference in Dresden, which was officially convened to debate economic questions only, Moscow was beginning to worry seriously about Czechoslovakia’s future. On 15 March, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU) debated a report by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Committee for State Security (KGB) chief Yuri Andropov. It outlined a worst-case scenario that was all but imminent in the Kremlin’s eyes: introduction of capitalism in Czechoslovakia and the splitting up of the Warsaw Pact. 23

Moderate Moscow, on the one hand, at least initially conveyed again and again to the KSČ leadership its approval of the resolutions of the January plenum and the reform course on which Czechoslovakia had embarked. On the other hand, the hard-line East German, Polish, and Bulgarian leaders took a much more critical view of events and condemned them categorically. East German leader Walter Ulbricht always acted with his eyes anticipating or following the Soviet course. The political changes in Czechoslovakia, in evidence at least since 1967, were also painstakingly charted by Bulgarian diplomats. Bulgaria’s ambassador to Prague warned of growing discontent in Czechoslovakia. From the end of 1967, Todor Zhivkov, the bullish head of the Bulgarian Communist Party, insisted on personally reading the diplomatic dispatches from Prague. After the dismissal of the KSČ’s first secretary, Antonín Novotný, who enjoyed Bulgarian sympathies, Dubček assured the Bulgarians that the unity of the party was not in danger. Sofia’s worries were assuaged only mildly. While Zhivkov noted the exchange of the entire Czechoslovak state leadership, he was not the only one gravely concerned with it. 24Having been given the green light by Moscow, Władysław Gomułka, the head of the Polish Communist Party, had already had a meeting with Dubček as early as the beginning of February. Dubček tried to paint the situation in his country in the best possible light, but failed to convince Gomułka. The Polish party chief feared that the reforms would lead to a significant weakening of the party. 25

In this first phase, the East German SED leadership was trying to gauge the consequences of Novotný’s ousting by Dubček; it prepared a first assessment of the new situation in the run-up to the meeting in Dresden on 23 March. The GDR Embassy in Prague sent regular reports to East Berlin, expressing their view of an impending threat: “The activities of the oppositional forces have been… stepped up and are displaying increasingly openly counterrevolutionary characteristics.” The Prague reformers’ key word—“democratization”—was synonymous for the SED with the desire for a counterrevolutionary regime change. This had to be prevented at all costs. Yet it accurately described the goal of the SED’s interventionist policy. The direction of East German goals paralleled Moscow’s: the Czechoslovak reforms had to be stopped! The power monopoly of the KSČ had to be restored! For the SED, the gist of the reforms in the ČSSR was perfectly clear: a counterrevolution was underway in Prague! 26

The Dresden Warsaw Pact meeting ended the opening phase of the policy of intervention. It was the first of five meetings of the fraternal parties prior to 21 August. The party and state leaderships of Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR, Poland, and the USSR were in attendance at these meetings. On 6/7 March, Zhivkov had already issued assurances in a Sofia meeting with Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin that Bulgaria stood ready to use its armed forces if necessary. However, Zhivkov’s willingness to use force can hardly be seen as the first proposal to use military force to end the reform process in Czechoslovakia. Rather, Zhivkov was aiming “to provide further proof of Bulgaria’s traditional role as a loyal and unflinching ally of the USSR.” Solving problems within the Warsaw Pact with armed force was a staple of his policy, even though he considered the “Stalinist methods of the past” no longer necessary. 27Yet despite such caveats, Zhivkov’s proposal is the earliest documented statement of the military option for the “solution” of the Czechoslovak question contemplated by the “Warsaw Five” (USSR, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and East Germany). This is corroborated by Marat Kuznetsov, the former counselor in the Soviet embassy, who had accompanied the Soviet delegation to Sofia. The issue of an invasion of Czechoslovakia was raised: “Suddenly I noted to my surprise that the conversation had turned to an invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. I was amazed…. Brezhnev himself seemed to be of two minds. It was a tug of war…. In Sofia the issue of the invasion was not on the agenda as such but it was discussed in private between members of the Warsaw Pact delegations.” 28