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

An issue that this program avoided altogether was the restoration of the sovereignty of state and nation; it did not touch on Czechoslovakia’s membership or position within the Soviet Bloc. All questions relating to the country’s foreign policy were deliberately sidelined or excluded altogether. This was done presumably under the naive perspective that unquestioning loyalty on the level of global politics was going to ensure a safe climate for domestic reforms. This was, of course, a cardinal mistake. The intervention was to become reality.

It is obvious that the intervention was not triggered by worries occasioned by the reform agenda of the KSČ. The reason was that the Soviet leadership had lost confidence in Dubček’s ability (and indeed in his willingness) to get a situation under control in which the system was gradually being eroded. 14There were other sponsors of the intervention in addition to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza or CPSU) leadership, notably the orthodox faction in the KSČ leadership and the party leaders in the satellite countries. Among them, the attitude of the Polish and the East German Communists, who explicitly endorsed the invasion, was particularly important. 15It is understandable that the final assessment, arrived at in Moscow not without hesitation or controversy, carried considerable weight. In view of what we know today, one of the interpretations that were once common in Czechoslovakia and in leftist Western circles can hardly be upheld any longer, namely that the Soviet leadership misjudged the situation entirely, meddled when the Communist regime was under no threat, and discredited itself through its aggressive communism with lasting consequences. Let us, for instance, recall the poster that was on display everywhere in the streets of Prague depicting Brezhnev as the grave digger of world communism or the slogan that was making the rounds at the same time: “Wake up, Lenin, Brezhnev has gone nuts.” In fact, the reverse was true. The Soviets remained true to the logic of the system that they represented. Consequently, the intervention stifled the movement that had the potential to bring about the collapse of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and, for all the Soviets knew, was already in the process of doing so. This would have amounted to a serious destabilization of the regimes of the neighboring countries in a manner that was ultimately to materialize in the domino effect of 1989. It may very well have been the case that the intervention extended the lease on life for these regimes by another twenty years.

That such an assessment ultimately gained credence in the Soviet leadership is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the tactics that the KSČ leadership used in their negotiations with the Soviets or, to assign names to the dramatis personae, that Dubček used in his negotiations with Brezhnev. It is difficult to judge whether a different strategy than the one chosen by Dubček, which consisted basically in playing for time, would have had more of a chance of success. Its rationale was the realization on the part of the Dubček faction that it was of paramount importance for them to hold out until the beginning of the extraordinary party conference of the KSČ, which was scheduled for 9 September; the conference would boost the reformers and quite likely blow the position of the leadership’s orthodox, Moscow-beholden faction to smithereens. But, of course, the Soviets were equally capable of a rational assessment of the situation. Dubček’s ceaseless attempts to paint the situation in rosier colors than was actually justified (and also rosier than it had repeatedly been depicted in speeches by the leading reformers, speeches with which the Soviets were, of course, familiar), to pacify the Soviets with promises holding out the prospect of various measures and changes, to embark subsequently on a course of procrastination and then to serve up excuses of one kind or another for the delays—all these maneuvers were effective for a time, but the moment when enough was enough finally arrived. The transcripts of the telephone conversations that took place between Dubček and Brezhnev only days before the intervention, on 9 and 13 August 1968, when Dubček attempted to justify himself by citing all kinds of reasons why he had not yet followed up on the pledges he had made two weeks earlier in Čierná nad Tisou, demonstrate quite clearly the limits and also the counterproductivity of such tactics. 16The majority of the CPSU leadership could not but arrive at the conclusion that the KSČ had not only lost all control over the media and was in the process of losing control over the organs of power, but that it had entirely lost its ability to act and to hold the party together.

To return to this point once more: it is, of course, impossible to tell in retrospect whether a different approach might have prevented the intervention. Yet it is undoubtedly true that the leaders of Poland’s Communist Party, Władysław Gomułka in 1956 and Stanisław Kania and Wojciech Jaruzelski in 1980 and 1981, confronted the Soviets when the country was in a comparable situation far more resolutely than Dubček with his words, “Comrade Brezhnev, you should resort to all the measures that your CC Politburo believes are appropriate.” One must add, however, that in their negotiations with Moscow the Poles not only displayed much more determination to stave off an intervention, they were also as good as their word in actually carrying out the measures they had pledged. The fact that they did not implement measures that would no doubt have been construed as endorsement of the Soviet interference and that would, moreover, have meant reneging significantly on liberalization and reform (reintroduction of censorship, changes in the Ministry of the Interior, a number of new appointments) would have reflected well on the KSČ leadership under Dubček in 1968, if they had also had the gumption in the first place to reject such demands out of hand in the talks with the Soviet leaders, instead of halfheartedly acceding to them and following this up with equally halfhearted delays. What made matters even worse was that these same reformist party leaders then played a role in the downward spiral that followed the intervention, in autumn 1968 and in 1969, in a situation in which they were no longer constrained by tactical considerations to defend themselves, in which the last traces of their reform program had been swept away as well as the last shreds of their own political careers. A case in point is the Legal Measure of the Presidium of the Federal Assembly of 22 August 1969. It was passed after several days of rioting in connection with the first anniversary of the intervention. It amounted to the proclamation of a temporary state of siege and became an important tool for quelling resistance at the beginning of the process of “normalization,” that is, the consolidation of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. It bore the signatures of President Ludvík Svoboda, of the head of the government, Černík, and Dubček, who had already been reduced to the role of president of the Federal Assembly. 17

Raising the question to what extent this or that negotiation tactic of the KSČ leadership contributed to Soviet decision making does not mean attempting a reallocation of the roles of victim and aggressor (which is part of the agenda of some Russian historians). 18The aggressor, irrespective of what reasons led to its decision, was the Soviet Union; the role of accomplice and initiator of the intervention was the domestic “fifth column”: the orthodox Communists within the party leadership of the KSČ and other plotters in the party and the state apparatus.

The intervention and the resistance it evoked led to a tremendous mobilization of the Czechoslovak society and gave it ethical and emotional foundations that were to serve as a basis for the unparalleled awakening of civic self-confidence and responsibility. On 21 August, the threat of an attack from outside ceased to be relevant any longer; while it had been imminent, it had slowed down political activity during the preceding months by forcing people to respect self-imposed limits. In a strange way, that first week after the invasion gave the Czechoslovak public an intense foretaste of unlimited freedom. It was only then that the forces pent up in society, which had been something of an object for speculation before August, revealed themselves in full. Brezhnev and others in Moscow were right in the way they assessed the activities of the “Right” immediately after the invasion. Gomułka even said: “We are the wiser for the experience: it’s in fact possible to stage a counterrevolution before the very eyes of the Soviet military. The situation is worse than we thought.” 19