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

The political culture of the majority of people in Soviet Russian society continued to be defined by the search for stability and peace, not by the quest for civil freedoms. The traditional Cold War enemy images, blurred among the educated strata and reversed among the liberal dissidents, remained very strong in the society’s depth. The regime’s propaganda successfully used the Vietnam War and the brutal U.S. bombing of the North Vietnamese to discredit the “American enemy” in the eyes of the majority. Against this backdrop, the Soviet “right” to control Central Eastern Europe remained nondiscussible and sacrosanct.

The truth about the Prague Spring was in the beholder’s eye. The reform Communists, including the “enlightened” apparatchiks, viewed the Czech developments as an unexpected second chance for a profound deStalinization of the Soviet society and for the ousting of the neo-Stalinist old guard. Some of them had lived in Prague for years, working for the journal The Problems of the Peace and Socialism . 45They warned the party leadership that military intervention in Czechoslovakia would lead to a split with the Western Communist parties and jeopardize the Soviet position in the world. 46One observer who worked in the party Central Committee’s building in the summer of 1968 recalled: “Never before or since have I seen so much room for liberalism in the highest Soviet quarters. One could walk along the corridor inside the party Central Committee and shout at the top of one’s lungs: ‘It is impossible to send tanks into Czechoslovakia!’” 47Aleksandr Bovin wrote in his diary on 19 August, “In our Department [of the Central Committee], in the Foreign Ministry [intervention] is considered an unjustified step, at least a premature one.” 48

The brio of the Prague Spring seemed to have brought reform Communists and Liberals together again, at least in Muscovite intellectual circles. Active Russian Jewish dissident Mikhail Agursky recalled: “The Prague Spring of 1968 briefly brought me back to the eschatological expectations of Good Communism. I still shared hopes that salvation would come from the outside: Poland, Hungary, the Italian Communist Party and now from Czechoslovakia.” 49Journalist Vladimir Lukin, a man with strong identity of shestidesyatnik and with extensive contacts to innovative artists and formalist poets, returned early in 1968 from Prague to Moscow for a leave and found that “the entire Moscow” of dissidents and semi-dissidents flocked to his apartment, eager for news about Czechoslovakia. 50

The Prague Spring was closer to the hearts and minds of the Moscowbased intellectuals and artists than the Western New Left radicalism that erupted at the same time. The anti-Vietnam protest among radical youth in the West did not find the slightest response in the quarters of the dissident movement. Moscow intellectuals also refused to share the Western radical infatuation with Maoist Cultural revolution in China. In the opinion of one Moscow witness of the May events in Paris, French neo-Marxist intellectuals and students were “possessed by Satanic powers.” They worshipped revolutionary violence, while Soviet liberals and reform Communists abhorred it. 51Russian film critic Maya Turovskaya recalled: “In 1968 the West experienced ‘its’ Sixties. And we did not understand why Western Leftists could be so blind to what was happening in the Soviet Union. We felt like being on a train going in the opposite direction.” 52

In April–June 1968, Andrei Sakharov formulated a paradigm of technocratic-minded Soviet intellectuals in a pamphlet: “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” He appealed to the Western political and intellectual classes with a call for the convergence of the two opposed systems. Sakharov emphasized the need of intellectual freedom and of the “scientific-democratic approach to politics, economics, and culture.” He stressed that he held “socialist” views. Yet his emphasis was not on revolution or mass politics, but on peaceful evolution and scientific/technical progress. Sakharov rejected violence and revolutionary changes. He feared that any political coup or revolution in Soviet society would cause a regression to violent chaos. The only alternative could be “scientific-democratic” reforms brought about by a gradual evolution in politics, economics, and culture. Sakharov believed that the intelligentsia, scientists and artists, should play a crucial role in such a transformation, provided they were given freedom of information, travel, and speech. 53

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968 took everybody in Russia by surprise. Earlier news broadcasts had not prepared people for the use of military force. Many were on summer vacations, in a mood that was far from political or concerned with international events. KGB and party reports invariably spoke of “absolute calm” in all the Soviet regions and cities. Even in comparison with 1956, protest in Moscow and Leningrad was remarkably insignificant. In Prague, Lukin and other Russians in sympathy with the Prague Spring refused to propagate lies about the invasion and quickly lost their jobs. In Russia, there was one perhaps rather spectacular protest that took place in Red Square on 25 August. There were only seven protesters, all of them from the ranks of the post-1965 movement of human rights defenders: Konstantin Babitsky, Larisa Bogoraz, Vadim Delone, Vladimir Dremliuga, Pavel Litvinov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, and Vladimir Fainberg. They tried to unfurl small Czech flags and posters. One poster read: “Long live a free and independent Czechoslovakia!” On another poster was the famous slogan of the Polish nationalist revolutionaries of the nineteenth century: “For your freedom and for ours!” The KGB quickly arrested the protesters. 54

Ill-informed and deceived by the Kremlin propaganda, the vast majority of Russian people took the invasion as a necessity. Some in the KGB and among the officials were all too eager to depict the Czech reforms as a “Jewish-led affair,” drawing parallels to the dissidents in the USSR. This had the potential of unleashing anti-Semitic reactions. 55Yet this did not happen. Security interests and Cold War bipolarity remained the trump card of official propaganda. For many, the fact that Czechoslovakia bordered on West Germany was enough to justify the invasion. “What occupation?” asked some people regarding the seven dissident protesters in Red Square. “Of Czechoslovakia? But we liberated them in 1945. Two hundred thousand Russian soldiers died there. And now they’ve staged this counterrevolution. We cannot give up Czechoslovakia and leave it to the Americans.” 56This echoed typical views, shared by many Russians who had lost relatives in the Second World War. 57

The invasion fatally tipped the domestic balance: the potential democratic-socialist coalition, uniting idealistic Communists and liberal intellectuals, was no longer in the cards. The regime proved it was not afraid of resorting to brutal force and got away with insignificant reactions from the Western powers and total quiescence inside the USSR and the Communist Bloc. Among advocates of cultural liberalization and reform Communists alike, a feeling of intense shame was compounded with a sense of impotence. They felt dishonored, for their ideals had been trampled on and defiled. More and more of them became, as Elena Bonner put it, “foreigners at home.” 58Writer Aksyonov railed against the criminal regime. Poet Yevtushenko shed “the tears of a deceived idealist.” Yevtushenko sent two cables: one to Brezhnev, protesting the invasion, another to the Czech embassy in Moscow, expressing moral solidarity. Then he hurried to his dacha near Moscow to burn his manuscripts and letters, expecting the KGB to come and search or even arrest him. In the “oases of free thinking,” the think-tanks and labs in Moscow, Akademgorodok and elsewhere, the arrogant and confident technocrats of the scientific elite promptly “changed tapes”: now they marched to hard-line music. The editor of Literary Gazette , Aleksandr Chakovsky, launched a campaign to collect signatures of writers to support the invasion. 59There was no widespread campaign among established pro-liberalization intellectuals and artists to defend the rights of the arrested dissidents. Fear of being branded anti-Soviet and the inability to speak against Stalin’s empire at the time of the Cold War were as paralyzing in 1968 as in 1956.