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

The self-immolation of Jan Palach, the Czech student, underlined the pain of isolation felt by the liberal-reformist minority of Soviet intelligentsia. On 20 January 1969, Igor Dedkov, another veteran of the student activism of 1956, wrote in his diary: “A Czech student died yesterday. Our radio stations and newspapers are silent. They report on anything but Czechoslovakia. Nothing we have been writing makes any sense: cheap, cowardly acting, boot-licking, and prostitution.” Some students of the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO), the elite factory of Soviet diplomats, stood silently with glasses of vodka raised—the old Russian tradition of mourning the dead. Still, in Russia, in contrast to the Baltics and the Ukraine, Palach found no followers. 60

While the invasion demoralized the reformist intellectuals, it energized their enemies. Mikhail Gorbachev, then the regional party boss in the Stavropol region, recalled: “From 21 August on, an ideological ‘toughening’ began, the repression of any free thinking.” Instructions from the party Central Committee ordered regional committees to “take decisive actions in the ideological sphere. The struggle against dissident movements took on a massive and ubiquitous character.” 61Numerous reform Communists and those involved in the movement of 1966–1967 were expelled from the party. The very word “reform” became a taboo in the public lexicon for almost two decades. In January 1970, after many months of strangulation of Novy Mir by censors and party hard-liners, Tvardovsky resigned from the journal and died soon afterwards.

In November 1969, Mikhail Gorbachev and another regional party leader, Yegor Ligachev, visited Prague with an official Soviet delegation. Gorbachev knew that his university classmate Zdeněk Mlynář was an active participant in the Prague Spring. At first, Gorbachev tended to agree with the majority in Russia that the invasion was necessary, for his father had been badly wounded liberating Slovakia in 1944. Yet he could not help feeling dismayed by the paralysis and the unmitigated hostility displayed toward the Russians in Prague and Bratislava. After the trip to Czechoslovakia, he recalled, he “returned home overpowered by grave thoughts, realizing the direct connection of what was happening over there with the events of August 1968.” In his memoirs, published in 1995, he called this trip “the most difficult” of all foreign trips he made. 62It would take Gorbachev years to come round to the views on the Czech reforms espoused in 1968 by Alexander Dubček and other reform Communists.

The short-term effect of the 1968 invasion on Russian society was extremely limited. Except for a few dissidents, no elements in Soviet society were prepared to take their discontent and protest into the public realm. On the other hand, the longer-term effect of the abortion of the Prague Spring was very significant. The disillusionment with the prospects of “democratic socialism” similar to the Czechoslovaks’ “communism with a human face,” terminated any possibility of a unity between the liberals in the Muscovite cultural milieu and reform-Communist apparatchiks. The hopes for an evolutionary improvement of the Soviet regime were gone among the cultural Muscovite elites. Meeting in their kitchens, they raised bitter toasts to the “success of our hopeless cause.” From now on, their priority was the preservation of their individual moral and intellectual integrity, not the transformation of society. Among the intellectuals who had toyed with neo-Marxist ideas in the 1960s, there was a widespread sense that history “betrayed” them. 63Social philosopher Dmitry Furman recalled about that time that the fad of Marxism-Leninism among his friends and colleagues in Moscow “died a quiet death sometime during the reign of Brezhnev.” 64

Some intellectuals now turned to the West and the “free world” as a last resort. “The West will help us,” became a favorite toast among those “defectors-in-place.” For dissidents, friendship with Western journalists became essential. Foreigners who resided in Moscow with their families, the hordes of the “messengers of détente” who descended on Moscow and Leningrad, exchange scholars, and participants in scientific conferences carried information in and out of the Soviet Union, helping to spread the news about the arrests and persecutions and to erode the xenophobic encirclement. Numerous sympathizers of the “movement” of 1966–1967 who had begun to “feel foreign” in Soviet society began to seek an exit not only from the ideological utopia, but also from the Soviet Union itself. From 1970 onward, the possibility of such an exit existed in the form of the so-called Jewish immigration.

Reform communism was dead in Russian Soviet society, yet miraculously it survived in the party apparatus. It continued to exist among intellectuals and “enlightened” party members in the Russian provinces and among the tiny group of “enlightened” party apparatchiks in Moscow. The very fact that the Prague Spring (as well as the earlier Moscow Spring) was aborted helped those people to live with their illusions. This meant that, if the democratic reforms had been allowed to proceed instead of being brutally crushed, they would have attracted mass support and created preconditions for the peaceful transformation of the Soviet system.

Inspired by this scenario, two decades later in 1988–1989, Mikhail Gorbachev decided to repeat the Prague Spring in the Soviet Union. The dismal failure of this attempt was overdetermined by a host of economic, financial, and social-political factors. It proved, once and for all, that there was no possibility for a “third way” in the Soviet or Central European countries for societies to develop without the authoritarian state. The abolition of censorship, cultural liberalization, and political democratization produced an avalanche that swept aside the artificial elitist constructions of reform communism. Then as before in Russian society, reform Communists lacked any genuine base even among the elites, not to mention Russian society at large. Very quickly, the discourse of “democratic socialism” practiced by Gorbachev lost its mass support among educated Russians and even in the Russian segment of the Communist Party. Shattered by the revelations of Gorbachev’s glasnost in 1986–1989, Russian nationalism underwent a remarkable transformation: it rejected the vision of Stalin’s empire and embraced the prospect of Russia’s independence from this empire. This transformation is not the subject of this article. Still, it demonstrated the transitional and illusory nature of the ideas and values that had inspired the Moscow Thaw and the shestidesyatniki in the years preceding 1968.

1. “Dva tisíce slov,” Literarni listy , 27 June 1968, reproduced in Jaromír Navrátil, ed., The Prague Spring 1968 (Budapest: CEU, 1998), 177–81.

2. Aleksandr Tvardovsky, “Rabochie tetradi,” Znamia 9 (2003): 142–43, 149.

3. Amir Weiner, “Déjà vu All Over Again: Prague Spring, Romanian Summer, and Soviet Autumn on the Soviet Western Frontier,” Contemporary European History 15, no. 2 (2006): 159–94; Mark Kramer, “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 (March 1998).

4. Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

5. Susanne Schattenberg, “‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’? How the Secret Speech Was Translated into Everyday Life,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era , ed. Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2006), 64–79.