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

The beginning of the second stage can be dated to March 1968 when a far-reaching review of the Soviet position took place with regard to SovietCzechoslovak relations. Prior to this date, it had been the resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s (CCKSČ) presidium to abolish censorship in Czechoslovakia that had been the greatest cause for worry for the USSR; now, at the beginning of spring, the incipient mass dismissal of “preselected” functionaries at the medium and lower levels, for which the free press was largely responsible, rattled Moscow. 3It did so all the more since all attempts by the USSR to obtain from the Czechoslovak leadership an assessment of the situation had produced no solid result so far. What Prague transmitted to Moscow was reassuring announcements that everything was under control. At the same time, members of the presidium of the CC of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) were making statements in their speeches to huge audiences that diametrically contradicted this.

The first signal that might have alerted observers to the fact that Moscow had moved beyond the stage of carefully monitoring developments in the ČSSR and was now beginning to nurse grave misgivings was a letter of the ČSSR CPSU to the KSČ leadership, which was discussed in the Politburo meeting of the CC CPSU on 15 March. The draft of the letter, prepared by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and the then head of the CC Department for Relations with Communist Parties in Socialist Countries and the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was drastically revised. 4The revision resulted in underscoring the two key theses: anticommunist forces were trying to establish a capitalist system in Czechoslovakia, and the Western countries were trying to drive a wedge between the members of the Warsaw Pact by dragging “free” Czechoslovakia off to join NATO. Formulations that appeared to take matters to extremes (such as statements like “While you are coasting along in the wake of the reactionaries, Fascism is rearing its head in Germany” 5) were ultimately left out, yet the overhauled document was still quite harsh in comparison to the first version.

On the same day, three letters of the Ministry of Defense to the Czechoslovak leadership were discussed in the Presidium session. The topics of these missives were the visit of a delegation of the Political Administration of the Red Army and the Navy, command-staff exercises to be conducted by the armies of Warsaw Pact countries on the territory of Czechoslovakia, and an invitation to the USSR of a Czechoslovak military delegation. 6Three days later, it was decided that only the last letter was actually going to be forwarded to Prague; a brief note attached to this resolution states that “the missives regarding the command-staff exercises and the Soviet military delegation’s visit to the ČSSR… have not been dispatched on account of the ongoing changes in the leadership of the ČSSR.” 7The changes mentioned here apparently referred to the enforced resignation of Antonín Novotný from the post of president of the ČSSR. This development caused great ill feeling among Soviet leaders, for only two months earlier, when Novotný had had to vacate the post of general secretary of the CC KSČ to accommodate Alexander Dubček, both Novotný himself and Moscow had been given assurances that Novotný would be safe in his post as president of the state under any circumstances. It does not come as a surprise therefore that, given the latest twist, the Soviet leadership felt downright betrayed by the new KSČ leaders. 8

It has to be borne in mind that the general secretary of the CC CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev, was caught in a most precarious dilemma at that stage. Through his trip to Prague in December 1967, when the “endless plenum” of the CC KSČ was in session there, he de facto gave a hand up to the leader of the “new wave,” Dubček; afterwards, feeling responsible for his protégé, he constantly tried to defend and protect him. Even within the Socialist camp, he singled out Dubček for special support. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Communist takeover of power (the “Victory of the Czechoslovak Working Class” in February 1948), 9for instance, it was none other than Brezhnev who insisted that the Eastern European countries dispatch their highest ranking party delegations to Prague. 10At the same time, the majority of members of the CC CPSU felt intensely uncomfortable about the new KSČ leader right from the start. He was criticized for his indecisiveness, for the constant concessions he made to rightist forces, for his weak interpretation of Marxism, and so forth. This criticism hurt Brezhnev as well, if indirectly, and he was compelled at a later stage, when the misgivings of the Soviet leaders concerning Dubček increasingly turned out to be justified, to prove to all and sundry that he had supported “Sasha” 11only until the latter began, through his activities (or the lack thereof), to jeopardize the “achievements of socialism” in Czechoslovakia. 12

If there were differences of opinion in the Politburo of the CC CPSU regarding developments in Czechoslovakia, these did not go beyond what was usual in discussions. They most certainly did not amount to a split of the Soviet leadership into a “liberal Western” and an “internationalist Leninist” camp, as is sometimes asserted in the literature, notably in Western literature. A comparable split of the CPSU leadership (into “conservatives” and “revisionists”) occurred much later. At the time being discussed in this chapter, the positions held by the Soviet leaders were determined in many ways by their personal perception of the Czechoslovak crisis; their perception was, in turn, shaped by the amount of information to which they had access, by their own political experience, and by the position they occupied in the hierarchies of party and state. The imperative calls to “reestablish order” in Czechoslovakia articulated by the defense minister of the USSR, Andrei Grechko, and by Petro Shelest, a Politburo member, are easy enough to understand as justified, given their point of view. The former worried about weakening the defensive potential of the Warsaw Pact on the one hand and, on the other, about a possible “depropagandization” of the soldiers of the Czechoslovak People’s Army which might result, should the “Day X” dawn, in former “brothers in arms” turning into a military power bent on active resistance. 13Shelest, who was also the general secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, feared that the “Czechoslovak contagion” might spread to his republic, particularly to its western regions. The positions of other Soviet leaders were not quite as clear cut and were occasionally modified in one direction or another, dependent on circumstances.

Mikhail Latysh in particular comes to the conclusion, in the light of the interviews he conducted and recorded at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s with people who had inside knowledge of the apparatus of the CC CPSU—namely Vadim Zagladin, Ivan Udal’tsov, and Aleksandr Bovin—that the Soviet prime minister, Aleksei Kosygin, always considered rather “weak” in the West, maintained, in fact, a “consistently rigorous” attitude toward both the ideas of the Prague Spring and the majority of the Czechoslovak political leaders associated with it. 14

On the one hand, this view might well be true. What commends it, for example, is the CC CPSU missive of 15 March mentioned above. Kosygin’s comments on the draft of this resolution were by far the most rigorous and the least inclined to compromise. 15On the other hand, it must be remembered that on his return from Karlovy Vary, where he was said “to be taking the waters,” 16the same Kosygin gave a very moderate assessment of the situation in the ČSSR; 17later, he tried repeatedly—and urged his colleagues in the part leadership to do the same—to come up with an answer to the most difficult of questions, namely: “So, having marched our troops into Czechoslovakia, what do we do next?” 18He was raising the issue of an exit strategy.