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

Any discussion of the demands and claims that Moscow addressed to Prague must underscore the fact that issues connected to reforms of the ČSSR’s economy always took second place, even though Ota Šik’s reforms were clearly angled at a market economy. In part, this may have been due to the Soviet leadership’s deeply held conviction that these reforms were doomed to early failure—price rises, soaring rates of unemployment, and other side effects of such reforms would necessarily, in the Kremlin’s rationale, trigger vociferous protest among the majority of Czechoslovakia’s population, particularly among the working class. This assessment was compounded by an assumption that was widely shared in the Soviet Union and in the other East European countries—namely that the actual economic situation in the ČSSR was not as bleak as the Czechoslovak leadership as well as the “rightist forces” chose to paint it. The leader of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany ( Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands , or SED), Walter Ulbricht, went so far as to assume that the ČSSR’s regular pleas directed at the USSR for economic and financial aid were no more than moves in the great political game the Czechoslovak leadership was playing and had one sole objective: in case the request was turned down by the USSR, the ČSSR would “have no choice” but to turn to the West for help. 34

On the other hand, such problems as free mass media and a possible shift in the political system of ČSSR which would include the creation of a multiparty system, featured prominently in Soviet party documents. It may be said that the Kremlin was panic-stricken at the idea of the Czechoslovak society losing its ideological focus, a process signaled, in the eyes of the Politburo members, by the stirrings of the Czechoslovak Social Democrats. It was feared in Moscow at first that once the Social Democrats returned to the political stage, they would develop into a major player capable of toppling the Communists, seizing power, and guiding the country to the “bourgeois fold.” However, as events unfolded the danger increased that the KSČ itself was doomed for a de facto disintegration and that part of it was going to become the basis for the newly emergent social democracy. This was a development that had to be prevented by the USSR at all costs. Since a comparable scenario was within the bounds of probability at the 24th Party Conference of the KSČ, which was scheduled for autumn, the very fact that this party forum was drawing near, particularly when seen in conjunction with the ambivalence of the policies of the KSČ leadership, was one of the reasons for the ultimate fatal twist in this saga.

One of the virtually insoluble problems was that Czechoslovakia’s mass media had been freed from the constraints of censorship in January 1968. Originally, the USSR had even been prepared to accept a measure of Czechoslovak glasnost until the consistent one-sidedness of what was happening became evident. 35The pendulum abruptly changed direction. In the past, it had been impossible to circumvent the control of the party and get into print negative reports on the CPSU, the KSČ, Soviet-Czechoslovak relations, and so forth. Now it was almost equally impossible to find any positive reports in the Czechoslovak mass media on any of these topics. In the USSR, statesmen noted with rising indignation that in the Czechoslovak mass media “all Communists” were automatically tagged as conservative; that “Communists who had become the target of public criticism and vilification had no possibility of defending their point of view,” simply because papers would not accept their statements for publication; and that “there was no freedom of information” any longer in Czechoslovakia, only “freedom for political thuggery and the complete and utter defenselessness of those who were methodically victimized by the press.” 36

Such grievances may sound strange, particularly when uttered by political leaders who had been using similar and even more drastic methods in the struggle with their political opponents for decades. Nevertheless, it was the activities of the Czechoslovak mass media that irked the Soviet leadership the most, and in the last resort, they provided one of the most important impulses for the USSR’s decision in favor of armed intervention. Both in Moscow and in Prague, people knew only too well what a crucial role the Czechoslovak mass media and the propaganda spread by them was playing in the situation as it actually existed. This was also why a compromise in this area was improbable from the start. Even in the earliest stages of the military operation Soviet leaders claimed repeatedly that Prague was rife with underground radio stations (“One radio station has its neck twisted; another one takes its place”), and Soviet troops encountered the first major resistance precisely when they were about to take the radio and TV center in Prague. 37

Ultimately the main charge that was leveled at the KSČ’s leadership was one of utter helplessness and ineptitude (or a lack of inclination) when confronted with the task of reestablishing control of the country. Moscow did what it could to alert Dubček to the fact that many local party organizations either ignored or contravened the resolutions of the presidium of the CC; that members of the presidium kept on announcing in public the most contradictory political principles; and that the KSČ leadership did not muster the resistance that was required—not even when socialism and the party itself were targeted. One of these attacks—the opposition manifesto of the “2,000 Words,” which the Czechoslovak leadership again failed to rebuff adequately in the Kremlin’s opinion—became in many ways the point of no return in Soviet-Czechoslovak relations and marks the beginning of the third stage.

This stage is marked by the fact that the majority of Soviet leaders had come to the conclusion that a military intervention was inevitable. Moscow’s final running out of patience can be reconstructed in detail from the discussion and elaboration of the following memorandum of the CC CPSU to the CC KSČ (particularly on the occasion of the manifesto of the “2,000 Words”) as well as from the steps that Soviet leadership took immediately afterwards.

The first draft of the memorandum as well as the outlines for the meeting between the Soviet ambassador and Dubček at Brezhnev’s behest were prepared by Mikhail Suslov, Boris Ponomaryov, and Konstantin Rusakov and presented to the members and candidate members of the Politburo of the CC CPSU on 29 June 1968. 38The prepared document did not satisfy the majority of the Soviet leadership despite the harshness of a number of formulations. Comments and suggestions poured in from all sides whose common denominator was a hardening of the Soviet position and demanding from the Czechoslovak leaders decisive and, above all, immediate, action. 39Even from faraway Uzbekistan, a cable arrived from first secretary of the Communist Party of that republic containing similar demands. 40The arguably weightiest proposals came from Aleksandr Shelepin, who not only demanded finalizing an agreement with the CC KSČ that would cover all the details but a redraft of the entire text of the document, 41for he considered it “pointless” to dispatch the original version, given the fact “that we have already spoken on more than one occasion with [the KSČ leaders] along the selfsame lines contained in the memorandum that has now been forwarded to the comrades in the Politburo.” 42

After a number of alterations the document wound up being discussed in a session of the Poliburo for two days, on 2 and 3 July, and it took several rounds of voting for it to be passed by the leaders of the CPSU. 43The resolution was fairly nonpartisan in tone, despite the fact that not nearly all proposals put forward by some in the Soviet leadership were incorporated into the final text. For instance, a passage claiming that the CPSU “was sympathetic to the resolutions of the latest plenum of the CC KSČ, which were aimed at streamlining administrative procedures and methods and at speeding up progress along the road of Socialism,” was deleted from the original version. After the statement that “rightist forces had no support among the broad mass of the workers” the warning was inserted that, the situation being what it was, this “did not mean they might not be successful after all”; this warning had been missing in the first draft. 44In some cases, compromise variants carried the day. The draft of the missive spoke of “many” Czechoslovak mass media outlets that were controlled by elements hostile to the party. The hardliners wanted to substitute “nearly all” for “many”; the final version has the more moderate phrase “the most important mass media.” 45