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

At the same time, on 16 August, the top Soviet leadership convened a “big meeting” in Moscow. On 17 August, all members and all candidate members of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, as well as the party leaders of some of the Union’s republics who hardly ever took part in sessions in Moscow, assembled. The preparations for the military operation were propelled by a keen sense of purpose, which did not prevent small stumbling blocks from making a nuisance of themselves. What occurred at the time was the rare case of a Politburo resolution that had already been signed (the “signed version”) having to be annulled; even Brezhnev’s signature had to be crossed out again! The stumbling block took the form of a passage of a text dealing with convening a conference which would involve the party and state leaders of the USSR, Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR and Poland on 18 August in Moscow. The purpose of the meeting as stated in that first version was the discussion of the “topical issue.” This formulation was replaced forthwith 97by another equally soft one typical of the Soviet party apparatus: 98the idea of the meeting was “to discuss questions related to joint actions to provide assistance to the Communist Party and the government of Czechoslovakia in their struggle against reactionary and counterrevolutionary forces.” 99The participants of the Warsaw Conference, who had come to Moscow within a few hours, ratified the resolution that had already been passed a long time before on participation in the joint military intervention, even though they needed more time for the detailed formulation in individual documents on which the five countries had agreed; Kádár’s last additions were not inserted until the afternoon of 19 August.

Materials were fetched from party safes that had already been prepared around 20 July. Some alterations were made in these materials which had become necessary in view of the changed situation. At Suslov’s suggestion, the word “revolutionary” was deleted from the title of the prepared declaration to be delivered by the “Revolutionary Government of the ČSSR”; in the address of the declaration of the five interventionist countries (“Comrades, workers, agricultural laborers, intelligentsia of the people; Czechs and Slovaks, fighters of the people’s militia, members of the Communist Party”), the mention of the members of the Communist Party was eliminated. After consulting its allies in the Interventionist Coalition on the topic, the CPSU leadership provided an answer to the question who inside the ČSSR was to be named as allegedly having requested the five countries to undertake a military intervention in the name of protecting the achievements of socialism—from the end of July up to (and including) 18 August several blank lines had marked the place for the insertion of this piece of information. 100The government of the ČSSR was named as the party responsible for this, even though some documents also contain references to the “majority of the Presidium of the CC KSČ.” 101

Finally, the story of the memorandum that the CC CPSU addressed to the CC KSČ, which had already been written on 15 August, reached closure. Even before it had been delivered to its addressee, it was reedited several times and shuttled around within a few days along the route Moscow–Yalta–Moscow–Prague–Moscow–Prague. The circuitous detour of the document resulted from the fact that, after the text of the memorandum had been finally approved at the Politburo session on 17 August and dispatched to Chervonenko for him to hand it to Dubček, problems surfaced in Prague concerning the document. The Soviet ambassador, having consulted a representative of the “healthy forces” in the Presidium of the CC KSČ, immediately sent back his assessment of the text of the memorandum to Moscow. On the one hand, he suggested several sweeping changes; on the other, he advised handing the document to KSČ leadership not on 18 August (the date specified in the resolution of the CC CPSU), but on 19 August. 102The ostensible reason given for this change was that 18 August was a Sunday, and it would have been difficult to find any KSČ leader who was on duty. The real reason was that both Chervonenko and the “healthy forces” wanted to reduce the time span between the presentation of the memorandum and the beginning of the invasion as much as possible. An indirect corroboration of this assumption derives from the phrase that

this opinion [regarding the postponement of the presentation of the memorandum to 19 August] is also shared by our Czechoslovak friends, who would prefer for the memorandum to be handed over as part of routine procedure in order not to attract unnecessary attention or to provoke premature reactions on the part of the right-wing forces. 103

This resulted in the memorandum being returned to Moscow once more and not getting back to Prague until after last alterations had been made.

The activities in the phase of rising tension in the Politburo of the CC CPSU immediately before the beginning of the invasion are characterized by two divergent tendencies. On the one hand, the need to react in operative terms to even the smallest changes in the run-up to the military operation resulted in several resolutions being noted down, as it were, almost on a haphazard basis by a handful of people in pencil on note paper. 104On the other hand, the most important resolutions were passed immediately in sessions of the Politburo of the CC CPSU by the entire Soviet leadership. Even more remarkable is the fact that even the second names are given in the materials of the CC of those who were directly involved in the formulation of one or the other resolution. As far as the situation that existed at the time is concerned, it is possible to witness a rare picture regarding the Soviet party nomenclature. As regards the most important resolutions, the roll-call of individuals participating in the sessions of the Politburo was almost identical with the roll-call of those who had prepared the resolution. This might of course be interpreted as the realization of the principle of “collective leadership,” to which Soviet leaders loved to pay lip service, yet it actually makes a more forceful case for the interpretation that what the CPSU leadership desired was the establishment of a kind of “joint liability,” a collective responsibility for the dramatic and politically dubious decisions.

Regardless of all the efforts and the careful preparation of the “military/political operation,” the invasion as a whole did not unfold the way the Kremlin had planned it or the way the Soviet leaders would afterwards make the world believe it had unfolded. While the military component unfolded on the whole without a hitch, the political side was anything but satisfactory. Above all, a total fiasco occurred at the beginning of the operation when the “healthy forces” who, not content with being unable to gain control of the country and the party, became pariahs themselves, and had to be shielded and protected. 105This was obviously linked to the inevitable political “reanimation” of Dubček and his entourage, who were whisked from Uzhgorod, where they were de facto under arrest, to Moscow for negotiations. In the eyes of the Soviets who wanted to restore order in the country with the help of Czechs and Slovaks, there was at the moment no one apart from Dubček who seemed capable of keeping the country in the Soviet camp, even if the name of an alternative candidate had been put forward who commanded a following in the party. During the time that it took to find such a candidate (the choice was soon to fall on the Slovak politician Gustáv Husák), it was not only necessary to keep Dubček in power, but also to make sure he was taking orders from Moscow. This was to be guaranteed by the allied troops stationed in Czechoslovakia and by Dubček’s assurances that, after the debacle of Čierná nad Tisou, they were going to be put down in writing in every single case. We may assume that it was thanks to the ineptitude of the “healthy forces” that proved unable to assume power that Dubček was spared the fate of Rákosi, Nikos Zachariadis, or even Imre Nagy. 106