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

Another failure for Moscow was the attempt to persuade the president of the ČSSR, Svoboda, to play an active role on its side. Chervonenko had familiarized him with the Politburo missive explaining the inevitability of a military invasion only an hour before the operation began. The Soviet ambassador had also been ordered, should Svoboda “be positively inclined toward the request of the fraternal states,” to hand him—“with the tact that the situation requires”—a draft composed in Moscow of the president’s address to the Czechoslovak people. 107It is impossible to tell whether the Soviet Union seriously believed that a man of Svoboda’s caliber would consent to such a step. As was to be expected, the attempt failed. Even though the president of the ČSSR took an active part in the ensuing “negotiations” in Moscow and did everything in his power to defuse the situation, it was plain for the USSR to see that he was not positively inclined to what was happening.

The party leaders of the five Socialist countries had clearly misjudged the domestic situation in Czechoslovakia and its development following the invasion, and they openly admitted as much at the meeting in Moscow on 24 August. The intervention had a unifying effect on Czechoslovak society, albeit in an antisocialist and anti-Soviet direction. Under these circumstances, not only the remains of the “healthy forces” but also each ordinary citizen who did not agree with the political line of the KSČ leadership were automatically dubbed “traitors to their native country” and “Moscow’s agents.” Dubček, Černík, and Smrkovský, who had only shortly before been attacked both from the “Right” and from the “Left” were elevated to “national heroes and martyrs for ‘the Idea.’” The troops of the Interventionist Coalition, who had been told prior to the invasion they were being given marching orders at the request of the new state leadership of the ČSSR and of the whole Czechoslovak people found themselves in a situation that was more than ambiguous. There was no new (revolutionary or national) government that had requested military assistance, the Extraordinary 24th Party Conference of the KSČ that had been convened demanded the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from the territory of the ČSSR, and the majority of the country’s population regarded the foreign military contingents as occupants, not as defenders of socialism.

It is instructive in this context to compare two meetings of the countries participating in the “military-political operation” that took place in Moscow within six days—one three days before the invasion, the other three days after it. On 18 August, the participants were reasonably optimistic in their assessment of the impending operations. Brezhnev pointed out that the “healthy forces” had already united, that they had already demonstrated “unity,” and that they were “ready for a decisive battle with the right.” 108By way of corroboration, details of Chervonenko’s latest negotiations with representatives of the “healthy forces” within the KSČ leadership were shared as were their plans for the following days. In addition to this, a letter was read out that a group of leaders of the Slovak Communist Party had handed to Brezhnev already in Bratislava asking for a military invasion. All the other participants at the meeting voiced unanimous agreement with the Soviet leaders, with the sole exception of Gomułka, who tried to make the point that a great deal was going to depend on the domestic situation in the ČSSR: “What the Czechoslovak comrades and the forces on the left will say is of the greatest importance.” 109

The mood was an entirely different one at the consultations on 24 August, when it had become obvious that much of what Moscow had been banking on was simply not going to materialize. In addition to the assessment that the “healthy forces” were failing to deliver (“A number of them took refuge in the embassy and were, therefore, unable to lead propaganda activities,” “They got scared,” and so forth)—the participants vied with each other in assuring each other that the operation had been justified and inevitable in the prevailing circumstances. 110Brezhnev tried to convince the allies that the unavoidable negotiations with the interned KSČ leadership did not mean that the USSR did not adhere to the decisions previously jointly adopted. 111The most controversial issue was how to inform the Czechoslovak public and the world about these negotiations.

Propaganda work during the military invasion was not successful either. In Eastern European countries as well as in the ČSSR, neither the secret agreements struck in Čierná and Bratislava were mentioned, nor was anything about the leaders of the KSČ sabotaging these agreements. It was, therefore, extremely difficult to explain to the world—and above all to the Czechoslovak people—the reasons that had necessitated the invasion only two weeks after the “successful conclusion of negotiations.” Such explanations became downright impossible in the wake of the invasion for two reasons. First, all the ČSSR’s mass media outlets were in the hands of “rightists”; second, given the outburst of national patriotism that took hold of the public after the invasion, no one would listen to arguments justifying the aggression, no matter how weighty they might have been.

The allies, who had pinned their hopes on the “healthy forces” in the ČSSR, had in addition to all this failed to establish propaganda cadres and to prepare high-quality materials in the Czech and Slovak languages for distribution virtually within hours after the invasion. 112It was not until 23 August (that is, two days after the invasion) that the hurriedly edited text of the “Address to the Citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic” in Czech and Slovak was dispatched to Czechoslovakia from Moscow. 113Access to information for the population of the Socialist countries was also almost nonexistent. In the West, events in Czechoslovakia dominated the headlines, trumping all other news; in the Warsaw Pact countries, citizens were fed the news in tiny doses encrypted in official propagandese. Many critical questions were simply ignored altogether. 114

A Kremlin analysis of the military operation that was done three months later confirmed that the advance of the troops on Czechoslovak territory took place during the first days in a “propaganda vacuum”; the first leaflets in Czech did not appear until the fifth or sixth day of the occupation, there were no special papers for the occasion, no radio or TV commentaries, and so forth. In Moscow it was conceded, if through clenched teeth, that it had been this “absence of propaganda” in conjunction with the active, goaloriented activities of “rightist forces” that resulted in the latter de facto securing the lion’s share of the Czechoslovaks’ sympathy. Soviet troops, according to a Soviet assessment, could act at the beginning of the invasion “with the support and the understanding of roughly 50 to 60 percent of the population”; after the first week, between 75 to 90 percent of the population saw the invasion as an “occupation.” 115It is not surprising that this author did not entertain at least for a moment the possibility that such a massive rejection of the “military-political operation” could have been caused by the national humiliation that had been inflicted on the Czechoslovak people, which was a fact that was not altered by the noble goals that the occupiers claimed to be pursuing. There was a conviction instead that there was a “lesson to be learned for the future” from the events in Czechoslovakia, for imperialism would not desist from its attempts “to use these same means to reverse to its advantage developments in the socialist countries.” 116