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

The internal situation in the USSR after Nikita Khrushchev’s ousting may be characterized as a phase of the settling of scores by “moderate” Stalinists and of the consolidation of “dogmatic” positions. The propaganda campaign before the spectacular festivities to celebrate fifty years of Soviet power assumed dimensions that were completely without parallel. Under these circumstances, the Brezhnev regime paid increased attention to suppressing any kind of dissent with or “defilement” of the Soviet ideals. It was obvious for the Politburo that the wave of revelations concerning Stalin’s personality cult initiated by Khrushchev was yielding concrete results: people were losing faith in the socialist ideals, a development that was thoroughly unacceptable to the Kremlin.

At the session of the Politburo of the CC CPSU on 10 November 1966, Brezhnev addressed the topic of ideology, which he considered the most important of all:

In some works, in journals and other publications criticism is being voiced of what people hold most dear, most sacred. It is a fact that some of our writers (who, let me add, subsequently find their way into print) will say for instance that there was no such thing as the Aurora’s salvo, that it was no more than a barrel burst, that there were fewer than 28 Panfilov guardsmen or, even more grotesquely, that the whole story in which Klochkov 10figures is a fabrication altogether and that he never uttered his famous dictum, “Behind us is Moscow and there is no way we can retreat.” This extends all the way to slanderous statements about the October Revolution and other historical stages of the heroic history of our party and of our Soviet people. 11

The future head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, registered his total agreement with Brezhnev’s point of view and explicitly identified Khrushchev as the source of all evils: “It is a fact that the period before the October plenum of the CC [1964] inflicted considerable damage on both our party and our people in the area of ideological activities.” 12

Six months later, in May 1967, Andropov became head of the KGB. He immediately gave the struggle against “subversion” high priority. As early as July 1967, the Politburo approved Andropov’s proposal to add a fifth directorate with five subdivisions to the KGB for the struggle against “ideological diversion.” In addition to this, the network of local KGB offices was substantially enlarged. In 200 districts and cities, new KGB branches were installed, which were given the name of District or Municipal Departments of the KGB. This was decreed in a Politburo resolution (P47/97-op), which also provided for the increase of the KGB’s overall number of staff to 2,250 (of whom 1,750 were officers, including 100 officers newly appointed to the central apparatus in Moscow’s Lubyanka). 13

Changes also affected other subdivisions of the KGB. The 11th Department of the KGB 14(which conducted liaison with counterpart services in other Socialist countries) was again made an integral part of the foreign intelligence by a Politburo resolution passed on 4 June 1968 and was now called the 11th Department of the First Chief Directorate of the Committee of State Security (KGB) of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. 15This was the result of Andropov’s explicit request to the Politburo. 16He wrote that hiving off the 11th Department and setting it up as an independent unit had weakened its “working contacts” with other subdivisions of the security services, which made its work less effective. According to Andropov, the activities of the 11th Department had degenerated in the end to “mere protocolar processing” of hosting state security delegations from other Socialist countries. In the meantime, “the imperialist powers and their secret services are engaging in activities that aim to subvert the unity between socialist countries and the liquidation of their socialist gains.” 17

The changeover of power in Prague in January 1968 proved decisive in imparting a direction to the development of the Czechoslovak situation that proved unacceptable to the Kremlin. From this point onward, the Politburo of the CC CPSU regularly received reports from Czechoslovakia that were put on the agenda and required discussion. On 25 January 1968, for instance, a report by the ambassador of the USSR in Czechoslovakia, Stepan Chervonenko, was discussed, and Brezhnev was asked to “inform Dubček of the exchange of opinions in the Politburo.” 18In all discussions on Czechoslovakia, the head of the KGB, Andropov, played a prominent role. He belonged to all the Politburo committees dealing with the ČSSR.

The April plenum of the CC CPSU on 9 and 10 April 1968 contributed decisively to the positions on Czechoslovakia subsequently adopted by the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev delivered his speech “On the Current Problems of the International Situation and on the Struggle of the CPSU for the Unity of the International Communist Movement,” and in the ensuing debates, the quality of the ideological work in the USSR was touched upon again and again. Several speakers demanded devoting more attention to this area. The first secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Belarus, Pyotr Masherov, advocated the extirpation of “ideological weeds”; he felt that literature was being turned into a vehicle for “the libel of all things Soviet” and insisted that it was necessary to strengthen the ideological cadres and to institute “educational measures.” 19First Secretary Radishov of the CC of the Uzbek Communist Party referred to “ideological diversions” and the “subversive influence” of the West in general; he felt that it was this influence to which dissidents owed their existence in the first place: “Such people even appear in the guise of writers, as can be seen from the example of the contemptible dissidents Daniel’, Sinyavskii, Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovol’skii, Lashkova and others.” 20Minister of Culture Ekaterina Fursteva used the plenum to voice her criticism of the Taganka Theatre and its director, Yuri Lyubimov. First Secretary Petro Shelest 21of the CC of the Ukrainian Communist Party criticized Nicolae Ceaus¸escu for “being heaped with praise”—from the wrong corner. He was particularly scornful of the president of the Council of Ministers of Romania, Ion Gheorghe Maurer, who had visited General C. G. E. Mannerheim’s grave while in Finland on a state visit. On this occasion, Shelest said that at the head of the Romanian government was a man who was “at the very least extremely suspect as a communist.” 22Yet the greatest source of anxiety was the situation in Czechoslovakia. First Secretary Sergei Pavlov of the CC Komsomol, speaking of a meeting with Czechoslovak colleagues, said: “We criticized the Czechs” for their lenient attitude toward the mores of Western modernity. Pavlov cited examples such as “the incomprehensible use of stupid Beatles music for advertising purposes, the springing up of so-called Big Beat ensembles all over the place and the massive epidemic of pathological dancing.” 23

Brezhnev had the last word at the plenum and made it clear in his speech that he, too, advocated a course of “putting on the screws.” Brezhnev had the example of Czechoslovakia in mind when he said that even a small dose of indulgence and procrastination might be enough to jeopardize Soviet principles: “One has to strengthen discipline in all areas of society and must not be reduced to a situation where one has to resort to extreme measures.” The plenum also approved Brezhnev’s proposal to enlarge the staff of the secretariat of the CC CPSU by one. Konstantin F. Katushev rose from the post of the first secretary of the Gor’kii Regional Committee to that of Secretary of the CC CPSU. There was no need for Brezhnev to tell the CC members what task the new secretary was going to be assigned because it was obvious to all that the proliferation of differences within the “socialist camp” made filling the vacancy left by Andropov’s departure from the secretariat of the CC CPSU a matter of urgent necessity; 24Andropov had been in charge of the CC CPSU’s relations with the “fraternal parties” of the other Socialist countries.