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

The Austrian political class suffered from a bad case of jitters, too. 45From Vienna, Austrian minister of defense Georg Prader spread the rumor that Warsaw Pact troops on the Austrian border enabled it to unleash military action against Romania, Yugoslavia, and Austria. Prader expected an invasion of Romania in the week of 2 to 8 September. Unless the West protested such a likely intervention vigorously, an attack on Yugoslavia and an ultimatum against Austria could be next. U.S. ambassador to Austria Douglas MacArthur III felt that Prader’s alarmist defense ministry experts argued from a “visceral feeling,” while Socialist critics like opposition leader Bruno Kreisky saw such Soviet actions as “remote.” The Austrian government was angling for discrete U.S. and NATO guarantees to protect Austria’s vulnerable neutrality. 46President Johnson did warn members of Congress that after cleaning up in Romania and Yugoslavia, Austria could be next: “The next target might be Austria.” 47The State Department did not want to take any chances and initiated contingency planning for Austria as well. 48The Austrian government also had to contend with Soviet black propaganda about harboring U.S. “green berets” in eastern Austria preparing for covert military action into Czechoslovakia. 49

President Charles de Gaulle unleashed a wave of attacks against the Johnson administration that the United States colluded with the Soviet Union not to intervene in case of Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. 50Like the Johnson administration, De Gaulle’s government published a communiqué, too, on 21 August. The French statement related the Czech events back to the great spheres of influence agreement at the Yalta Conference in February 1945: “The armed intervention of the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia is evidence of the fact that the Moscow Government has not abandoned the policy of power blocs imposed upon Europe by the effect of the Yalta Agreements. That policy is incompatible with the right of peoples to self-determination.” De Gaulle was quick to point out that France did not take part in the Yalta Agreements and regretted that the invasion impeded East-West détente. The French insisted that Eastern Europe belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence, but blamed Yalta and Anglo-American complicity for those spheres. 51

Dean Rusk and the State Department were quick to reject such notions of prior U.S.-Soviet agreements as preposterous, “malicious and totally without foundation”:

The U.S. government has never entered into any “sphere of influence” agreements or understandings with anyone anywhere in the world. There has been no discussion of any such idea in connection with recent developments in Czechoslovakia nor has any government attempted to elicit from the U.S. government any such understanding.

Rusk reminded U.S. missions around the world that Yalta dealt with zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, but not with spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. In a poignant history lesson for the French president, Rusk noted that at Yalta, in fact, France was granted a zone of occupation and postwar representation on the Allied Control Council in postwar Germany. As a final clincher, Rusk wanted to remind the world that the “Declaration of Librated Europe” tried to secure free elections in the countries liberated by the Red Army in Eastern Europe—exactly “the opposite of [a] spheres of influence” agreement. 52Rusk also resented being constantly needled by the French with the analogy of the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and strongly reprimanded French ambassador Lucet over such an unfriendly equivalency. 53

In a speech in Connecticut a couple of weeks later, Rusk came back to denying emphatically any charges of “complicity” with the Soviet Union. He reminded the world that it was the Soviets that divided Europe “in violation of its Yalta pledge.” It was the Soviet Union that “used force and the threat of force from its occupying armies to impose Communist regimes on Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet zone of Germany.” It was the Kremlin, Rusk insisted, that “established and maintained by force in Eastern Europe a sphere—not of influence but of dominance.” NATO had been established as a defensive pact not to establish a “sphere of influence” in Western Europe, but to protect Western Europeans against the threat of Soviet aggression. When France withdrew its forces from the NATO command in 1966, Rusk reminded de Gaulle, the fourteen NATO members withdrew their military headquarters quickly from France. 54Yet in spite of these strong official rejoinders, the intellectual debate about Yalta and spheres of influence continued. While the official news media supported de Gaulle’s position, the eminent political scientist Raymond Aaron upbraided de Gaulle for his myth-making. While de Gaulle accepted the division of Europe when he sent a representative to the Communist Lublin government in Poland in the fall of 1945, Yalta was the final attempt to prevent a division of Europe. Aaron admonished de Gaulle that he was in no position to preach to the Anglo-Americans on this matter. 55

Alas, charges both in Western and Eastern Europe about U.S.-Soviet “collusion” and U.S. “complicity” in the intervention did not go away. The Viennese press interpreted Washington’s failure to protest the invasion sharply as a tacit agreement between the superpowers. Austrian foreign minister Kurt Waldheim felt that East and West had clearly marked their respective spheres of interest, and Socialist Party boss Bruno Kreisky commented in a similar vein that the superpowers wanted to see their mutual spheres of influence respected. The daily Arbeiterzeitung noted that the United States had lost the moral high ground in Vietnam. Western cries of outrage about the Soviet invasion, noted the Socialist daily, could easily be dismissed by cynics with the counterpart of U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia and Latin America. 56The West German press was full of charges of “spheres of influence agreements” as well. President Johnson’s weak response to the Warsaw Pact action against Czechoslovakia undermined his leadership role in the Western world. A National Security memorandum summarized West German public opinion: “the German press is heavy with charges of ‘superpower complicity’ in the Czechoslovak crisis and expressions of uneasy doubt of the ability of the U.S. and other of Germany’s allies to stand up to the Warsaw Pact.” 57

In Czechoslovakia, too, the rumor mill of conspiracy theories about prior U.S.-Soviet complicity was churning. Zedněk Mlynář, a prominent member of the Alexander Dubček regime and intellectual force behind the reforms of the Prague Spring, prominently insisted on explicit prior agreements in his memoirs Nightfrost . Mlynář mentions that Leonid Brezhnev received the confirmation from President Johnson on 18 August that the United States respected the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements. The Soviet leader allegedly took this as a clear signal from Washington that the United States would not react to a Soviet intervention. 58No “smoking gun” was ever found in the Soviet or U.S. archives that confirmed such a clear-cut explicit prior agreement. 59The most that can be said of Rusk’s policy of nonintervention, as apparently pronounced to Ambassador Dobrynin on 22 July, was the U.S. policy of “hands off” from internal affairs in the Eastern Bloc—a policy that by and large had been practiced during the Soviet interventions in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 as well. The obvious historical analogy with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956—unleashed by Moscow to stop satellite dominoes from falling as well as the U.S. failure to intervene—was, indeed, regularly made in analyzing the Czech crisis.