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

62. Mastny, “Was 1968 a Strategic Watershed of the Cold War?” 174; NATO #04388, “NAC Discussion of Warsaw Pact Threat to NATO,” Cleveland and Rusk, 26 August 1968, and NATO #04375, Cleveland and Rusk, 26 August 1968, both Folder 5, Box 2, CCF RG 59, NARA.

63. NATO #04447 Cleveland to Rusk, 29 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

64. The transcript of the Kiesinger radio interview is in Bonn #15990, Lodge to Rusk, 25 August 1968, Folder 4, Box 2, CCF; see also NATO #04379, Cleveland to Rusk, 26 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF; Kiesinger’s foreign policy adviser Osterhammel told the Americans that the chancellor’s idea of a summit meeting for the revitalization of NATO originated with the U.S. expert on Eastern Europe Zbigniev Brezinzki, see Bonn #15996, Lodge to Rusk, 26 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, all RG 50, NARA.

65. NATO #04427, “NATO Post-Czech Reassessment Program,” Cleveland to Rusk, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 49, NARA.

66. Memorandum of conversation (Eugene Rostow, Birrenbach et al.), 10 September 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente , #214; LBJ citation in Schwartz, Johnson and Europe , 220; the importance of the invasion for NATO is also discussed in memorandum of conversation (Birrenbach, Rusk et al.), 9 September 1968, in FRUS 1964–1968 , XV, 737–40. The effect of the Czechoslovak crisis on NATO and on Congress in terms of strengthening NATO defenses and ending all talk of American troop withdrawals from Europe in Washington, is a persistent theme in Clifford’s weekly staff meetings in the Pentagon (see appendix 9 of this volume).

67. Minutes of cabinet meeting, 18 September 1968, Folder “9/18/68 [1 of 3],” Box 15, Cabinet Papers, LBJ Papers, LBJL; see also the chapter by Saki Ruth Dockrill in this volume.

68. McGhee memorandum for Rusk “New Situation for U.S. created by Czech Crisis,” 4 September 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, RG 59, NARA. Given that McGhee had served as U.S. ambassador in Bonn until the spring of 1968, it does not come as a surprise that he advocated a leadership role for West Germany in NATO; see George McGhee, At the Creation of a New Germany: From Adenauer to Brandt. An Ambassador’s Account (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

69. NSC Paper, “The United States, Europe, and the Czechoslovak Crisis” (n.d.), FRUS, 266.

70. Mastny, “Was 1968 a Strategic Watershed of the Cold War?” 176–77.

71. Jeremi Suri, “Lyndon Johnson and the Global Disruption of 1968,” in Lerner, Looking Back at LBJ , 53–77 (here 66); Prados, “Prague Spring and SALT,” 32–33.

72. Herring, “Tet and the Crisis of Hegemony,” 31–53, see also Brands’s conclusions, “Hegemony’s End,” in his Wages of Globalism , 254–64.

As is well known, the origins of the Czech crisis and the so-called Prague Spring lay in the election of Alexander Dubček to the post of first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia ( Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ) on 5 January 1968. 1Dubček replaced the moribund Antonin Novotný, first secretary since 1957.

Dubček’s election was greeted with enthusiasm both in Czechoslovakia and in Moscow—at least initially. Novotný had presided over the decline of the previously efficient Czech economy and apparently was regarded in the Kremlin as something of a “neo-Stalinist nuisance.” Dubček, at fortysix, was young, energetic, and—in Moscow’s eyes—reliable, having been educated in the Soviet Union and lived some seventeen years there. In the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) he was known as “our Sasha.” In December 1967, the Soviet Communist leader Leonid Brezhnev made an unscheduled visit to Prague during which he made clear to Novotný that he had lost Moscow’s backing—thus effectively paving the way for Dubček’s election. 2

Despite this apparent stamp of approval from Moscow, Dubček proved to be anything but reliable. From his election onward, the Czech Communist leadership embarked on a program of dramatic liberalization of the Czech political economic and social system, including the overhaul of the KSČ leadership, freedom of speech, surrender of authority to the Czech National Assembly by the Communist Party, real elections at local and national levels, and even the suggestion of legalizing noncommunist political parties.

All this alarmed Moscow and the leadership of the Warsaw Pact, but throughout the Prague Spring, Dubček went out of his way to demonstrate his personal loyalty to Moscow and Prague’s intention to remain firmly within the Warsaw Pact military alliance. How sincere he was in these protestations is difficult to say, but Dubček and his allies clearly feared a repetition of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, bloodily crushed by Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops.

These fears were mirrored in Washington and, to a certain extent, even in Moscow. Certainly the Kremlin, under the nearly comatose leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, had no desire to provoke a crisis, while any disturbance anywhere was seen as a threat to the increasingly ramshackle stability of the Soviet Bloc. There was, moreover, a general tendency—at least in the West—to view some kind of internal reform as a necessary precondition for the stability of the Warsaw Pact.

Although the Warsaw Pact had been created in 1955 as a “paper organization” to counter the rearming of West Germany and the cooperative effort of the western Allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), by the early 1960s, the Warsaw Pact gradually was acquiring more form and substance as a military alliance. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the pact had become the mechanism by which Moscow could introduce large-scale troop reductions, principally in conventional forces deployed to Europe. 3With substantially fewer forces on the ground in Eastern Europe, Moscow had more at stake in making the alliance work. Thus, although the non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact had had little choice in joining the organization, once they were members of an alliance with the Soviet Union, they found they had a relatively greater voice in ordering their own affairs. 4

By 1965, the Warsaw Pact was becoming a framework in which the nations of Eastern Europe could exercise a growing level of relative autonomy. General disenchantment with Marxist economics and Soviet-style politics and the growing attraction of the West were giving the states of Eastern Europe “both the incentive and the opportunity for striking out on their own”; “[t]he Soviets,” noted ONE, will find it difficult to arrest the process; “though crises are an ever-present danger, we believe that these countries will be able successfully to assert their own national interests gradually and without provoking Soviet intervention.” 5The Prague Spring thus seems to have been evaluated as part of a broader reform movement within the Warsaw Pact as a whole. There was the cautious belief that Sasha Dubček—if he were very careful and very, very lucky—just might pull it off. 6

Agency analysis in the Prague Spring focused on two critical factors. The first of these was the importance of the Czechoslovak armed forces to Warsaw Pact military planning. In a war with NATO, the Czechoslovakian army would have formed the first echelon of a Warsaw Pact attack into southern Germany, intended to outflank any NATO effort to defend the inner-German border and, ultimately, to drive across Bavaria and BadenWürttemberg to the Rhine. 7The Czech military leadership was given command of this front and would have retained command of its armed forces in wartime—which put Czechoslovakia, alongside Poland, in a privileged position in the Warsaw Pact hierarchy. 8The reduction of Soviet ground forces in the early 1960s had only increased Czechoslovakia’s importance to Soviet/Warsaw Pact war planning. 9