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

Alliance politics drove the Warsaw Pact. Keeping the Eastern European Communist parties together in a close alliance was of paramount concern. The Kremlin needed to shore up the Communist Bloc and contain China’s hegemonic demands that were increasingly in evidence ever since the SinoSoviet split. Brezhnev himself summed up the matter at the Communist Party Plenum in October 1968 when he noted that the Soviet leadership had been so engrossed with China politics that it failed to devote sufficient attention to Soviet Bloc matters. 86For this reason, it was crucially important for the Kremlin in 1968 to paint the military intervention as an action of Warsaw Pact solidarity. To the Kremlin, it mattered that the intervention was an “internationalist socialist measure” originating with the joint deliberations among the fraternal parties. The Soviet Union was deeply concerned with preserving the status quo in Europe as laid down by the Yalta agreements. Moscow was just as concerned with consolidating its own hegemonic position within the Communist world against the challenge of China’s ascendancy in acting as a competing power in Asia and the Third World. The invasion of Czechoslovakia also mattered in terms of solidifying Moscow’s premier hegemonic position in the Communist world.

Alliance politics drove the U.S. response to the Warsaw Pact invasion as well. The Johnson administration was deeply concerned over escalating the crisis toward the nuclear threshold with a military response. The United States was stuck in its Vietnam morass and was running out of military manpower to fight the war. Since the United States had failed to convince its NATO allies to support it in Vietnam, it put pressure on its NATO allies in Europe to carry more of their own defense burden. In this sense, the invasion of Czechoslovakia was a “blessing in disguise” for NATO, concludes Saki Dockrill. Indeed, London and Paris were equally disinclined to confront the Warsaw Pact over Czechoslovakia. 87In a veritable “war of nerves,” Washington and NATO perceived the greatest threat after the invasion of Czechoslovakia as being a possible spillover of the crisis to reluctant pact-ally Romania, or nonaligned Yugoslavia, or neutral Austria, or even exposed West Berlin. In spite of considerable paranoia, both sides kept their cool through the aftereffects of the Czechoslovak crisis. 88Those were the fearful crisis scenarios in 1968 that did not come to pass.

While the old Warsaw Pact is now on the ash heap of history, the politics of history remind us of the legacies of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia today. On 1 December 1989, a mere three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the People’s Parliament of the GDR declared that “in response to the manifest will of the citizens of our country… it sincerely regrets the GDR’s involvement in military actions in the states of the Warsaw Pact in connection with internal struggles within the ČSSR in August 1968 and apologizes for it on behalf of the people of the GDR to the peoples of the ČSSR.” 89On 1 March 2006, Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, conceded in a meeting with Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, that Russia as legal successor to the Soviet Union, accepted “moral” but not legal responsibility for the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He added that excessively dwelling on the past would lead nowhere. 90Yet apologies do matter as a form of restitution for past injustice for those who have been victimized, particularly to a people who had suffered two brutal invasions within a period of thirty years from totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century.

To launch their research project for completion before the 2008 fortieth anniversary of the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis, the Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences and the Russian State Archive for Contemporary History and the Russian Academy of Sciences signed a declaration of intent regarding a joint publication on the Prague Spring as early as 2003. They immediately initiated the planning and realization of the project. In a historic first step, the former Central Committee Archive made the relevant Politburo resolutions from the period of 1967 to 1969 systematically accessible for the first time ever. In July 2006, the actual analysis of these thousands of newly accessible files began. The result of this collaborative effort is the two volumes mentioned at the beginning of this introduction.

Altogether more than one hundred researchers from Europe, Russia, and the United States, including prominent eyewitnesses to those events, cooperated in an extensive international research network established under the aegis of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences in Graz. The key partners in this research collaborative were the Russian State Archive for Contemporary History (formerly the Archive of the CC CPSU under the directorship of Natalya Tomilina), the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow (Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, directed by Alexander Chubaryan), Center Austria of the University of New Orleans (Günter Bischof), the Institute for Contemporary History 26 of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (Oldřich Tůma), the Institute for Contemporary History, both in Munich and Berlin (Horst Möller) and Manfred Wilke, Berlin. Stefan Karner headed the entire project.

The coordination of the project lay in the hands of Peter Ruggenthaler (Graz), Mikhail Prozumenshchikov, and Viktor Ishchenko (Moscow). An additional three dozen research institutions were involved in Austria, Russia, Czechoslovakia, the United States, Germany, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom during the course of the two-year collection effort from 2006 to 2008.

Needless to say, such a vast collective research endeavor would have been impossible to launch without many generous sponsors and supporters. Funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture (since 2007 the Federal Ministry for Science and Research) was essential in launching the project. We owe the respective Ministers of Science Elisabeth Gehrer and Johannes Hahn our deepest gratitude, along with their dedicated ministry staff Anneliese Stoklaska, Gisela Zieger, Alois Söhn, Peter Kowalski, and Elmar Pichl. Other significant sponsors were the provincial government of Styria, where Governor Franz Voves showed great interest in the progress of the research effort. Also Mayor Siegfried Nagl and the City of Graz enthusiastically supported the project. Additional generous sponsors were the Dokumentationsstelle Zeitgeschichte/Volksgruppenbüro of the provincial government of Carinthia and its head, Peter Karpf; the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship in Berlin with the help of Anna Kaminsky, Markus Meckel, and Ulrich Mählert; the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf; the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna and its director, Ambassador Jiři Gruša; and the Austrian Cultural Forums of the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, which made significant contributions to the conferences in Moscow (May/June 2007), New Orleans (April 2008), and Vienna-Graz (20–22 August 2008), with the enthusiastic support of Ambassador Emil Brix. Ewald Stadler has been extremely helpful both as director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Budapest and then in New York, where Martin Rauchbauer also lent us his helping hand. Aleksandr Bezborodov, Ol’ga Pavlenko, and Viktor Ishchenko organized an interim conference in early summer 2007 at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. This allowed project scholars an opportunity to discuss emerging theses and arguments intensively and shape the future conception and direction of the two volumes.