Reassessing the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968

ReviewReassessing Forum the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968

REVIEW FORUM

Editor’s Note: As a follow-up to the review essays by Kieran Williams and Walter Connor in the Spring 2012 issue of the JCWS, we asked three distinguished experts on East European politics and history—A. Ross Johnson, Michael Kraus, and Vojtech Mastny—to assess The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, an anthology recently published in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. Their reviews are presented here as a group.

Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler, eds., The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 510 pp.

Reviewed by A. Ross Johnson

This book is a welcome addition to the huge literature on the “Prague Spring” of 1968, its suppression by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies in August 1968, and the international ramiªcations.1 The book provides three original chapters in English and translations of some of the 70 contributions in German and the 232 documents in both German and Russian originally published in 2008 and totaling almost 3,000 pages.2 The specialist reader will want to consult the original volumes as well. The Prague Spring was the second attempt to carry out fundamental reforms in an East European Communist system, and it quickly outpaced the upheavals in Po- land and Hungary in 1956. Establishment of organizations outside Communist Party control, abolition of media censorship, diluting party discipline, questioning of party control of the armed forces—all of this constituted a far-reaching challenge to the Communist system and Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. Independent media were a particular thorn in the Soviet side (Prozumenshchikov, pp. 113–114). As Leonid

1. Among many earlier works on this subject, see H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Rev- olution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement: Communism in Crisis 1962–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Jaromír Navratil et al., eds., The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998); and Karen Dawisha, The Kremlin and the Prague Spring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 2. Stefan Karner, Natalja Tomilina, and Alexander Tschubarjan, eds., Prager Frühling: Das international Krisenjahr 1968, 2 vols. (Beiträge and Dokumente/Dokumenty) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2008.

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Brezhnev told Alexander Dubcek, “all this propaganda affects us as much as it affects you.”3 Dubcek and other party reformers thought they could democratize the Com- munist system piecemeal. They, like many outside observers at the time, wrongly as- sumed (as Oldrich Tùma reminds us on p. 68) that orthodoxy in foreign and security policy would provide cover for domestic reforms. The Soviet Union and its orthodox East European allies more realistically viewed incrementalism as a slippery slope lead- ing not to “socialism with a human face” but to the dismantling of the Leninist system. They put an end to the experiment by sending several hundred thousand military forces into Czechoslovakia on 20–21 August 1968 (Operation Danube). That act sealed the fate of “revisionism” in Eastern Europe. Thereafter, dissent and opposition developed predominantly on anti-Communist and national platforms. At the end of the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev attempted a reprise of the Prague Spring, but, as Vladislav Zubok notes (p. 97), the easing of censorship, cultural liberalization, and political democratization made Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika—another pro- gram of reform Communism—irrelevant and doomed Communist control, as it surely would have done in Czechoslovakia in 1968 had the Soviet Union not inter- vened. The contributions in this volume do not challenge the fundamental conclusion of earlier studies that the Prague Spring could not have succeeded given the state of the Soviet Union and its political leaders twelve years after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and twelve years before the Polish Communists crushed Solidarity at Soviet insistence and with considerable Soviet support. The contributors draw on Soviet and East European archives not accessible to earlier scholars to add considerable detail to our understanding of day-to-day developments in 1968 and leadership dynamics in both Moscow and Prague. For example, as early as 15 March 1968, the Soviet Politburo feared the dismantling of the Commu- nist system in Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact (Prozumen- shchikov, p. 105) and therefore authorized planning for a military invasion. Absent the violence, renunciation of one-party rule, and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact that Nikita Khrushchev confronted in Hungary in 1956, Soviet leaders procrasti- nated, hoping that Dubcek “might be induced...toimpose order in the country of his own accord” (Bischof, p. 13) and thus reverse “creeping counterrevolution” for them, as Wladyslaw Gomulka had done in 1957 and as Wojciech Jaruzelski later did in 1981. Like Khrushchev in 1956 with respect to Hungary, Brezhnev and his col- leagues devoted major time and resources to Czechoslovak developments. The Soviet Politburo established a “commission on the Czechoslovak question” (Kramer, p. 42) and consulted extensively with East European Communist leaders: Walter Ulbricht of the GDR and Gomulka of Poland urged intervention, while János Kádár of Hungary was reluctant. The Soviet leadership was not of one mind on tactics, as documented in

3. Mark Kramer, “The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine,” in Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 143; and Mark Kramer, “The Kremlin, the Prague Spring, and the Brezhnev Doc- trine,” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and Utopia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), p. 307.

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Politburo meeting transcripts (Kramer, p. 45), and this reinforced the tendency to procrastinate. The political decision to intervene militarily was set on 6 August and reafªrmed after Brezhnev’s telephone conversation with Dubcek on 13 August (Pro- zumenshchikov, p. 121; Ruggenthaler, p. 167). When a new Czechoslovak hardline government did not emerge immediately after the invasion, Soviet leaders initially seemed at a loss about what to do. Even though Soviet forces had captured Dubcek and his Czechoslovak associates, Soviet leaders ended up reconªrming him as party leader (albeit severely constrained) in the coerced “Moscow Agreement” (Ruggen- thaler, pp. 168–189). Certain contentions and judgments by volume authors may be questioned. For example, Günter Bischof contends that the Soviet invasion surprised Washington (p. 5); but in fact it was not a strategic surprise, and even tactical warning was pro- vided by signals intelligence sources on 18 August, as Donald Steury points out in his essay (p. 244). Prozumenshchikov (p. 119), and less categorically Bischof (p. 217), ac- cept the Soviet version of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s 22 July statement to Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin that the Czechoslovak developments “concerned solely the Czechs and the other Warsaw Pact countries,” a statement that Prozu- menshchikov construes as a “green light” to invade (p. 119).4 The State Department transcript quotes Rusk as saying (after objecting to the Soviet propaganda campaign alleging U.S. and West European involvement) “the U.S. Government had not sought to involve itself in this situation, but there should be no misapprehension as to the feelings and sympathies of the American people.”5 It is equally implausible that Secre- tary Rusk would have sought to reassure the Yugoslav ambassador that the United States was not engaged in covert military inªltration “unlike Hungary in 1956” (p. 222). Notwithstanding the extensive documentation and research underlying the book (and its two-volume original version), key questions remain unanswered. Why did So- viet leaders delude themselves into believing that a shadow loyalist alternative Com- munist leadership representing “healthy forces” was available in Prague? Did the fault lie with Soviet foreign intelligence reporting, or did Soviet leaders simply conclude what they wanted to conclude from little evidence? How do we assess Dubcek’s role after the invasion? While avoiding the personal fate of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader who was executed after Soviet troops invaded Hungary in late 1956, did Dubcek mitigate or only facilitate the Soviet-imposed reversal of the Prague Spring reforms under the banner of “normalization”?

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4. The Soviet version of Rusk’s statement appears in a Politburo resolution of 26 July and is translated in Appendix V (p. 454) of the volume under review. No Soviet transcript of the Rusk-Dobrynin conversation is cited. 5. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol. XVII, Doc. 70.

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Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler, eds., The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 510 pp.

Reviewed by Michael Kraus

August 2008 marked the passage of forty years since the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention of Czechoslovakia. The eighteen essays in this volume are rooted in a series of conferences organized around the fortieth anniversary by the Ludwig Boltzmann In- stitute for Research on War’s Consequences in Graz, Austria, and by the Center Aus- tria of the University of New Orleans. Nearly all contributions focus on the international context of the Prague Spring, and collectively they advance our understanding of this chapter in the history of the Cold War. With the exception of three essays (by Mark Kramer, Mark Carson, and Alessandro Brodi) that had not appeared in print previously, these essays were originally published—in German, for the most part—in Stefan Karner et al., eds., Prager Frühling: Das Internationale Krisenjahr 1968 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2008). The editors’ introduction summarizes the key phases of Soviet preinvasion decision-making, as well as some of the chapter ªndings. The editors also suggest that the Warsaw Pact allies, in particular the leaders of Bulgaria, East Germany, and Poland, exerted “considerable leverage” (p. 6) on Moscow (though they refer to the same ac- tors as “vassals” a few pages later). They conclude that by “mid-July, the invasion was a foregone conclusion” (p. 22). Mark Kramer shows that by mid-March 1968 “the Czechoslovak question” had risen to the top of the Soviet Politburo’s agenda. By then, Yuri Andropov, the head of the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB), was drawing ominous parallels to 1956 in Hungary (where he had served as Moscow’s ambassador at the time). The specter of the Hungarian Revolution haunted the Politburo throughout the spring and summer of 1968. By April, Petro Shelest, the Ukrainian party chief and Soviet Politburo mem- ber, developed his own conspiracy theory (reserved for closed party gatherings) of a creeping counterrevolution in Prague where, in contrast to Hungary in 1956, an attempt was being made “to establish a bourgeois order” by “‘peaceful means’” (p. 43). Accordingly, Soviet leaders attempted to steer the “healthy forces” inside Czechoslova- kia toward an internal coup, while setting in motion the preparations for military action. Throughout the 1968 crisis, Moscow demanded of Prague the reimposition of censorship, the removal of key reformists, and a ban on “anti-socialist” groups, some- thing that Alexander Dubcek was both unwilling and unable to do. Kramer rightly emphasizes that the gradual pace of development in Czechoslovakia gave Soviet leaders the opportunity to deliberate to reach a consensus. Apparently, by 6 August “no one...expected that military action could be averted” (p. 46). Despite some differ- ences over the tactics favored by consistent advocates of military action (such as Andropov and Shelest) and the approach advocated by the rest (Leonid Brezhnev vac- illated, and Mikhail Suslov was “circumspect”), there were no soft-liners in the

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Kremlin regarding fundamental objectives. Therefore, “no real opportunity existed in 1968 for truly radical change in Czechoslovakia” (p. 52). This proposition ªnds additional support and evidence from Oldrich Tùma’s and Vladislav Zubok’s (previously published) contributions, which deal with internal developments inside Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union respectively. Tùma depicts the politics of the Prague Spring in terms of liberalization (in contrast to democratization), and Zubok explains why “the vast majority of Russian people took the invasion as a necessity”—largely because they were ill-informed “and deceived by the Kremlin propaganda” (p. 94). Mikhail Prozumenshchikov’s analysis of Soviet Politburo deliber- ations complements Kramer’s and shows that by July the invasion plans already in- cluded Soviet drafts of speeches prepared for the post-Dubcek “revolutionary workers’ and peasants’” quisling regime. Nikita Petrov adds new details concerning the role of the KGB or what Brezhnev (in a note found posthumously in his desk) described as “an extensive plan involving disinformation measures” to “discredit the right wing leaders” and special operations (pp. 152). Peter Ruggenthaler and Harald Knoll use materials from the Russian archives to reconstruct and analyze the Soviet-Czechoslo- vak post-invasion “negotiations” in the Kremlin. The foregoing contributions paint a portrait of Brezhnev as a skillful crisis manager who saddled his fellow oligarchs with collective responsibility for the intervention and cleverly returned Dubcek to power, only to have him preside over the undoing of his own reforms. Several essays examine the role of the other great powers. Mark Carson probes “The Johnson Administration, the Vietnam War, and the American South’s Response to the Vietnam War”; Günter Bischof puts to good use the relevant archives to analyze Washington’s (non-)response to the Soviet-led intervention; Donald Steury focuses on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose Ofªce of National Estimates deªned the situation on 17 July 1968 accurately; Saki Ruth Dockrill evaluates Brit- ain’s policy toward the Prague Spring and its aftermath; Georges-Henri Soutou argues that 20 August 1968 “spelled the end of de Gaulle’s policy of détente” (p. 271); and Alessandro Brogi tackles “France, Italy, the Western Communists, and the Prague Spring” in terms of the Eurocommunist quest for autonomy and legitimacy. The ªnal part covers the “European Neighbors,” including the Moscow-Bonn equation (Aleksei Filitov), as well as the role of East Germany (Manfred Wilke), Hungary (Csaba Békés), and Tito’s Yugoslavia (Tvrtko Jakovina). As Stefan Karner and Peter Ruggen- thaler demonstrate in their essay on neutral Austria, the watchword in Vienna in the aftermath of the Soviet intervention was caution. Ten key documents constitute the appendix. A few factual errors have eluded the editors. The “Communist president Klement Gottwald” did not dismiss the “twelve bourgeois ministers from their posts” in February 1948 (p. 133n9). Gottwald’s predecessor, president Edvard Beneš, ac- cepted the ministers’ resignation in 1948. Nor did the entire Soviet Politburo travel at the end of July 1968 “abroad for the ªrst and only time in the history of the Soviet Union” to negotiate with Dubcek and other senior Czechoslovak ofªcials, as the editors repeatedly state (pp. 15, 22, 166)—several full and candidate Politburo members actually stayed behind in Moscow. Furthermore, given the subject of this book, it is

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surprising to ªnd (the Slovak) Dubcek being identiªed as “the Czech leader” and his government as “Czech” instead of “Czechoslovak.” Despite such minor shortcomings, specialists will welcome this volume, and Cold War scholars will ªnd important leads here for further research. Given the rich revelations the archives have yielded about the 1968 crisis in the past four decades, we are unlikely to discover major surprises in what remains inaccessible. What looms ever larger today is the signiªcance of the Czechoslovak crisis for the future fate of the So- viet–East European empire. As Kramer puts it, the 1968 reforms “offered the ªrst opportunity for an East European Communist regime to earn genuine popular support” (p. 36). The ªrst opportunity and—one might add—the last.

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Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler, eds., The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 510 pp.

Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny

The 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia it provoked are widely recognized as pivotal events in the Cold War’s watershed year. What their consequences have been for the remainder of the global conºict and beyond, however, is more difªcult to tell. This book goes further than any other in trying to answer that question by bringing in an impressive amount of new scholarship that should allow us to judge. Most of the book’s eighteen chapters were previously published in German as part of a massive project by an Austrian institute that was originally founded to study the consequences of World War II. More essays have been added that were presented at a follow-up conference at the University of New Orleans in 2008. Organized by country, the contributions tend to emphasize the local rather than the larger picture, although they include enough to complement and reªne this picture. So does the se- lection of ten important documents, not previously published in English, appended to the book. A judicious survey of the Czechoslovak reform movement by Oldrich Tùma shows the movement’s main weakness: the inherent defects of its Marxist proponents in one of the Soviet bloc’s most Stalinist countries, highlighted by the blundering of the movement’s pathetic hero, Alexander Dubcek. The essay by Mikhail Prozu- menshchikov, based on Soviet Politburo documents, concurs with Tùma’s assessment that the Czechoslovak leaders were neither willing nor able to reassure the Soviet Union that they had things under control, although Dubcek had blithely given that impression before events proved otherwise. The Soviet decision to intervene, which can now be reconstructed in minute detail from archival sources, reºected divided opinion within the Politburo, with the main pressure for intervention coming from Moscow’s East German and Polish allies

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and Leonid Brezhnev reluctant to decide until he had given up on Dubcek. Both Prozumenshchikov and Mark Kramer convincingly argue that the outcome was nev- ertheless all but predetermined. According to Kramer, “no real opportunity existed in 1968 for truly radical change in Czechoslovakia” (p. 52) because the necessary fundamental change in Soviet policy did not occur until twenty years later. How did the unsuccessful Czechoslovak experiment of “socialism with a human face” inºuence the change that ªnally came under Mikhail Gorbachev? In the preface, the Czech ambassador speculates that the Soviet crackdown made “intellectuals in East and West realize that socialism with a human face was not feasible.” As Vladislav Zubok makes clear, however, it was precisely the belief in socialism’s feasibility by the reform-minded segment of the Soviet elite that inspired the reformers around Gorbachev. Their failure is what ªnally discredited the notion of a “third way” between capitalism and Communism. Among the most perceptive essays in the collection are those dealing with the response of the Western powers to the invasion, an event that none of them had antici- pated. The late Saki Dockrill, to whom the book is dedicated, found the British response sensible and constructive. British ofªcials concluded that the intervention was a “misfortune for the Soviet system” because force was used “to maintain the status quo, not to change it” (p. 265), a blessing in disguise for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because of the way it strengthened the alliance’s cohesion, and a timely reminder for Britain and other lesser powers of the indispensability of multilateralism. The unseemly haste with which the lame-duck administration of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson initially tried to downplay the Soviet intervention in vain hopes of proceeding toward a summit and an arms control deal is well documented. Günter Bischof proceeds to evaluate Washington’s adjustment to the new situation, much along the British lines, and the U.S. response to astounding French allegations of su- perpower complicity, supposedly rooted in the mythical spheres-of-inºuence agreement at Yalta. The French ambassador went so far as to compare the Soviet intervention with that of the United States in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Johnson knew that his term in ofªce was limited, but France’s President Charles de Gaulle did not know that he would be out of ofªce less than a year after the 1968 Paris riots shook his hold on power. Georges-Henri Soutou paints an unºattering picture of an aging statesman clinging to his vision of a revived French-Russian entente of his youth and thoroughly misjudging what was happening. De Gaulle believed “it was not Prague that spelled danger for détente, but Vietnam and the Middle East, by which...healluded to U.S. foreign policy.” He saw “the real cause of the crisis and the purpose of the invasion in Soviet...resolution to intimidate the [Federal Repub- lic of Germany], which would ensure its back [being] covered for confrontation with China.” Consequently, “the opportunity of understanding the developments of 1968 as a point of departure for later transformation in the East that transcended the old demarcation lines went unclaimed” (p. 277). Other chapters examine the impact of the Czechoslovak crisis on the two Ger- man states, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria, but not on Poland or Romania. The trajectory of the Polish leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who in 1956 had defended his

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country’s independence against Soviet interference but then in 1968 became the fore- most advocate of Soviet intervention in neighboring Czechoslovakia, would have been worth exploring. Similarly, the apparent ªnest hour of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauqescu, when he denounced the invasion and stood up against the threat of Soviet invasion of his own country, deserves closer attention. The most regrettable omission, however, is China, whose response to the Soviet invasion of another Communist country in the name of socialist solidarity led to the escalation of hostilities on the Sino-Soviet border in 1969 and the transformation of Mao Zedong’s policy that re- sulted in the Sino-American rapprochement. In dwelling on the importance of the Czechoslovak crisis for the onset of détente, the book strangely ignores not only the Sino-Soviet clashes but also the concurrent consolidation of the Warsaw Pact. The introduction enumerates developments that were supposedly “unleashed” or “spawned” by the Czechoslovak events: the opening of negotiations for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the West German Ostpolitik, the build-up of Soviet SS-20 missiles, NATO’s dual-track decision to counter them, the American Strategic Defense Initiative (pp. 4–5). None of these developments, however, could be either directly or primarily linked with the Czecho- slovak events. The book would have beneªted from a concluding chapter to clarify the legacy of those events. This could hardly be seen, as claimed in the preface, in having taught the West the “lesson” that “the Czech Republic must not be abandoned again”—a lesson that supposedly brought the country its NATO membership in 1999. In fact, the legacy is largely limited by the context of the Cold War. The 1968 crisis arose from a conºict between a reform-oriented version of Communism—a model that has since been rendered obsolete—and the power interests of the defunct Soviet Union. The abiding relevance of the 1968 experience concerns the adequacy of using military force to keep suppressed the democratic aspirations of citizens in an authori- tarian state. For that reason, the Prague Spring has recently been invoked in connec- tion with the “jasmine” revolutions in the Arab world and presumably studied by re- gimes contemplating a crackdown similar to that undertaken by the Soviet Union. For anyone looking back in that respect, the present book should be required reading.

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