“AN OASIS OF FREE THOUGHT” IN PRAGUE: PROBLEMS OF PEACE AND SOCIALISM AND THE END OF THE THAW, 1968-1969 Andrew Kapinos A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Curriculum in Global Studies (Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies) in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2020 Approved by: Chad Bryant Donald J. Raleigh Michael Cotey Morgan © 2020 Andrew Kapinos ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Andrew Kapinos: “An Oasis of Free Thought” in Prague: Problems of Peace and Socialism and the End of the Thaw, 1968-1969 (Under the direction of Chad Bryant) This thesis investigates Problems of Peace and Socialism, the journal of the international communist movement, and its coverage of the Prague Spring and its immediate aftermath. Unlike the Moscow-based journal Kommunist, the journal’s location in Prague and the relatively open-minded attitudes of its overseers allowed for a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the reforms. Moscow reasserted control over the journal after the August invasion, after which PPS joined Kommunist in condemning the reforms and calling for renewed fidelity to socialist internationalism. In addition to the journal’s role as a training ground for young Soviet thinkers who later advised M. S. Gorbachev in the 1980s, PPS’s coverage of the Prague Spring provides insight into the varying ways the Thaw unfolded across Eastern Europe before it ultimately ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and suggests ways in which events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 influenced Soviet politics and society. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................................ vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: CREATING AN INTERNATIONAL FORUM ................................................... 10 Western Analysis of PPS .......................................................................................................... 15 Comparison with Kommunist .................................................................................................... 18 The Mezhdunarodniki ............................................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER 3: REFORM AND INVASION, JANUARY-SEPTEMBER 1968 ........................... 27 The Reforms as seen in PPS ..................................................................................................... 28 Kommunist Takes Notice .......................................................................................................... 32 The Warsaw Pact Five Invade .................................................................................................. 35 Shake-up at the Editorial Office ............................................................................................... 38 CHAPTER 4: NORMALIZATION BEGINS, OCTOBER 1968-1969 ....................................... 41 Normalization Under Dubček Begins ....................................................................................... 43 The Normalizers Take the Wheel ............................................................................................. 46 Unity, Cohesion, and Cooperation ............................................................................................ 50 Crisis averted ............................................................................................................................ 52 iv CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 54 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 58 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CIA Central Intelligence Agency CMEA Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union ID International Department of the CPSU KPČ Communist Party of Czechoslovakia PPS Problemy mira a sotsialisma (Problems of Peace and Socialism) vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION On the night of August 20-21, 1968, soldiers from the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the “counterrevolutionary situation” now known as the Prague Spring. Though Warsaw Pact troops met no organized violent resistance, they faced a week of mass demonstrations and indignant locals inquiring where this supposed counterrevolution was. The uproar spilled into the Prague editorial office of the theoretical journal Problemy mira i sotsialisma (Problems of Peace and Socialism, or PPS), where Soviet editors worked alongside Czechoslovaks and communists from around the world. One of the Soviet editors present in 1968, Vladimir Petrovich Lukin, who later became a prominent dissident and liberal politician, summed up the dilemma in which he and his coworkers found themselves: “My friends, this is a bloody mess.”1 Problems of Peace in Socialism, also known by the title of the English-language edition World Marxist Review, served as the monthly theoretical journal of the Soviet-led international communist movement from 1958 to 1990. From its headquarters in Prague, PPS was published in thirty-seven languages and had a circulation of over 500,000 issues as of 1981.2 Although billed as a journal devoted to collaborative discussion of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice, the chief editor of PPS was always a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1 Josef Pazderka, “Rok 1968 nás změnil: rozhovor s Vladimirem Lukinem.” in Invaze 1968: Ruský pohled, ed. Josef Pazderka (Prague: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů/Torst, 2011), 169. 2 Wallace Spaulding, "New Head, Old Problems of Peace and Socialism," Problems of Communism 31, no. 6 (November-December 1982): 57. 1 (CPSU). The International Department (ID) of the CPSU had to approve every issue before publishing. American analysts typically saw this as evidence of Soviet control over the journal, charged with disseminating Moscow’s ideological line to international communist parties. An early Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report on the first issue of PPS released in 1958 described its contents as “uninspired elaborations on the Moscow line” and a part of “the effort to suppress freedom of thought and expression within the international movement,” before nonetheless cautioning that PPS “should in no circumstances be underestimated as an authoritative vehicle for the international line.”3 In this interpretation, the journal’s supposed status as an international forum for discussing important communist theoretical matters was no more than a smokescreen. At odds with this picture of stifling Soviet control, Anatolii Sergeevich Cherniaev, foreign policy advisor to Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev and former member of the PPS editorial board, wrote in his 1995 memoir that the journal’s Prague headquarters fostered an atmosphere “favorable to freedom of thought and behavior.”4 Vladimir Lukin further indicated that while the International Department examined every issue before publishing, the reviewers were relatively receptive to unorthodox ideas and allowed some of those ideas through. Lukin even opined that the journal ”was the only one edited in Russian and sold in the USSR that escaped censorship.”5 The Prague Spring reforms, as both an honest attempt to improve socialism by giving it a 3 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The New Journal of International Communism: “Problems of Peace and Socialism” (Langley, 1958): 9-10, CIA Electronic Reading Room. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-00915r000900250013-1 4 Anatolii Cherniaev, Moia zhizn’ i moe vremia (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniia, 1995), 234. 5 Michel Tatu, “Les élites russes et la politique étrangère, leurs origins et leur évolution,” in Recherches et Documents, no 11 (November 1999): appendices, quoted in Marie-Pierre Rey, “The Mejdunarodniki in the 1960s and First Half of the 1970s: Backgrounds, Connections, and the Agenda of Soviet International Elites,” in The Making of Détente: Eastern and Western Europe in the Cold War, 1965-75, eds. Wilfried Loth and Georges-Henri Soutou (London: Routledge, 2008), 55. 2 “human face” and a challenge to Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, represented a significant test of just how far PPS could go in presenting unorthodox ideas to the entire Soviet-led international communist movement. The importance of PPS’s editorial office in Prague as an incubator for a cohort of men who advised M. S. Gorbachev in the 1980s is well known.6 This aspect of PPS’s legacy is certainly important; indeed, it is undoubtedly the journal’s most important legacy. But none of the historians who have identified this phenomenon explored why the journal had an atmosphere conducive to creative thought, nor has anyone studied the contents of the journal itself. Historians have in fact typically joined Cold War-era US government analysts in dismissing the idea of PPS containing daring or reformist ideas. Marie-Pierre Rey in her study of the mezhdunarodniki, a term referring to specialists in international relations, recognized PPS a “powerful tool” for the International Department in “maintaining the cohesion of the parties while limiting the centrifugal and destabilizing tendencies that appeared after 1956,” but maintained that “the ideas expressed