ReviewReassessing Forum the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 REVIEW FORUM Reassessing the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 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 doc- uments 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 interna- tional Krisenjahr 1968, 2 vols. (Beiträge and Dokumente/Dokumenty) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2008. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 14, No. 4, Fall 2012, pp. 216–223 © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 216 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00281 by guest on 02 October 2021 Reassessing the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 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 sys- tem. They put an end to the experiment by sending several hundred thousand mili- tary 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 develop- ments 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. 217 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00281 by guest on 02 October 2021 Review Forum 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 re- forms under the banner of “normalization”? ✣✣✣ 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 con- versation is cited. 5. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968,