For many contemporary observers, the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were already directly linked at the time to one symbolic figure: Alexander Dubček. This was undoubtedly even more the case for observers from abroad (and to a certain extent also for Slovak observers). Factors that contributed to this impression were photos, sound recordings, and even mere ideas: Dubček smiling, with an enthusiastic crowd milling around him in spring 1968; Dubček anxious, talking to Leonid Brezhnev at the end of July in Čierná nad Tisou;¹ Dubček on his way to an uncertain future on 21 August, as he is being deported from the country (perhaps handcuffed) by Soviet military personnel;² Dubček on 27 August, addressing Czechs and Slovaks on the radio and explaining with a faltering voice the necessity of reaching a compromise with the Kremlin and appealing to the population to end their resistance to the intervention.³ In the memories of 1968, Dubček does indeed play the role of an icon of the “Prague Spring,” and these events also signaled, in a certain sense, his own breakthrough: Dubček the reformer of socialism, Dubček the defender of Czechoslovak sovereignty and independence, Dubček the precursor of Mikhail Gorbachev.⁴

A certain simplification in the interpretation of past events and their identification with the most significant actors are not unusual in connection with historical memory, all the more so in the case of a memory that relies above all on the media reportage of the period: headlines, photos, and TV material. In all of them it is, unsurprisingly enough, people and their names that play a key role and that eclipse to some extent the continuum or the changes and developments in the attitudes and the reactions of the public, the hidden interdependencies, the decision making, and all the rest that tends to get lost in day-to-day reporting. These were the decisive factors shaping the information about the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia that was brought to the attention of a non-Czechoslovak public, which—according to the rules applicable at the time—was a Western one. The “Dubček myth”—the idea that, first, the Prague Spring amounted to a single-handed attempt by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ) to reform the Communist regime and that, second, the initiator and at the same time the political leader responsible for that attempt was Alexander Dubček—is erroneous twice over. This myth is, moreover, decidedly unhelpful if we want to understand what actually happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and complicates the interpretation of the Soviet decision and of the reasons for the military intervention even further. By the same logic, this myth will prevent us from fully appreciating the lessons to be learned from the Prague Spring and its consequences for the following decades.

It must be borne in mind that the Prague Spring was not only an attempt to reform the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, it was a major crisis of the regime as such. For an understanding of what was at stake in Czechoslovakia in 1968, we must not content ourselves with an analysis of the reforms that the KSČ leadership sought to implement. It is not enough to focus on “socialism with a human face,” and it would be a great mistake to analyze the motives behind the Soviet decision to intervene purely in terms of the Soviet determination to put a stop to the Czechoslovak reforms.

If we are to understand the dynamics and the meaning of the events of 1968, we must proceed from the fact that the developments of the spring and summer were not exclusively (and not even primarily) masterminded by the reformers within the leadership of the KSČ. We must assume that the reforms were not the outcome of some political strategy that had been devised in detail in advance and that was backed by a unified and clearly defined group of reformers. Even less were they the work of one key player, that is, Alexander Dubček. In Czechoslovak society, other forces were at work as well, forces whose strivings for reform influenced each other, which took turns in the role of pioneers, which took inspiration from each other, but which were at the same time far from identical in terms of their objectives, their political platforms, and their orientation.

The majority of Czech and Slovak society hoped for much more in terms of freedom and democracy than the reform agenda of the KSČ attempted; their desires, if played out to their logical conclusion, were incompatible in principle with any Communist program, including that of the reform Communists. Saying that here was a movement that was incompatible with communism by its very nature does not necessarily imply that it was not also supported by people who chose to remain members of the KSČ. These people even had considerable clout in some of the party organizations, most notably in the city committees in Prague and Brno as well as among Communist artists and intellectuals. Yet the far greater part of the movement had no truck with the Communist Party, and it is important to remember that this movement or societal force had neither one leader nor a clearly formulated program. These handicaps were compensated for by the existence of specific groups, such as journalists, artists, and, increasingly, students, who were the group with the clearest political profile.⁵ On the whole, one opted for noncommittal discussions of a whole range of political programs and visions rather than for serious and conscientious political preparations. Prototypical in a way were Václav Havel’s musings in the first issue of the Writers’ Association’s revived weekly Literární listy at the beginning of April on the possibility of the implementation of a political system that had as its basis the competition between two parties, the Communists and the Democratic Party.⁶ Yet deliberations on democracy, pluralism, civil society, basic civic rights, and the sovereignty of state and nation were definitely part of the societal discourse as well. Deliberations proved by no means the end of it; very soon a clamoring for their gradual realization arose. An almost unrestricted freedom of speech existed, and several organizations (including youth organizations, cultural organizations, some trade unions, and the like) emancipated themselves from the tutelage of the KSČ. Openly political groupings took shape and became active, such as the Association of Former Political Prisoners K231 or the Club of Committed Non-Partisans (KAN), the attempt to relaunch social democracy,⁷ the establishment of an independent student organization (Association of University Assistants), and the existence of critical public opinion.⁸ All this amounted already to a de facto pluralistic environment: a state of affairs, in other words, that the KSČ reformists’ program did not take into account but that was nevertheless an indisputable fact. These “protodemocratic” forces did not succeed in gaining a sufficiently strong foothold in public before August. Their activities were confined to discussions of a theoretical nature in the press or in various debating shops. They preferred this to voicing their demands in the streets. Nevertheless, it was clear that the movement had potential, and it was, therefore, eyed with apprehension by Moscow. In the eyes of the Kremlin, it was clearly an antisocialist and counterrevolutionary movement. The reform Communists, too, felt displeasure at the existence of such societal forces. Under certain conditions, if it had not been thrown off course by external pressure and, subsequently, by the intervention, such a “protodemocratic” movement could have flourished and would—if we follow this line of thought through for a moment—necessarily have had to engage in conflict with the reform Communists. This is, of course, a matter of pure speculation and cannot be decided one way or another.

Reforms of the different spheres of societal life were prepared in Czechoslovakia with considerable thoroughness. This is by no means only true of 1968, but of the first half of the 1960s as well, even though this is not always fully appreciated.⁹ Sizable groups of cadres advocated reform at different levels of the party apparatus, in the state administration, and in the economic and scientific communities. With a bit of simplification, one might say that it was these people who had, after 1945 and when they were still young, supported the Communist seizure of power and the construction of the Communist system out of conviction, sometimes even in a spirit of fanaticism. In the 1950s, a number of different circumstances subsequently led many of these people to view critically the reality that had developed after 1948; they noticed that it had little in common with the idealistic notions they had initially harbored. Any criticism within the party was suppressed until 1956 and did not resurface until the beginning of the 1960s. In the meantime, many of these critical thinkers had reached relatively important positions. The reasons for their disenchantment were to be found in a number of different areas: the weak economy, cases of blatant disregard for the law, the suppression of artistic freedom, and so forth. In addition to these, the nagging sense that Czechoslovakia was hopelessly trailing the countries to the west of its borders, countries with which Czechoslovakia had shared the same or a similar standard of living immediately after 1945, existed. The sense that the country was falling behind concerned not only the economy, but also technology, culture, and civilization in general. When the strict isolation in which the country had found itself in the 1950s was beginning to yield, the gap became very apparent. A solution, perhaps the proverbial five-to-twelve doomsday scenario, to give the country a break appeared to lie in the preparation and implementation of fundamental reforms. These reforms were meticulously planned. On the basis of close cooperation between institutions of the party, the state and academic teams were put together to orchestrate reforms in different spheres: one team, with Ota Šik at its head, was to deal with the economy, Zdeněk Mlynář headed another that was supposed to fix the political system, and Radovan Richta and his team were to devote themselves to the environment. The teams received relatively generous support in terms of money and the possibility of traveling abroad for study purposes. This proved somewhat counterproductive: the insights these people gained abroad served mainly to strengthen their conviction that far-reaching changes were necessary.

The reform program was underpinned not only by a general awareness that Czechoslovakia had significantly fallen behind the West and that the system as such was dysfunctional, but also by an ideological basis. The ratification of the new constitution in 1960 entailed the assessment that the process of the construction of socialism had been successfully concluded in Czechoslovakia and that the time had now come—in accordance with the classics of Marxism-Leninism—to discuss the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to a state for the entire population and the need and/or the possibility of a reduction of state control in view of the new situation. The reform program was hammered out and ratified under the aegis of Antonín Novotný. Economic reform, which was formulated down to the last detail and which was to combine state ownership and central planning with a dose of market economy principles, was begun as early as 1965. The program aiming at a reform of the political system was much more cautious in its scope and did not allow for the emergence of a certain limited political pluralism for at least another decade.

The general acceptance of the inevitability of reforms was one thing; quite another was their consistent implementation, which was viewed by the KSČ leadership and by important segments of the party and state apparatus with apprehension and distaste. Evidence for this can be found in such examples as the attempted economic reform and the reform of the domestic secret service. As regards the reform of the economy it was, paradoxically enough, its initial successes—an increase in the profits of several businesses and the ensuing wage rises—that evoked in Novotný a nightmare that Communist functionaries knew only too well: the fear that demand and supply might be thrown out of sync in that the supply of goods available in the market might prove inadequate in relation to the workers’ increasing spending power. Novotný therefore began to backpedal, to slow the pace of the reform, delay its implementation, and generally make sure it was no more than a half-hearted attempt. In the case of the transformation of the domestic secret service from an organ that was supposed to form the vanguard in the exacerbating class struggle into one that was to protect the state against external enemies—which was the totality of Minister of the Interior Lubomír Štrougal’s blueprint for reform—the decisive opposition came from below. The majority of the service’s staff never accepted this transformation, sabotaged it as best they could, and did everything to reverse it.

In 1967, the demarcation line that separated the inimical camps within the KSČ leadership became apparent: those who supported a continuation and intensification of the reforms and those under Novotný’s aegis who, motivated by fear of further progress, opted for indecisive and incomplete solutions. However, at the crucial moment toward the end of the year there were a number of additional fault lines which caused these forces within the Central Committee to split into opposing factions. There were those who joined the anti-Novotný camp for various personal reasons, and the Slovak question was another key factor. Novotný’s lack of sensitivity in handling Slovak matters and Slovakia’s declared wish to be granted a certain maneuvering space at the expense of strict central control resulted in a Slovak front practically unified against Novotný. By another paradoxical twist, one of the protagonists in the activities that led to Novotný’s dismissal, Vasil Bil’ak, was to assume a leading role a few months later in a plot that staged a coup in the KSČ with Moscow’s help and engaged in preparations for the military invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Some of the measures adopted by the new party leadership after January 1968 were merely designed to reduce further the standing of Novotný and his supporters and, therefore, lacked the logic of a consistent reform program. The key decision at the end of February 1968 to abolish censorship must be seen in that context. This decision was taken in the illusory conviction that the party’s control of the media was guaranteed by the KSČ members being among the editors and that society could be counted on in its entirety to support the reform program and nothing else. This quickly proved a misjudgment. The media totally emancipated themselves from any control within weeks and assumed the role of one of the most important political actors. The nascent civil society and the critical public opinion generated demands that went much further than the planned reforms, which, moreover, had at least in part been conceived in an academic environment and were still far from having assumed the form of a concise political program.

Incidentally, the reformist movement within the KSČ did not achieve by any means a stable or fixed identity during the eight months of the Prague Spring, the time between Alexander Dubček’s acceptance of the party leadership and the intervention in August. It was itself in a state of flux; it accommodated a variety of different viewpoints, nuances, priorities, and a whole range of different assessments as to the envisaged scope of the reforms. It was, therefore, not highly developed in terms of its program nor even, for a long time, in terms of its membership. The line of demarcation between reformers and orthodox Communists that eventually split the KSČ leadership emerged slowly and by degrees. It did not imply radically different programmatic viewpoints; what set the camps apart was, rather, a difference in the way they represented their viewpoints in public and the attitudes they displayed toward the Warsaw Pact “allies.” For the reader of the minutes of the speeches delivered at the sessions of the KSČ’s governing bodies in April or May 1968, it is virtually impossible to tell which of the speakers would end up after the suppression of the Prague Spring with the tag “revisionist” and “opportunist” and which would be counted among the “healthy forces.” Utterances that are characteristic for us of the way the Kremlin viewed the situation in Czechoslovakia were voiced in the spring of 1968 not only by those members of the KSČ leadership who in the end threw in their lot with the “allies” of the Warsaw Pact and took part in preparing the intervention, but also (and on a fairly regular basis, too) by the protagonists of the reform movement. Dubček himself as well as the head of the government Oldřich Černík, the president of the National Assembly Josef Smrkovský, Central Committee Secretary Zdeněk Mlynář, and others routinely referred to the imminence of the counterrevolution, to the need to leave the people’s militias (the KSČ’s armed units) intact because it might become necessary to deploy them, to tanks and the use of force as extreme but, perhaps, inevitable possibilities. They, too, voiced regular complaints about the party’s increasing loss of control of the media and peremptorily demanded a change of this intolerable situation. They did mention, it is true, other things as well, such as the positive transformation program for which the party had to muster and retain public support. (The reasons given for this included the need not to concede terrain to “right-wing antisocialist forces.”)¹⁰ Above all, they used a somewhat different diction when their words were designed for public consumption. Yet it reflects to their credit that they were capable of heeding the mood and the expectations of the public, of respecting them and taking them into account. This was not necessarily due to their unprincipled, opportunist “Janus-headed politics” (epithets used later by the “normalized” KSČ leadership and the “normalized” media to characterize their approach), but is regarded as evidence of the increasing regeneration of society’s potential in the direction of an open society and a normal interaction between the public and the political elites. A situation characterized by almost complete freedom of speech and the restoration of public opinion was simply too propitious to be ignored. Dubček’s own position was somewhere in the middle. He tried to defuse extremist positions, he tacked and veered, and his increasing popularity was due primarily to his likable appearance, which did indeed set him apart from leading Communist functionaries both before and after him.

The mainstream of this reformist movement did not by any means advocate the abolition of the existing political and economic system. The goals were innovation, rationalization, increased productivity, and undoubtedly also a certain upgrading of the regime in humane terms. It is possible to document with some precision that this applied both to those who chiefly represented the reform movement—in a word, Dubček and his entourage—and to the majority within the KSČ at the time. Mlynář later estimated in his memoirs, which were first published in the West,¹¹ that this group represented roughly 80 percent of the party. It was this reformist majority that emerged victorious in spring 1968 from the KSČ’s district and regional conferences and that would have triumphed at the extraordinary party conference scheduled for September, which never took place. The programmatic key document of the reformist movement, the so-called Action Program, which the KSČ leadership passed on 5 April 1968, displays a disconcerting lack of focus and considerable internal contradictions.¹² There is, of course, no disputing that parts of the reformist program aimed for a far-reaching enfranchisement in the areas of culture and the sciences, for the removal of obstacles that hampered the professional careers of nonparty members, for a program of rehabilitation and compensation for the victims of injustice, and so forth. The same applies to the emphasis on the autonomy of the organs of the state (government, parliament, and regional and local authorities). The Communist Party’s task was perceived not to lie in day-to-day administration, but in the definition in political terms of the direction in which society was to move. This was, indeed, a striking innovation: the party was to resign its role of an omnipresent force that dominated everything, reducing all other social organizations and institutions to cogs and levers for the transmission of Communist power. Questions concerning political power and the admissibility of political pluralism were off limits. Should it ever become possible to address them, this would be in a distant future and in a manner that was far from clear in 1968.¹³ In simple terms, one could say that the reformers within the party leadership were not aiming for the democratization but for the liberalization of the system. It goes without saying that even this political course differed substantially from anything for which the KSČ had stood prior to 1968 and would stand for from 1969 onward. It was also a course that propelled Czechoslovakia, through the unplanned but nevertheless real synergy with the dynamics of an agitated social movement, beyond the confines of “really existing socialism.”

An issue that this program avoided altogether was the restoration of the sovereignty of state and nation; it did not touch on Czechoslovakia’s membership or position within the Soviet Bloc. All questions relating to the country’s foreign policy were deliberately sidelined or excluded altogether. This was done presumably under the naive perspective that unquestioning loyalty on the level of global politics was going to ensure a safe climate for domestic reforms. This was, of course, a cardinal mistake. The intervention was to become reality.

It is obvious that the intervention was not triggered by worries occasioned by the reform agenda of the KSČ. The reason was that the Soviet leadership had lost confidence in Dubček’s ability (and indeed in his willingness) to get a situation under control in which the system was gradually being eroded.¹⁴ There were other sponsors of the intervention in addition to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza or CPSU) leadership, notably the orthodox faction in the KSČ leadership and the party leaders in the satellite countries. Among them, the attitude of the Polish and the East German Communists, who explicitly endorsed the invasion, was particularly important.¹⁵ It is understandable that the final assessment, arrived at in Moscow not without hesitation or controversy, carried considerable weight. In view of what we know today, one of the interpretations that were once common in Czechoslovakia and in leftist Western circles can hardly be upheld any longer, namely that the Soviet leadership misjudged the situation entirely, meddled when the Communist regime was under no threat, and discredited itself through its aggressive communism with lasting consequences. Let us, for instance, recall the poster that was on display everywhere in the streets of Prague depicting Brezhnev as the grave digger of world communism or the slogan that was making the rounds at the same time: “Wake up, Lenin, Brezhnev has gone nuts.” In fact, the reverse was true. The Soviets remained true to the logic of the system that they represented. Consequently, the intervention stifled the movement that had the potential to bring about the collapse of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and, for all the Soviets knew, was already in the process of doing so. This would have amounted to a serious destabilization of the regimes of the neighboring countries in a manner that was ultimately to materialize in the domino effect of 1989. It may very well have been the case that the intervention extended the lease on life for these regimes by another twenty years.

That such an assessment ultimately gained credence in the Soviet leadership is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the tactics that the KSČ leadership used in their negotiations with the Soviets or, to assign names to the dramatis personae, that Dubček used in his negotiations with Brezhnev. It is difficult to judge whether a different strategy than the one chosen by Dubček, which consisted basically in playing for time, would have had more of a chance of success. Its rationale was the realization on the part of the Dubček faction that it was of paramount importance for them to hold out until the beginning of the extraordinary party conference of the KSČ, which was scheduled for 9 September; the conference would boost the reformers and quite likely blow the position of the leadership’s orthodox, Moscow-beholden faction to smithereens. But, of course, the Soviets were equally capable of a rational assessment of the situation. Dubček’s ceaseless attempts to paint the situation in rosier colors than was actually justified (and also rosier than it had repeatedly been depicted in speeches by the leading reformers, speeches with which the Soviets were, of course, familiar), to pacify the Soviets with promises holding out the prospect of various measures and changes, to embark subsequently on a course of procrastination and then to serve up excuses of one kind or another for the delays—all these maneuvers were effective for a time, but the moment when enough was enough finally arrived. The transcripts of the telephone conversations that took place between Dubček and Brezhnev only days before the intervention, on 9 and 13 August 1968, when Dubček attempted to justify himself by citing all kinds of reasons why he had not yet followed up on the pledges he had made two weeks earlier in Čierná nad Tisou, demonstrate quite clearly the limits and also the counterproductivity of such tactics.¹⁶ The majority of the CPSU leadership could not but arrive at the conclusion that the KSČ had not only lost all control over the media and was in the process of losing control over the organs of power, but that it had entirely lost its ability to act and to hold the party together.

To return to this point once more: it is, of course, impossible to tell in retrospect whether a different approach might have prevented the intervention. Yet it is undoubtedly true that the leaders of Poland’s Communist Party, Władysław Gomułka in 1956 and Stanisław Kania and Wojciech Jaruzelski in 1980 and 1981, confronted the Soviets when the country was in a comparable situation far more resolutely than Dubček with his words, “Comrade Brezhnev, you should resort to all the measures that your CC Politburo believes are appropriate.” One must add, however, that in their negotiations with Moscow the Poles not only displayed much more determination to stave off an intervention, they were also as good as their word in actually carrying out the measures they had pledged. The fact that they did not implement measures that would no doubt have been construed as endorsement of the Soviet interference and that would, moreover, have meant reneging significantly on liberalization and reform (reintroduction of censorship, changes in the Ministry of the Interior, a number of new appointments) would have reflected well on the KSČ leadership under Dubček in 1968, if they had also had the gumption in the first place to reject such demands out of hand in the talks with the Soviet leaders, instead of halfheartedly acceding to them and following this up with equally halfhearted delays. What made matters even worse was that these same reformist party leaders then played a role in the downward spiral that followed the intervention, in autumn 1968 and in 1969, in a situation in which they were no longer constrained by tactical considerations to defend themselves, in which the last traces of their reform program had been swept away as well as the last shreds of their own political careers. A case in point is the Legal Measure of the Presidium of the Federal Assembly of 22 August 1969. It was passed after several days of rioting in connection with the first anniversary of the intervention. It amounted to the proclamation of a temporary state of siege and became an important tool for quelling resistance at the beginning of the process of “normalization,” that is, the consolidation of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. It bore the signatures of President Ludvík Svoboda, of the head of the government, Černík, and Dubček, who had already been reduced to the role of president of the Federal Assembly.¹⁷

Raising the question to what extent this or that negotiation tactic of the KSČ leadership contributed to Soviet decision making does not mean attempting a reallocation of the roles of victim and aggressor (which is part of the agenda of some Russian historians).¹⁸ The aggressor, irrespective of what reasons led to its decision, was the Soviet Union; the role of accomplice and initiator of the intervention was the domestic “fifth column”: the orthodox Communists within the party leadership of the KSČ and other plotters in the party and the state apparatus.

The intervention and the resistance it evoked led to a tremendous mobilization of the Czechoslovak society and gave it ethical and emotional foundations that were to serve as a basis for the unparalleled awakening of civic self-confidence and responsibility. On 21 August, the threat of an attack from outside ceased to be relevant any longer; while it had been imminent, it had slowed down political activity during the preceding months by forcing people to respect self-imposed limits. In a strange way, that first week after the invasion gave the Czechoslovak public an intense foretaste of unlimited freedom. It was only then that the forces pent up in society, which had been something of an object for speculation before August, revealed themselves in full. Brezhnev and others in Moscow were right in the way they assessed the activities of the “Right” immediately after the invasion. Gomułka even said: “We are the wiser for the experience: it’s in fact possible to stage a counterrevolution before the very eyes of the Soviet military. The situation is worse than we thought.”¹⁹

The two different movements that had powered the Czechoslovak Spring of 1968, the reformist and the socially more Catholic “protodemocratic” one that embraced society in its entirety, were briefly united in the struggle against the military intervention. This struggle was admirable in a way, and it succeeded temporarily in upsetting the political miseen-scène of the intervention and forced the Kremlin to improvise. This improvisation made a calculating use of the leading reformers and the practically unlimited trust that was placed on them by the Czech and Slovak societies. After 21 August the KSČ, with a few insignificant exceptions, massively supported the countrywide resistance. However, this situation did not last long, and after the signing of the Moscow Protocols and the accession to power in Czechoslovakia of the pragmatists, opportunists, and the orthodox Communists, the party found itself once again in opposition to mainstream society.

Relying on the presence of foreign troops, it managed to consolidate the regime for another two decades. The protagonists of the reforms came to realize at different times (if they did not opt for the shortcut of switching sides, which some of them managed to do with remarkable bravura) that a reform of the Communist system was doomed to failure and that their attempts at reform and the tactics with which they had tried to establish contact with a society whose control eluded them had actually paved the way for a much more radical change. Some of them understood this immediately after 21 August, others later, when they found themselves in the ranks of the dissenters, in exile, or even in prison, where Gustáv Husák’s normalization regime had put them. Some did not arrive at what was for them a bitter insight until November 1989—and this presumably applied to Dubček.²⁰

The defeat that was inflicted on the Czechoslovak society between August 1968 and 1969 took a long time to be reversed. Yet there is no doubt that in the history of the long, drawn out failure and eventual collapse of the Communist regime, the events of 1968 played a key role. The years 1968 and 1969 made a significant contribution to the emancipation of the Czech and Slovak societies from communism, particularly as regards the younger generation. In the terms of power politics, the regime had been consolidated again, but it had lost those roots in society that would have been necessary for a genuine revitalization.

NOTES

Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.

1. Photos depicting Dubček can be found online at http://www.68.usd.cap.cz (accessed 8 May 2008).

2. Throughout 1981, General Jaruzelski kept on recalling Dubček’s fate, which, according to the testimony of his memoirs, had great influence on his own decisions. See Wojciech Jaruzelski, Mein Leben für Polen (Munich: Piper, 1993); Wojciech Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht: Der Anfang vom Ende einer Herrschaft (Leipzig: Militzke Verlag, 1996).

3. The recording is available for download at http://www.68.usd.cap.cz/content65/93/lang,cz/ (accessed 8 May 2008). The text of the address has been published in Jitka Vondrová and Jaromír Navrátil, eds., Komunistická strana Československa. Kapitulace. srpen—listopad 1968, vol. 9, no. 3, Prameny k dějinám československé krize (Prague: Ústav pro Soudobé Dějiny, 2001), 120–24.

4. See Antonín Benčík, Utajovaná pravda o Alexandru Dubčekovi: Drama muže, který předběhl svou dobu (Prague: Ostrov, 2001).

5. On the role played by the students, see Milan Otáhal, Studenti a komunistická moc v českých zemích, 1968–1989 (Prague: Dokořán 2003).

6. See Jiří Hoppe, ed., Pražské jaro v médiích: Výběr z dobové publicistiky, vol. 11, Prameny k dějinám československé krize (Prague: Ústav pro Soudobé Dějiny AV ČR, 2004), 114–19.

7. On the attempted revival of the Social Democratic Party, see Přemysl Janýr, Neznámá kapitola roku 1968: Zápas o obnovení činnosti Československé sociální demokracie (Prague: Ústav pro Soudobé Dějiny AV ČR, 1998); Jiří Hoppe, “Die Wiedererlebung von Politik und bürgerlicher Gesellschaft: die tschechischen Sozialdemokraten im Jahre 1968,” ZfG 46 (1998): 710–19.

8. On the emancipation of the society, see inter alia Vilém Prečan, “Lid, veřejnost, občanská společnost jako aktér Pražského jara 1968,” in Proměny Pražského jara 1968–1969, ed. Jindřich Pecka and Vilém Prečan (Prague: Ústav pro Soudobé Dějiny AV ČR, 1993), 13–36; Vilém Prečan, “Seven Great Days: The People and Civil Society during the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968–1969,” in La Primavera di Praga, ed. Francesco M. Cataluccio and Francesca Gori (Milan: F. Angeli, 1990), 165–75; Petr Pithart, “La dualité du Printemps tchécoslovaque: Société civile et communistes réformateurs,” in Le Printemps tchécoslovaque 1968, ed. Francois Fejto (Brussels: Éd. Complexe, 1999), 77–86; Petr Pithart, Osmašedesátý (Prague: Rozmluvy, 1990); H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).

9. For details on the preparations of the reforms and the roots of the “Prague Spring” in the Communist Party and society, see above all Karel Kaplan, Kořeny československé reformy 1968, I. Československo a rozpory v sovětském bloku, II. Reforma trvale nemocné ekonomiky (Brno: Doplněk, 2000); Karel Kaplan, Kořeny československé reformy 1968, III. Změny ve společnosti, IV. Struktura moci (Brno: Doplněk, 2002); see also Karel Kaplan, “Die Wurzeln der 1968er Reform,” in Karner et al., Beiträge.

10. See also the minutes of the most important KSČ bodies in spring 1968 in Jitka Vondrová et al., eds., Komunistická strana Československa. Pokus o reformu (říjen 1967–květen 1968), vol. 9, no. 1 (Prague: Doplněk, 1999).

11. Zdeněk Mlynář, Mráz přichází z Kremlinu (Prague: Mladá fronta, 1990); in German translation, Zdeněk Mlynář, Nachtfrost: Das Ende des Prager Frühlings (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988).

12. See Vondrová et al., Komunistická strana Československa, 320–59; for excerpts in English, see Jaromír Navratíl et al., eds., The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 92–95.

13. Zdeněk Mlynář, Československý pokus o reformu 1968: Analýza jeho teorie a praxe (Cologne: Index, 1975).

14. On the process of Soviet decision making with regard to the intervention, see Mikhail Prozumenshchikov, “Inside the Politburo of the CPSU: Political and Military Decision Making to Solve the Czechoslovak Crisis,” in this volume; Václav Kural et al., eds., Československo roku 1968 (Prague: Parta, 1993); Jan Pauer, Prag 1968, Der Einmarsch des Warschauer Paktes: Hintergründe, Planung, Durchführung (Bremen: Ed. Temmen, 1995), 34–228; Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jiři Valenta, Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968: Anatomy of a Decision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

15. For more details, see Manfred Wilke, “Die DDR in der Interventionskoalition,” and Pawel Piotrowski, “Polen und die Intervention,” in Karner et al., Beiträge.

16. See Jitka Vondrová and Jaromír Navrátil, eds., Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize 1967–1970, Červenec—srpen 1968, vol. 4, no. 2 (Brno: Doplněk, 1996), 164–66, 172–81; RGANI, F. 89, op. 76, d. 75, pp. 1–18, telephone conversations of L. I. Brezhnev with A. Dubček, 13 August 1968, reprinted in Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 343–56; and in German and Russian in Karner et al., Dokumente, #57.

17. See Oldřich Tůma et al., eds., Srpen ’69. Edice dokumentů (Prague: Maxdorf, 1996); Oldřich Tůma, “Ein Jahr danach. Das Ende des Prager Frühlings im August 1969,” ZfG 46 (1998): 720–32.

18. See also R. G. Pikhoya, “Chekoslovakiya, 1968 god. Vzglyad iz Moskvy. Po dokumentam TsK KPSS,” Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya 6 (1994): 3–20, and in Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya 1 (1995): 34–48.

19. Vondrová and Navrátil, Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize 1967–1970, 277.

20. For Dubček’s views as voiced in conversations, letters, and other texts dating from the spring and summer of 1989, see Alexander Dubček, Od totality k demokracii. Prejavy, články a rozhovory, výber 1963–1992 (Bratislava: Veda, 2002), 293–313.

On 18 August 1968, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the Russian poet and editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, spent hours at his dacha near Moscow with his short-wave radio. He listened to the news broadcast about Czechoslovakia by Western stations, among them Radio Liberty, Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle. He also listened to the open letter “2,000 Words to Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists, and Everyone,” composed by the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík, which concluded: “This spring, as after the war, we have been given a great chance. Again we have the chance to take into our own hands our common cause, which for working purposes we call socialism, and give it a form more appropriate to our once-good reputation and to the fairly good opinion we used to have of ourselves.”¹

These words resonated powerfully in Tvardovsky’s soul. He wrote in his diary on the next day: “I would have signed [a similar letter], regarding our situation. And I would have written an even better one.” During the tense Soviet-Czechoslovak talks at Čierná nad Tisou in early August, Tvardovsky, for the first time in his life, spent hours glued to his short-wave radio. He felt euphoric when he learned that the Czechoslovak reformists enjoyed national support and would not bend to Soviet pressure: “I never imagined I could feel such joy at this discomfiture, political and moral, of my country in the eyes of the whole world.” At the same time, as Tvardovsky admitted, there was a great polarization of opinions in the Soviet Union regarding the Prague Spring. “What a multitude of people in our land has been listening to all this: some feel great compassion and sympathy, yet others feel tense, apprehensive, and are full of hatred. They think: ‘These Czechs allow themselves too much!’”²

Understanding Soviet responses to the Prague Spring sheds light on inner divisions, feelings, ambiguities, hopes, and fears that existed in Soviet society at the time. Recent studies reveal the “spillover effect” of the events in Czechoslovakia on the USSR. Yet the resonance of the Prague Spring with Soviet society cannot be fully understood in the synchronic perspective. Nor can it be correctly explained as a one-sided impact or emanation of the Czech events on the Soviet body politic and the social-intellectual scenery. A much more adequate perspective, as this essay will argue, is a diachronic one that explains various Soviet attitudes to the Prague Spring as the products of previous Soviet internal arguments and struggles over the issues of de-Stalinization, liberalization, and the possibility of a reformed communism “with a human face.”

The main argument of this chapter is that the Soviet experience of deStalinization (which preceded the Czech developments) had produced passions, hopes, and fears as well as lessons and memories that would produce fundamental divisions in Soviet society’s reaction to the Prague Spring and the Soviet intervention of 1968. This chapter focuses on the Russian part of Soviet society and the central Soviet elites located in Moscow and other Russian cities. The responses, lessons, and memories in the non-Russian parts of the USSR, especially in the western borderlands, were markedly different and have been studied elsewhere.³ This chapter draws on the growing body of archival research as well as the numerous sources this author was able to study for his large-scale project on the role of intellectuals in Soviet society.⁴ First, Soviet de-Stalinization as it developed is explored. Then the focus shifts to the divisions and options Soviet de-Stalinization created, and the reasons why de-Stalinization and the movement for liberalization and reformed communism had such a limited and abortive nature in Soviet society and elites are discussed. Next, the ambiguous social developments and ideological trends in Moscow in the years preceding the Prague Spring are examined. A brief address of the lack of protest in the Soviet Union after the invasion follows. Finally, the short-term and long-term fallout of the aborted Czech experiment for Soviet polity and society is considered.

DE-STALINIZATION IN SOVIET SOCIETY, 1953–1963

It is important to recognize two facets of Soviet de-Stalinization: first, institutional and ideological de-Stalinization (from above), carried out by the Kremlin leadership, and second, the social, intellectual, and even spiritual de-Stalinization (from below) that took place in the minds, hearts, and souls of individual Soviet citizens. Both processes interacted and affected Soviet society. Both began at the moment of Stalin’s death, yet they did not develop in unison. The first attempts of the post-Stalin leadership (by the likes of Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov) in 1953 to raise the issue of the “cult of personality” of Stalin did not resonate much with the party elites or with society at large (with the notable exception of the gulag). Some departures from Stalinism in 1953–1955, such as amnesties and rehabilitations, reconciliation with Josip Tito, and withdrawal from Finland and Austria, evoked more confusion than approval among Soviet citizens. A very narrow stratum of cultural elites, educated public, and students participated in the cultural Thaw, yet even among these many remained genuine admirers of Stalin and his international and domestic legacy.

Therefore, Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of February 1956 produced a profound, unprecedented shock among the elites and the general public. That speech made irreversible the end of such key features of Stalinism as mass terror and permanent war mobilization. The speech unleashed de-Stalinization from below, yet it also produced powerful resistance in society. The Kremlin authorities, especially Khrushchev himself, were largely unaware of the Pandora’s box they opened. They did not prepare the propaganda apparatus for enormous tasks facing them in the new situation after the speech was read to millions of party and nonparty members. In fact, only in July the Politburo issued clarification to the party propagandists that interpreted Stalinist crimes as deviations dictated by the prewar circumstances. As a result, for months after the Secret Speech, people were left with their own perceptions and interpretations. Khrushchev’s attempts to avoid the public discussion of his speech and to divert public attention to other topics were counterproductive.⁵

From March to November 1956, spontaneous de-Stalinization occurred among students and young scientists, above all among those in the educational, cultural, and scientific institutions of Moscow and scientific-technical labs outside the capital, all of them linked to the military-industrial complex. There were attempts to reform the Komsomol, to search for “truth” and “sincerity” in literature, to forge new cultural and intellectual identities, and even sporadic collective actions to defend basic rights. Many students in Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Gorky, and other university centers of Russia tried to find out more about the Polish and Hungarian Revolutions. Some even sympathized with the Hungarian rebels and criticized the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In Leningrad in late November and early December, some students plotted to hold a rally in support of Hungary. Mikhail Molostvov, student of philosophy at Leningrad State University, wrote an essay entitled “Status Quo,” demanding glasnost and an end to the tyranny of the bureaucracy. Victor Trofimov and Boris Pustyntsev, both students of the Herzen Institute, were motivated by the same ideas and organized a secret group of “Decembrists.” A young party official and professor at Moscow State University, Lev Krasnopevtsev modeled his idea of organizing a revolutionary underground organization among junior faculty and graduate students on the Hungarian events. Hungary, he recalled later, “turned us upside down.”⁶

The confusion, inaction, and blunders by the Soviet authorities were, in part, the result of inexperience, but they also stemmed from Khrushchev’s convictions and overconfidence. The Soviet leader firmly believed that the selective dismantling of the Stalinist regime would only remove the roadblocks in the way of the ultimately inevitable triumphal march of communism. Khrushchev’s “communism” was not only a not-so-distant goal (as he famously proclaimed in 1959), but also the sum of past experiences, including the “war communism” of 1918–1921 and the “socialist construction” of 1928–1934, when Stalin had not yet stifled “party democracy.” This revolutionary epistemology blinded Khrushchev to the longterm dangers of radical de-Stalinization. At the same time, it made him alert to the short-term dangers of the loss of political control as a result of “bourgeois” or “revisionist” influences. Alarmed by the tragic Hungarian events, Khrushchev unleashed the Committee for State Security (KGB) on suspected agents of domestic “revisionism.” He believed that the arrest of a few “loudmouths” among intellectuals, scientists, and students would end the social confusion.

Still, de-Stalinization from above continued. It involved large-scale events and campaigns: the World Youth Festival in Moscow (1957), the mass mobilizations to the Virgin Lands (reviving the revolutionary traditions of “socialist labor” as opposed to the camps’ labor), Western exhibitions, development of foreign tourism, the emergence of “new” investigative journalism (in newspapers such as Komsomolskaia Pravda and Izvestiya, led by Khrushchev’s son-in-law A. Adzhubei), and the second attack on Stalin and his accomplices at the 22nd Party Congress (October 1961). Khrushchev promoted the “rejuvenation” of the party cadres. A group of reform-minded idealists worked in the Komsomol, among them sociologists, literary critics, and philosophers who sought to rebuild the damaged bridges to the university students in order to regain their trust and participation in public life

Khrushchev’s massive housing construction and other life-improving social policies became a powerful factor in de-Stalinization. The movement of millions of urbanites from “communal” apartments to private apartments sharply reduced the social space that had helped generate “ordinary” Stalinists, secret police informers, and vigilantes.⁷ The rapid growth of private social space boosted the proliferation of informal groups of young educated people (kompaniyi), a vital ingredient of the growing free-thinking milieu of middle-class professionals. Among the students during the 1950s, the private space of informal groups was far more important than the public activities in the Komsomol, which were increasingly viewed as bureaucratized and sterile. Groups of educated youth became the most important engine of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual de-Stalinization.⁸

Another significant factor was Khrushchev’s promotion of the scientifictechnical revolution after the successful Soviet launch of the first Sputnik. Ideologically cautious and inconsistent as this course was (such as when Khrushchev restored the infamous Trofim Lysenko, the enemy of genetics, to power), it produced the increasingly well-funded, confident, and socially prestigious academic and scientific-technical elites. In contrast to the universities that remained under stringent control, these elites existed in the “oases” of relatively free thinking and discussion, with access to information and enormous resources. The media reporting on the formerly secret scientific lab in Dubna near Moscow and the construction of a privileged “Academic City” near Novosibirsk epitomized the greater autonomy of the intellectual elites from the party-state as well as the recognition of the growing dependence of the latter on the former. Scientists became a privileged class and took advantage of this to help and promote their colleagues from the social sciences, biology, and creative arts—the other fields where the party-state’s ideological controls remained strong.⁹

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, de-Stalinization from below began to develop a momentum of its own in Moscow and a few other cultural centers of Russia. These informal educated groups and networks in Moscow generated a new phenomenon unthinkable under Stalinism: samizdat, the unofficial alternative system of information exchange and culturalintellectual interaction, free from state censorship. The Moscow branches of the “creative unions” of writers and artists—those Stalinist guilds created to corrupt and control the creative elites—became engines of cultural liberalization during the Thaw. There was a process of “rejuvenation” of these associations with the advent of younger cohorts of writers, poets, painters, and sculptors who sought to express “the truth” about the war, Stalinism, and everyday Soviet life and its meaning. The dominant direction of cultural and literary self-expression was modernist: young creative people took revolutionary experimental art as well as contemporary Western art as their models.¹⁰

The time between the spring of 1960 and December 1962 produced the “second Thaw” with its soaring hopes for liberalization among the Moscow cultural, intellectual, and scientific elites. A number of events created a synergistic effect: the spontaneous demonstrations after the space flight of Yuri Gagarin; the Cuban revolution and the surge of “revolutionary romanticism” with regard to the Third World, the adoption of the party’s new program of “construction of communism” by 1960, and Khrushchev’s second attack on Stalin at the 22nd Party Congress. All this took place against the background of an unprecedented expansion of the institutions of higher education, culture, and science; the peak of public faith in the scientific-technical revolution; and the rapid expansion of middle-class professional groups. The values of those groups, in contrast to the middle-class values of late Stalinism, focused not only on material well-being, but also on intellectual and cultural emancipation from the authoritarian controls. Publications in literary journals, popular scientific journals, and “investigative” newspapers, such as Novy Mir, Nauka i Zhizn’ (Science and Life), and Izvestiya, created the new phenomenon of a nation-wide, educated readership whose minds, souls, hearts, and ultimately civic loyalty belonged not to the party-state leadership, but to the intelligentsia. The notion of intelligentsia was a contested one, with different people imparting different meanings to it. Traditionally in Russia, however, this notion meant individual social responsibility, autonomy from the repressive authoritarian regime, and searching for the moral meaning of life.¹¹ The phenomenal popularity of poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, writer Vassily Aksyonov, and bard Bulat Okudzhava, among many others, signified the reemergence of a collective identity familiar from history (the Russian intelligentsia) with a new mass following among the Soviet-era professional educated middle classes.

In November 1962, Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir, obtained Khrushchev’s permission to publish the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a completely unknown teacher of mathematics in Ryazan and an ex-convict of the gulag. Finally, de-Stalinization from above (Khrushchev) and from below (intelligentsia) appeared to act in synchrony against the forces of Stalinism in the bureaucracy and society. Tvardovsky told Khrushchev: “Novy Mir and the Soviet government belong to the same camp.” He suggested abolishing the censorship of literary journals, and Khrushchev nodded sympathetically and, according to Tvardovsky, even expressed his “complete agreement” with the writer.¹² When Solzhenitsyn’s piece was published, the Thaw seemed to be turning into the Moscow Spring. As one Moscow school teacher wrote in her diary, “[F]rom that moment, people would begin to speak and think freely, and not a single scoundrel would be able to indict them for anti-Soviet speeches.”¹³ Anna Akhmatova believed at that moment that everything she wrote about the Great Terror would soon be published.¹⁴

Instead, in December 1962 came frost, not spring. Khrushchev personally led the attack against the liberalizing trends and their “agents” in Soviet arts and culture: closing the young artists’ exhibition in the Manege Exhibition Hall near the Kremlin and lashing out at poets and artists at two meetings with the “creative intelligentsia” (December 1962 and March 1963). The accounts, all written from the liberal perspective, blame the crackdown on the “Stalinist conspiracy.” The latest Khrushchev biography cites the leader’s neurotic instability, anti-intellectualism, and flawed vision of reforms and de-Stalinization. This turnabout, however, was totally abrupt and inexplicable for Moscow-based intellectuals and artists, the supporters of cultural liberalization. For a while, they continued to believe that “Stalin stalwarts seemed to be routed completely. One no longer had to fight with them. It was sufficient to laugh them off.”¹⁵ Abetted from the top, the crackdown, however, grew into a cultural-ideological backlash, reminiscent both of the Stalinist campaigns of 1946–1949 against “cosmopolitans” and of McCarthyist witch hunts. To many, this campaign also reminded them of a recent public attack on poet Boris Pasternak. Most shockingly, the established Soviet cultural elites, driven by fear and self-protection, became actively engaged in the campaign, denouncing each other, as if there had been no de-Stalinization or revelations by Solzhenitsyn. The momentum of the Moscow Spring was dead.¹⁶

The fragmentation and weakness of public support for cultural liberalization requires us to turn to the divisions, fears, and illusions produced by de-Stalinization in Soviet society, and ultimately to the abortive nature of this de-Stalinization.

LIMITATIONS OF RUSSIA’S DE-STALINIZATION

De-Stalinization was an international phenomenon. In Eastern and Western Europe, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech split the Communist world into “Stalinists” and “reformed Communists.” Numerous people abandoned their Communist beliefs altogether. The Hungarian Revolution was launched by the students and intellectuals who believed in liberalization, but also in “socialism”; their movement was supported by “reformed Communists” in the ruling party. Yet this revolution very quickly developed into an anticommunist, nationalist, anti-Russian movement that “reformed Communists” were unable to control any longer. In Poland, another option prevailed in 1956: ex-Stalinist Władysław Gomułka hoisted himself into the saddle of a popular movement, which blended “reformed communism” with liberalism and heavily anti-Russian Polish nationalism, which was the predominant driving force.

At the risk of crude generalization, the events in Poland and Hungary, as well as in less dramatic ways in Romania, revealed three discourses that emerged in the wake of Stalinism’s “decapitation” by Khrushchev. The Stalinist discourse survived in part as a language of “realism” and cold war, and it remained the language of Communist regimes which stayed in power. These regimes, however, tapped into two other discourses to boost their legitimacy. One was the powerful language of nationalism, both in its liberal and illiberal versions, harking back to earlier collective memories, especially war traumas. Another was an idealistic discourse of reform communism that rejected liberal democracy and economic liberalization as “the return to capitalism” and sought to refurbish and revive the egalitarian promises of the Communist faith, combining them with the dreams of democratization and respect for civil rights.

It is obvious in retrospect that reform communism was a transitional phenomenon on the road from the authoritarian regime toward democratization and full national sovereignty from the Soviet Union. Even before the Prague Spring, the proponents of reformed communism were losing ground everywhere in Eastern Europe either to Stalinists (Poland and Romania of the 1960s) or to radical liberal nationalism (briefly in Budapest in 1956). Yet the mirages associated with reformed communism continued to attract intellectuals and artistic elites everywhere from Moscow to Warsaw and Prague, and from there to Berlin and Paris. The rebellious Zeitgeist of the 1960s in the West, especially the continued ideological fascination with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong among Western intellectuals and students, supported and nourished these illusions and spread them among millions of believers in the rapidly growing ranks of university students and the professional middle classes.¹⁷

De-Stalinization proceeded very differently in various regions of the Soviet Union. In the Baltic republics, Ukraine, and in South Caucasus, especially in Georgia, the nationalist discourse was predominant. In Soviet Russia, it was a more complicated and contradictory process. The crisis of 1956 had already revealed important things about Russian Soviet society. The shock of revelations of Stalin’s crimes created the possibility for spiritual catharsis, for self-questioning. Some Moscow intellectuals, scientists, and students perceived themselves as a vanguard of de-Stalinization from below. Very few of them were ready, however, to question the entire revolutionary legacy. It was customary among intellectual hot-heads to rediscover the traditions of the Russian struggle against the Tsarist autocracy. Reformed communism contrasted “moral” Bolshevism with Stalinism, thereby preserving the basic myth of the leftist intelligentsia about its special mission in remaking and saving Russia. Poet David Samoilov wrote in his diary in 1957 that Stalin brought to power meschanstvo, the anti-intellectual lower-middle class, the embodiment of provincial darkness and crass materialism; the task of the intellectuals was to fight against this group.¹⁸ This line of thinking is typical of the time.

Just like many liberal-minded and reform-Communist intellectuals in Central Europe then and later, many of the anti-Stalinist intellectuals in Moscow came from the families of Old Bolsheviks and passionate believers in the revolution. Most of them still thought that a “return to Lenin” and “purification” of the revolutionary cause from Stalinism was the correct path to the future. For a decade after 1956, some of them would search for “a flaw in the original design” of Marxism in history, philosophy, sociology, and political economy. Others would propagate the idea of genuine revolution and honest and moral revolutionaries including Lenin (as opposed to Stalin and Stalinists) in theater, cinema, art, and literature.¹⁹

At the same time, in contrast to Central Eastern Europe, the Russian Soviet society failed to develop a potent nationalist alternative to discredited Stalinism. In part, this incapacity was the reflection of Russian history, traditions, and the composition of society. Unlike the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968 who remembered life before “communization,” the vast majority of Russians in 1956 and later remembered only the Soviet past. In Budapest and Prague, there were deep-seated liberal traditions and culture rooted in historical memories and the recently destroyed bourgeois, middle-class milieu. Virtually none of these existed in Moscow or elsewhere in Russia by 1953. Stalinism had reshaped and debased Russian society more than the societies of Central Europe. In Leningrad, the only truly European city of Russia, the bourgeois-liberal milieu had been destroyed by waves of terror and resettlements. In Moscow, numerous members of the cultural elites enjoyed in some ways bourgeois and middle-class standards of life, yet they developed the ingrained “court” mentality of time-serving cynics. Many of them fully accepted their role as the servants of the regime and abdicated their spiritual and moral responsibilities to society. They were prepared to stamp out any heretics and revisionists that dared to break the rules and cross the boundaries of the permissible. In 1958–1959, these “court” cultural elites, unleashed by the Kremlin, hunted down poet Boris Pasternak after he published his novel Doctor Zhivago (treating the Russian revolution as a deeply tragic, rather than historically progressive development) abroad and received the Nobel Prize for literature. Later, in 1963–1965, they supported repression against their fellow poets, writers, and filmmakers.

The Cold War fortified Stalinist discourse and undercut any attempts to form a Russian national alternative to Stalin’s empire. Cold War propaganda strengthened the illiberal reactions and predilections of Russian society and elites. After all, the Soviet Union opposed the most radical liberal democracy of all, the United States. The Kremlin leadership successfully argued that cultural liberalization and ideological deviations could only hand powerful weapons to the enemy, and the loss of stability in the USSR and the loss of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe would then be inevitable. The vast majority of the Russian ethnic “core” of the Soviet Union supported the center against the anti-Russian periphery (the Balts, West Ukrainians, and Georgians). An even greater majority of Russians, including the cultural-intellectual elites and students, strongly associated themselves with the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. Faced with a choice between liberalization and the Soviet postwar empire, most of them chose the latter. “The hegemony over East Central Europe,” as one historian aptly remarked, “became the most visible and palpable prize of the great Soviet victory and therefore functioned as a powerful moral bond between the regime and its peoples and among the various sectors of the Soviet elite.”²⁰

Even worse, Russians were deeply divided among themselves on the meaning of de-Stalinization. In Western and dissident literature, the division between “Stalinists” and “anti-Stalinists” became the standard binary formula to analyze and discuss politics and cultural divisions during the Khrushchev period and in the post-Khrushchev years. Useful as it was, this formula nevertheless simplified motivations and feelings behind “Stalinist” and “anti-Stalinist” façades. Above all, it failed to explain the remarkable resilience and strength of “Stalinist” attitudes in the Soviet society, as well as the chronic weakness of the “anti-Stalinist” camp.

In Soviet Russia, Stalinism had cultivated powerful identities that outlived Stalin because they appealed to Russian historical memories, pride, and fears. For millions, the Stalinist past embodied three decades of incredible suffering, destruction and executions, torture and slave camps. Yet for other millions of Russians, Stalinism symbolized an era of unparalleled achievements, great upward social mobility, enthusiasm, and triumphs, including victory in World War II. Vladimir Kozlov discovered the widespread phenomenon of anti-Khrushchevian “popular Stalinism” that was illiberal and immune to the values of individualism and human rights. Many felt repulsed seeing how Khrushchev and other Soviet “bosses” distanced themselves from Stalin, while retaining their power and privileges and pretending they still had the right to lead and rule. In many regions of Russia, people believed that Stalin’s terror in 1934–1938 was retribution to Communist bosses who had oppressed the “common people” and brutally enforced collectivization. Finally, many people remembered Stalin as the indispensable wartime leader who had led the country to victory.²¹

Even among intellectuals there was a curious attitude: anti-anti-Stalinism. They felt that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the way he stifled any discussion in society was wrong and profoundly immoral.²² Writer Konstantin Simonov once told Khrushchev that his denunciation of Stalin was like reversing a car that was moving forward at full speed. “You have to stop first and switch gears. I believe we should take a timeout and think.”²³ This kind of reaction reflected the traditional alienation between the regime and those who viewed themselves as the heirs to the left-liberal Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century and who experienced a profound feeling of social duty and moral responsibility.

Instead of presenting a credible alternative to Stalinist discourse, nationalism in Soviet Russia played a highly divisive role, putting sharp limits on de-Stalinization in Soviet Russian society. Stalin had successfully used the pre-revolutionary arsenal of the Great Russian imperial ideology to build up his cult. He also directed people’s discontent against the Jews. Late Stalinism revived and exploited Russian traditional identities, which had more in common with the prerevolutionary Black Hundred anti-Semitic nationalist movement than with Marxist-Leninist ideology. Many young intellectuals, ethnic Russians, imbibed anti-Semitism along with Great Russian chauvinism, and 1956 did not change their views. They became “Russian patriots” who hated liberals and cosmopolitan intellectuals, viewing their activities as treasonous.

Russian-Jewish intellectuals and cultural figures, victims of the anti-Semitic campaign, children of Old Bolsheviks and true believers in communism, were among the first who embarked on the process of de-Stalinization from below. They played a uniquely active role in the formation of the vanguard of cultural, intellectual, and spiritual liberalization.²⁴ Most of them continued to perceive Stalinism as a deviation from the correct historical path, and from the legacy of the Russian revolution. The uniting discourse of this group was reform communism or “democratic socialism.” Educated as Soviet patriots, these people were shocked by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and believed that principles were more important than the preservation of Stalin’s empire. The priority of these artists and intellectuals was cultural and intellectual emancipation, not traditional organized politics, and they rejected violence in the name of social change. A few them began to break with the faith of their Old Bolshevik parents, and some even became radical liberals, if not libertarians. They rejected the Soviet regime as a hostile force, and resented the official doctrine of socialist realism as a form of cultural oppression. Alexander Ginzburg, the father of samizdat, remarked to the writer V. Aksyonov in 1960: “It is a new environment where [the KGB] can no longer shadow all of us. There are just too many of us. This generation turned out to be like that, too many are marching out of lockstep.”²⁵

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the rift deepened between “Russian patriots” and “liberals” (they gave different definitions to each other) inside the cultural elites, especially in the Writers’ Union. While similar tensions existed in Communist Poland, Hungary, and even in Czechoslovakia, there were also, at various historical moments, broad national democratic coalitions that included “Jews” and even had them play the key role as the adepts of liberal or reform Communist ideas. It did not happen in Soviet Russia. Before the Thaw, “Russian patriots” victimized “cosmopolitans”; during the Thaw, the latter tried to settle their score with the former in kind. The constant rivalry precluded the formation of any new brand of liberal democratic movement that could simultaneously appeal to Russian national feelings. The “Russian patriots” rejected the ideas of reform communism and liberal socialism as the manifestations of the cosmopolitan “Jewish” spirit, which they regarded as destructive for Russians.²⁶ Members of the cultural vanguard of the early 1960s regarded Russian nationalism as a reactionary, anti-Semitic, and potentially “fascist” phenomenon. Both sides periodically looked to powerful allies in the Soviet party apparatus for support.²⁷

Against the background of these divisions, it is surprising that the ideas and values of the “third way,” “democratic socialism,” cultural liberalization, and economic reforms still played a prominent role in the Soviet Union in the years preceding the Prague Spring.

BIRDS OF SPRING: “PEOPLE OF THE SIXTIES”

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization actions and the Thaw created an unusual phenomenon in Soviet society: a growing number of men and women, including many from the postwar cohorts of the “Soviet intelligentsia” and educated professionals as well as survivors belonging to the pre-Stalinist intelligentsia, began to think of themselves as an informal and nonpolitical community. In public life, many of these people were party members and Komsomol activists. Privately, however, they stood in aesthetical and ethical opposition to the bulk of the party-state nomenklatura and the country’s leadership, considering them uneducated, crude, and repulsive. At the core of this phenomenon was the rejection of Stalinism in favor of liberal humanist values and ideas of individual dignity, the rejection of the turgid canon of socialist realism, the faith in historical progress, and a youthful sense of opening horizons. The most common, if very loose, name for this community was “people of the Sixties” (shestidesyatniki). It implied not so much the generational change (although it was visible) as a cultural, ethical, and aesthetical distancing from the Stalinist past.

The social base of this informal community grew rapidly in the postwar years. The logic of competition with the United States forced the Soviet leadership to expand higher education and to foster the growth of scientific and engineering elites. From 1928 to 1960, the number of college students in the USSR grew twelve-fold and reached 2.4 million. The number of collegeeducated professionals increased from 233,000 to 3.5 million.²⁸ The number of scientists reached 665,000 by 1965, a six-fold growth in fifteen years.²⁹ The students who graduated during the 1950s formed the majority of Soviet educated classes, and they joined the workforce during a period of unprecedented, Cold War–fueled job growth, the scientific-technical revolution, and Soviet social and educational programs. A huge gap separated these young cohorts, numerous, optimistic, and idealistic, from their predecessors who had been decimated by war and Stalin’s terror and whose authority was tarnished by their Faustian bargains with the regime. Gradually, some members of the young intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad began to look for inspiration and guidance from the remnants of the Russian intelligentsia.

The community had neither the desire nor the opportunity for political organization. The shestidesyatniki possessed only the “soft power” of cultural innovation, moral reflection, and thought-provoking intellectualism. Yet there were several trends that enhanced this “soft power.” First, there was the continuing discovery and production of the treasures of high culture. There was a long row of banned and suppressed Russian writers, poets, and artists to be discovered and “rehabilitated.” Also, there was the rising cultural tide that found its way into the Soviet Union through the breaches in the Iron Curtain made under Khrushchev: Italian neorealist films, British theater, French impressionists, Picasso, and many others. The translation and emulation of literature and art from Central Europe (Bertold Brecht, Polish films and novels, Czech essays, Hungarian poetry, and so forth) supplied the Soviet Russian intellectuals with Western elements that were conspicuously absent from their cultural and spiritual diet.

Despite Khrushchev’s crackdown on formalist poetry and art, the ferment of creativity continued to make itself felt in filmmaking through the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Konchalovsky, and many other young directors; in the theater by companies such as Oleg Yefremov’s Contemporary Theater and Yuri Liubimov’s Taganka Theater; and in literature. Novy Mir under Tvardovsky’s leadership developed into the best literary journal of the Soviet era. The journal’s publications broke the taboos of officially sanctioned socialist realism one by one, presenting the prose of “lieutenants” about war, the “village prose” about the tragic end of Russian peasantry, and critical essays discussing democratic and revolutionary traditions before Stalinism. Tvardovsky, together with a group of dedicated publishers, literary critics, writers, and poets, attempted to use the great traditions of Russian literature to refurbish—not discard—the Soviet identity.³⁰ One of the key elements in this attempt was the profound conviction that only a “sincere” and “truthful” exploration of the Stalinist era could provide a basis for the future existence of a Soviet internationalist and humanist society. Tvardovsky gradually came to the firmly held belief that the ill-educated bureaucracy needed the intelligentsia as a mediator between the state and the people. Only talented and sincere artists and writers would be able to help prepare the moral and spiritual ground for a future egalitarian society.

The 1960s also produced an ever-growing informal culture on the crossroads between the classical Russian high culture canon, new democratic liberal values, and unflagging beliefs in the revolutionary mythology and historical determinism. This informal culture was born below and found its most visible expression in the cult of informal songs written by bards not recognized by the cultural elite, but loved by the new educated cohorts. Songs by Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotsky, Yuri Vizbor, Aleksandr Galich, Aleksandr Gorodnitsky, Evgenii Kliachkin, and others spread among millions with the help of private tape-recorders (magnetizdat). Tens of thousands of people gathered every summer in the countryside to perform, sing, and exchange cultural information.

The most influential segment of the shestidesyatniki was in the militaryindustrial complex, which employed over three million in the 1960s. Scientists, designers, and engineers were avid readers of thick literary journals and consumers of “honest” cultural products. These groups extended assistance to the “lyricists”—poets, writers, artists—when the latter got into trouble in 1963–1964. Academic and scientific institutes acted not only as “oases of free thinking,” but as cultural stages. At the same time, scientists and professionals of the military-industrial complex harbored strong technocratic illusions in that they were confident that in the future the national leadership would have to turn to them, not to the poets and writers, for guidance. The Cold War arms race boosted their prestige and confidence and so did the decline in the growth of the Soviet economy in 1959–1964. It forced the Communist Party to turn for help to the professionals. It was the high noon for the technocrats and their supporters in the state bureaucracy.

In return for their vital services, the scientists gained more intellectual autonomy than they had ever had before. Scientists in the “closed” cities and labs of the military-industrial complex had virtually uncensored access to global information. Even outside this complex, a slew of privileged scientific conglomerates also enjoyed relative academic freedom. In 1965, Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk was, as one veteran recalled, “the most liberal locale in the country,” with forty-seven academicians, eighty-five doctors of science, and over one thousand younger scientists. There was virtually no party or secret police supervision there. The intensity of intellectual discussions in the Akademgorodok, one witness recalled, resembled that at Berkeley.³¹

The first post-Khrushchev years, 1965–1967, saw the peak of influence of the intellectual-professional elites on the Soviet regime. Sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh recalled that “never in Soviet history had the officially recognized role of the intellectuals been so great.”³² In the race for strategic parity with the West, the Soviet regime could only count on scientists. Even the KGB needed the scholarly elite and their brains to deal with the challenges from the West.³³ In 1962–1965, the Kremlin authorized economic discussions; central and regional authorities employed sociologists and paid for public opinion polls to learn more about social processes. Economists, mathematicians, and sociologists used the “rehabilitated” and now fashionable discipline of cybernetics to offer solutions to reverse the slowing of the Soviet economy. Pravda, Izvestiya, and other newspapers and journals published “discussion articles” on possible economic reforms. These reforms were launched with pomp and circumstance at the Party Plenum in September 1965.³⁴

Another trend in 1965–1967 was a growing public standoff between the post-Khrushchev leadership in the Politburo and the small group of the pro-liberalization and reform-Communist intellectuals and artists in Moscow. This standoff was triggered by the Kremlin’s decision to cancel de-Stalinization from above. Instead, the regime attempted to boost its national legitimacy by creating the cult of the Great Patriotic War. Against this ominous background, the arrest and trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, took place. The trial was part of a campaign promoted by “hardliners” in the KGB and the Politburo in order to fight “Western influences” and “liberal rot” that had accumulated in the Moscow educated circles, as the hardliners believed, during Khrushchev’s rule. Protest against this campaign brought to life a “movement” primarily located in Moscow. Solzhenitsyn recalled that “Samizdat gushed like a spring flood, new names joined the protests. It seemed that we would start breathing freely with one more push.”³⁵ Historian Roy Medvedev recalled that in 1966–1967 this movement enjoyed emotional and material support among large groups of the intelligentsia, Old Bolsheviks, and even some people of the central party apparatus. Among the latter were experts in international affairs, culture, and science, recruited into the apparatus during Khrushchev’s Thaw (A. Rumyantsev, F. Burlatsky, N. Inozemtsev, O. Bogomolov, A. Bovin, G. Shakhnazarov, and A. Chernyaev, among others). Some of them became directors of think-tanks preparing international “détente” and writing speeches for Leonid Brezhnev. At the same time, they helped artists and historians who became the targets of neo-Stalinist attacks.³⁶ There was an informal alliance between reform Communists in the apparatus and the anti-Stalinist cultural elites, including some “liberals” among them.

It is obvious that both trends failed to produce the forces of historic change. Moreover, the chances, in retrospect, look even bleaker than they had looked at the time. In general, reform communism never gained many converts in the party apparatus; it remained limited to a few smatterings of educated (“enlightened”) apparatchiks, specializing in international relations, culture, science, and technology. Soviet Russian reform Communists still believed in the Leninist revolution and “purification” of the Leninist legacy from Stalinism, and they hesitated to see that Stalin’s empire was doomed. Yet, at the same time, Khrushchev’s revelations of the bloodsoaked past created a strong aversion to violence among these intellectuals. They no longer viewed mass politics as the major force of history. On the contrary, they gave priority to cultural enlightenment or scientific/technical progress. They regarded Soviet bureaucracy as the primary enemy of “genuine socialism” and ascribed to themselves and the growing groups of intellectuals and artists the same role that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had ascribed to the proletariat.

As for liberals in the broader sense, they limited their aspirations to the sphere of culture and abhorred public politics. They were especially prominent among the cultural and artistic elites, ensconced in the official unions, and firmly embedded in the system of material privileges of the regime, which they were afraid to lose. Overall, fear remained a dominant motive in their actions. It had stayed in their marrow since Stalin’s times. Only a tiny minority of the reform Communists and liberals had the courage for making public protests. The vast majority had long learned to live a double life, even more so than their Central European colleagues. Their favorite way to compensate themselves for their public life as conformists and obsequious time-servers was the cultivation of refined cultural tastes. Many of them looked at the aesthetic and ethical spheres as a purely private affair, which helped them to “save their souls” and withstand the repulsive realities of Soviet Russian life.

For all its social and intellectual capital, the Soviet technocratic intelligentsia was as split and divided as the writers and the rest of the educated classes; they all spoke different discourses typical of the era, including Stalinist, reform Communist, and nationalist ones. Consistent “liberals” were a minority even in the Akademgorodok. Even those technocrats who were highly critical of the existing economic system continued to believe that alternatives and new solutions could only be found in “improving the socialist model,” not in returning to capitalism.³⁷ The main reformist ideas included de-centralization without the dismantling of the centrally planned economy, introduction of new labor incentives without creation of a free labor market, and introduction of the notions of “price,” “value,” and “competition” without abolition of total price control or the restitution of private property. The rejection of liberal economic thinking was the result of ideological blindness and ignorance about Western concepts, but it also reflected the “natural” social habitat of the reformers and their intellectual milieu. In the Academy of Science, including Akademgorodok, as well as in the two dozen “secret cities” of the military-industrial complex, tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and their families lived a privileged life in which all their needs were taken care of within the framework of a property-less, centralized economy. Why wish for its destruction?

The birth of the “movement” in 1966–1967 and the flurry of activities (collective petitions, promotion of “honest” works of history and literature, providing assistance to the families of political prisoners) seemed to break the paralyzing fear. It created the men and women of a new political-ideological quality, the dissident counter-elite. It is worth reminding the contemporary reader that many dissidents had grown up as Soviet patriots and true believers in communism. Many had joined the party during the war or after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. Practically all of them lived in Moscow and worked in the state-funded (there were no others) institutions of culture, education, and science. The group also included a very high percentage of children and relatives of the victims of Stalinist terror, children of Russified Jews, and innovative artists in aesthetic “rebellion” against the canon of socialist realism. In 1966–1967 they were united by the visceral hatred of Stalinism, “Stalinists,” and the KGB, and by the values of the left-leaning Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century as well as by the newly developed concept of human rights from postwar legal terminology.

The most active dissidents felt contemptuous of both their conformist colleagues and the reform Communists in positions of authority. Yet as far as a political platform, specific programs, and ideology were concerned, the dissidents were also in disarray. The same deep split existed between the movement’s liberals, socialists, and nationalists as everywhere else. Characteristically, the informal leader of the movement at the time, the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was a profoundly illiberal thinker and Russian nationalist. He despised Moscow intellectual “smatterers” and nursed a grudge against Jews for their support of communism and the Soviet regime in the past.

Above all, reform Communists, liberal dissidents, and technocratic scientists were just the icing on the cake, the rarified urban intellectuals estranged from the masses of the Russian people.³⁸ These masses, especially the workers and peasants, saw the party apparatchiks and the intelligentsia as different segments of the same ruling elite.³⁹ Soviet Russian reform Communists mistrusted mass politics; they were afraid of the mass support for “Russian fascism” in the near future. As far as the liberals among the dissidents were concerned, the logic of their opposition to the Brezhnevite neo-Stalinism increased their mistrust in the Russian people, alternatively imagined as passive and slovenly and as aggressive, neo-fascist, and nationalistic. Some dissidents tilted toward an alliance with non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union and, most importantly, with Western scientists, scholars, journalists, and, possibly, even people connected to Western secret services. Finally, the technocratic-minded dissidents felt that the masses lacked, by definition, education and an understanding of the meaning of progress. In other words, the masses and the bulk of Communist apparatchiks belonged to the kingdom of darkness.

Sociologists haltingly began to plumb the depths of Soviet Russian society. Focusing on their own problems with the post-Khrushchev regime, they were slow to admit that society was evolving away from, not toward, their elevated ideas and schemes.⁴⁰ Most remarkably, there was no student movement in Moscow in the 1960s. The new cohorts of Soviet students were much more conformist and less ideologically active than the cohorts of 1956–1958. John Scott, a contemporary American observer, remarked that education did not stimulate social activism anymore, but rather stimulated “desire for more privacy and mobility—one’s own room or apartment; the right to turn off the cliché-ridden political program on television, the desire for one’s own car; the chance to visit Paris.”⁴¹ Soviet opinion polls as well as KGB reports recorded a continuing decline of romanticism and idealism and the spread of cynical conformism. In comparison with the data of 1960–1961, many more young men and women seemed to become materialistic, indifferent to ideas, principles, and big social issues.⁴²

In Soviet Russian society, the credibility of the Brezhnev regime grew between 1965 and 1967; it did not decrease. Among the contributing factors was the second round of the extension of visible social benefits to millions of people (the first round took place under Khrushchev in 1955–1958), which included free housing, education, medicine, childcare, and pensions. According to Western estimates, public consumption in the USSR grew annually by 4.6 percent after 1964 (before it was 3.2 percent). The Kremlin combined increases in the purchase of wheat and consumer goods abroad with subsidized low prices for basic food and consumer items.⁴³ Sociologists began to notice that not only the Communist nomenklatura, a predictable suspect, resisted economic reforms; even bigger resistance came from the majority of the workers and employees who preferred equality in payment to hard work and social protection to efficiency. Even before 1968, economic reforms began to grind to a halt simply because the profits of the few efficient enterprises and economic sectors were spread around the entire economy via the central budget. Even before the Prague Spring, the USSR began to drift from dynamic reformism into stagnation.⁴⁴

The political culture of the majority of people in Soviet Russian society continued to be defined by the search for stability and peace, not by the quest for civil freedoms. The traditional Cold War enemy images, blurred among the educated strata and reversed among the liberal dissidents, remained very strong in the society’s depth. The regime’s propaganda successfully used the Vietnam War and the brutal U.S. bombing of the North Vietnamese to discredit the “American enemy” in the eyes of the majority. Against this backdrop, the Soviet “right” to control Central Eastern Europe remained nondiscussible and sacrosanct.

SURVIVING THE INVASION

The truth about the Prague Spring was in the beholder’s eye. The reform Communists, including the “enlightened” apparatchiks, viewed the Czech developments as an unexpected second chance for a profound deStalinization of the Soviet society and for the ousting of the neo-Stalinist old guard. Some of them had lived in Prague for years, working for the journal The Problems of the Peace and Socialism.⁴⁵ They warned the party leadership that military intervention in Czechoslovakia would lead to a split with the Western Communist parties and jeopardize the Soviet position in the world.⁴⁶ One observer who worked in the party Central Committee’s building in the summer of 1968 recalled: “Never before or since have I seen so much room for liberalism in the highest Soviet quarters. One could walk along the corridor inside the party Central Committee and shout at the top of one’s lungs: ‘It is impossible to send tanks into Czechoslovakia!’”⁴⁷ Aleksandr Bovin wrote in his diary on 19 August, “In our Department [of the Central Committee], in the Foreign Ministry [intervention] is considered an unjustified step, at least a premature one.”⁴⁸

The brio of the Prague Spring seemed to have brought reform Communists and Liberals together again, at least in Muscovite intellectual circles. Active Russian Jewish dissident Mikhail Agursky recalled: “The Prague Spring of 1968 briefly brought me back to the eschatological expectations of Good Communism. I still shared hopes that salvation would come from the outside: Poland, Hungary, the Italian Communist Party and now from Czechoslovakia.”⁴⁹ Journalist Vladimir Lukin, a man with strong identity of shestidesyatnik and with extensive contacts to innovative artists and formalist poets, returned early in 1968 from Prague to Moscow for a leave and found that “the entire Moscow” of dissidents and semi-dissidents flocked to his apartment, eager for news about Czechoslovakia.⁵⁰

The Prague Spring was closer to the hearts and minds of the Moscowbased intellectuals and artists than the Western New Left radicalism that erupted at the same time. The anti-Vietnam protest among radical youth in the West did not find the slightest response in the quarters of the dissident movement. Moscow intellectuals also refused to share the Western radical infatuation with Maoist Cultural revolution in China. In the opinion of one Moscow witness of the May events in Paris, French neo-Marxist intellectuals and students were “possessed by Satanic powers.” They worshipped revolutionary violence, while Soviet liberals and reform Communists abhorred it.⁵¹ Russian film critic Maya Turovskaya recalled: “In 1968 the West experienced ‘its’ Sixties. And we did not understand why Western Leftists could be so blind to what was happening in the Soviet Union. We felt like being on a train going in the opposite direction.”⁵²

In April–June 1968, Andrei Sakharov formulated a paradigm of technocratic-minded Soviet intellectuals in a pamphlet: “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” He appealed to the Western political and intellectual classes with a call for the convergence of the two opposed systems. Sakharov emphasized the need of intellectual freedom and of the “scientific-democratic approach to politics, economics, and culture.” He stressed that he held “socialist” views. Yet his emphasis was not on revolution or mass politics, but on peaceful evolution and scientific/technical progress. Sakharov rejected violence and revolutionary changes. He feared that any political coup or revolution in Soviet society would cause a regression to violent chaos. The only alternative could be “scientific-democratic” reforms brought about by a gradual evolution in politics, economics, and culture. Sakharov believed that the intelligentsia, scientists and artists, should play a crucial role in such a transformation, provided they were given freedom of information, travel, and speech.⁵³

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968 took everybody in Russia by surprise. Earlier news broadcasts had not prepared people for the use of military force. Many were on summer vacations, in a mood that was far from political or concerned with international events. KGB and party reports invariably spoke of “absolute calm” in all the Soviet regions and cities. Even in comparison with 1956, protest in Moscow and Leningrad was remarkably insignificant. In Prague, Lukin and other Russians in sympathy with the Prague Spring refused to propagate lies about the invasion and quickly lost their jobs. In Russia, there was one perhaps rather spectacular protest that took place in Red Square on 25 August. There were only seven protesters, all of them from the ranks of the post-1965 movement of human rights defenders: Konstantin Babitsky, Larisa Bogoraz, Vadim Delone, Vladimir Dremliuga, Pavel Litvinov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, and Vladimir Fainberg. They tried to unfurl small Czech flags and posters. One poster read: “Long live a free and independent Czechoslovakia!” On another poster was the famous slogan of the Polish nationalist revolutionaries of the nineteenth century: “For your freedom and for ours!” The KGB quickly arrested the protesters.⁵⁴

Ill-informed and deceived by the Kremlin propaganda, the vast majority of Russian people took the invasion as a necessity. Some in the KGB and among the officials were all too eager to depict the Czech reforms as a “Jewish-led affair,” drawing parallels to the dissidents in the USSR. This had the potential of unleashing anti-Semitic reactions.⁵⁵ Yet this did not happen. Security interests and Cold War bipolarity remained the trump card of official propaganda. For many, the fact that Czechoslovakia bordered on West Germany was enough to justify the invasion. “What occupation?” asked some people regarding the seven dissident protesters in Red Square. “Of Czechoslovakia? But we liberated them in 1945. Two hundred thousand Russian soldiers died there. And now they’ve staged this counterrevolution. We cannot give up Czechoslovakia and leave it to the Americans.”⁵⁶ This echoed typical views, shared by many Russians who had lost relatives in the Second World War.⁵⁷

The invasion fatally tipped the domestic balance: the potential democratic-socialist coalition, uniting idealistic Communists and liberal intellectuals, was no longer in the cards. The regime proved it was not afraid of resorting to brutal force and got away with insignificant reactions from the Western powers and total quiescence inside the USSR and the Communist Bloc. Among advocates of cultural liberalization and reform Communists alike, a feeling of intense shame was compounded with a sense of impotence. They felt dishonored, for their ideals had been trampled on and defiled. More and more of them became, as Elena Bonner put it, “foreigners at home.”⁵⁸ Writer Aksyonov railed against the criminal regime. Poet Yevtushenko shed “the tears of a deceived idealist.” Yevtushenko sent two cables: one to Brezhnev, protesting the invasion, another to the Czech embassy in Moscow, expressing moral solidarity. Then he hurried to his dacha near Moscow to burn his manuscripts and letters, expecting the KGB to come and search or even arrest him. In the “oases of free thinking,” the think-tanks and labs in Moscow, Akademgorodok and elsewhere, the arrogant and confident technocrats of the scientific elite promptly “changed tapes”: now they marched to hard-line music. The editor of Literary Gazette, Aleksandr Chakovsky, launched a campaign to collect signatures of writers to support the invasion.⁵⁹ There was no widespread campaign among established pro-liberalization intellectuals and artists to defend the rights of the arrested dissidents. Fear of being branded anti-Soviet and the inability to speak against Stalin’s empire at the time of the Cold War were as paralyzing in 1968 as in 1956.

The self-immolation of Jan Palach, the Czech student, underlined the pain of isolation felt by the liberal-reformist minority of Soviet intelligentsia. On 20 January 1969, Igor Dedkov, another veteran of the student activism of 1956, wrote in his diary: “A Czech student died yesterday. Our radio stations and newspapers are silent. They report on anything but Czechoslovakia. Nothing we have been writing makes any sense: cheap, cowardly acting, boot-licking, and prostitution.” Some students of the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO), the elite factory of Soviet diplomats, stood silently with glasses of vodka raised—the old Russian tradition of mourning the dead. Still, in Russia, in contrast to the Baltics and the Ukraine, Palach found no followers.⁶⁰

While the invasion demoralized the reformist intellectuals, it energized their enemies. Mikhail Gorbachev, then the regional party boss in the Stavropol region, recalled: “From 21 August on, an ideological ‘toughening’ began, the repression of any free thinking.” Instructions from the party Central Committee ordered regional committees to “take decisive actions in the ideological sphere. The struggle against dissident movements took on a massive and ubiquitous character.”⁶¹ Numerous reform Communists and those involved in the movement of 1966–1967 were expelled from the party. The very word “reform” became a taboo in the public lexicon for almost two decades. In January 1970, after many months of strangulation of Novy Mir by censors and party hard-liners, Tvardovsky resigned from the journal and died soon afterwards.

In November 1969, Mikhail Gorbachev and another regional party leader, Yegor Ligachev, visited Prague with an official Soviet delegation. Gorbachev knew that his university classmate Zdeněk Mlynář was an active participant in the Prague Spring. At first, Gorbachev tended to agree with the majority in Russia that the invasion was necessary, for his father had been badly wounded liberating Slovakia in 1944. Yet he could not help feeling dismayed by the paralysis and the unmitigated hostility displayed toward the Russians in Prague and Bratislava. After the trip to Czechoslovakia, he recalled, he “returned home overpowered by grave thoughts, realizing the direct connection of what was happening over there with the events of August 1968.” In his memoirs, published in 1995, he called this trip “the most difficult” of all foreign trips he made.⁶² It would take Gorbachev years to come round to the views on the Czech reforms espoused in 1968 by Alexander Dubček and other reform Communists.

POSTMORTEM

The short-term effect of the 1968 invasion on Russian society was extremely limited. Except for a few dissidents, no elements in Soviet society were prepared to take their discontent and protest into the public realm. On the other hand, the longer-term effect of the abortion of the Prague Spring was very significant. The disillusionment with the prospects of “democratic socialism” similar to the Czechoslovaks’ “communism with a human face,” terminated any possibility of a unity between the liberals in the Muscovite cultural milieu and reform-Communist apparatchiks. The hopes for an evolutionary improvement of the Soviet regime were gone among the cultural Muscovite elites. Meeting in their kitchens, they raised bitter toasts to the “success of our hopeless cause.” From now on, their priority was the preservation of their individual moral and intellectual integrity, not the transformation of society. Among the intellectuals who had toyed with neo-Marxist ideas in the 1960s, there was a widespread sense that history “betrayed” them.⁶³ Social philosopher Dmitry Furman recalled about that time that the fad of Marxism-Leninism among his friends and colleagues in Moscow “died a quiet death sometime during the reign of Brezhnev.”⁶⁴

Some intellectuals now turned to the West and the “free world” as a last resort. “The West will help us,” became a favorite toast among those “defectors-in-place.” For dissidents, friendship with Western journalists became essential. Foreigners who resided in Moscow with their families, the hordes of the “messengers of détente” who descended on Moscow and Leningrad, exchange scholars, and participants in scientific conferences carried information in and out of the Soviet Union, helping to spread the news about the arrests and persecutions and to erode the xenophobic encirclement. Numerous sympathizers of the “movement” of 1966–1967 who had begun to “feel foreign” in Soviet society began to seek an exit not only from the ideological utopia, but also from the Soviet Union itself. From 1970 onward, the possibility of such an exit existed in the form of the so-called Jewish immigration.

Reform communism was dead in Russian Soviet society, yet miraculously it survived in the party apparatus. It continued to exist among intellectuals and “enlightened” party members in the Russian provinces and among the tiny group of “enlightened” party apparatchiks in Moscow. The very fact that the Prague Spring (as well as the earlier Moscow Spring) was aborted helped those people to live with their illusions. This meant that, if the democratic reforms had been allowed to proceed instead of being brutally crushed, they would have attracted mass support and created preconditions for the peaceful transformation of the Soviet system.

Inspired by this scenario, two decades later in 1988–1989, Mikhail Gorbachev decided to repeat the Prague Spring in the Soviet Union. The dismal failure of this attempt was overdetermined by a host of economic, financial, and social-political factors. It proved, once and for all, that there was no possibility for a “third way” in the Soviet or Central European countries for societies to develop without the authoritarian state. The abolition of censorship, cultural liberalization, and political democratization produced an avalanche that swept aside the artificial elitist constructions of reform communism. Then as before in Russian society, reform Communists lacked any genuine base even among the elites, not to mention Russian society at large. Very quickly, the discourse of “democratic socialism” practiced by Gorbachev lost its mass support among educated Russians and even in the Russian segment of the Communist Party. Shattered by the revelations of Gorbachev’s glasnost in 1986–1989, Russian nationalism underwent a remarkable transformation: it rejected the vision of Stalin’s empire and embraced the prospect of Russia’s independence from this empire. This transformation is not the subject of this article. Still, it demonstrated the transitional and illusory nature of the ideas and values that had inspired the Moscow Thaw and the shestidesyatniki in the years preceding 1968.

NOTES

1. “Dva tisíce slov,” Literarni listy, 27 June 1968, reproduced in Jaromír Navrátil, ed., The Prague Spring 1968 (Budapest: CEU, 1998), 177–81.

2. Aleksandr Tvardovsky, “Rabochie tetradi,” Znamia 9 (2003): 142–43, 149.

3. Amir Weiner, “Déjà vu All Over Again: Prague Spring, Romanian Summer, and Soviet Autumn on the Soviet Western Frontier,” Contemporary European History 15, no. 2 (2006): 159–94; Mark Kramer, “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 (March 1998).

4. Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

5. Susanne Schattenberg, “‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’? How the Secret Speech Was Translated into Everyday Life,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2006), 64–79.

6. S. D. Rozhdestvensky, “Materiali k istorii samodeiatel’nikh politicheskikh ob’edinenii v SSSR posle 1945 goda,” Pamyat’: Istoricheskii sbornik, Vypusk 5 (Moscow: IMCA, 1981–1982), 231–33; interview of Tatiana Kosinova with Lev Krasnopevtsev, 10 August 1992, the Archive of Memorial Society, Moscow.

7. Katerina Gerasimova, “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment,” in Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies, ed. Gabor Rittersporn et al. (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2003); Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 174–86.

8. Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).

9. Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Anna Eremeeva, Rossiyskie uchyonye v usloviyakh sotsial’no-politicheskikh transformatsiii XX veka (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 2006), 137–49.

10. Emily Lygo, “The Need for New Voices: Writers’ Union Policy towards Young Writers, 1953–1964,” and Susan E. Reid, “Modernizing Socialist Realism in the Khrushchev Thaw: the Struggle for a ‘Contemporary Style’ in Soviet Art,” in Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, 193–230.

11. On the transformations and contested meanings of the intelligentsia in Soviet Russia see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1920–1925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Boris Uspensky, “Russkaya intelligentsia kak spetsificheskii fenomen russkoy kul’turi,” in Etyudi o russkoy istorii (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2002); D. S. Likhachev, ed., Russkaya intelligentsia: Istoriya i sud’ba (Moscow: Nauka, 1999).

12. Znamya 7 (2000): 136.

13. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Bodalsya Telenok s Dubom: Ocherki literaturnoy zhizni (Paris: IMKA, 1975), 63; the diary of Communa-33, TsADKM, f. 193, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 91–92.

14. Kornei Chukovsky on 19 November 1962 in his Dnevnik 1930–1969 (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1994), 328; Lidia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoy, vol. 2 (Paris: YMCA, 1976), 536–57, 552, 556, 560–62.

15. Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 83–84.

16. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 582, 590–95; Rabichev, “Manezh 1962,” 132; Andreĭ Voznesensky, Proza (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 190–91; Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Fekhtovanie s navoznoy kuchey,” Volchii pasport (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 196.

17. On the spirit of the 1960s as the ephemeral search for the Third Way, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), chaps. 11–12.

18. David Samoilov, Podennye zapisi (Moscow: Vremia, 2002), 1, 268. Soviet Society in the 1960s 99

19. Anatoly Smeliansky, The Russian Theater after Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24–29.

20. Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 73.

21. Vladimir Kozlov and Sergei Mironenko, eds., Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 1953–1982 gg. (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 125; Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, kniga 1 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 84.

22. Vera Sandomirsky-Dunham’s recollections during her meeting with the author, Washington, DC, 3 October 1999.

23. Recollection of Rada Adzhubei, in Pressa v obshchestve, 18; Aleksei Adzhubey, Krushenie illyuzii (Moscow: Izd-vo SP “Interbuk,” 1991), 205.

24. For an explanation of this phenomenon, see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

25. Vassily Aksyonov, “TsPKO im. Ginzburga,” Moskovskie Novosti, 8 August 2002.

26. Vladimir Shlapentokh, Strakh i druzhba v nashem totalitarnom proshlom (St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 2003), 132.

27. On the role of the intelligentsia as a generator of nationalism and the special inhibitions operative in the Russian case, see Nathaniel Knight, “Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in Post-Emancipation Russia,” Kritika 7, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 733–58. On the nationalist trends among Russian intellectuals, see Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaya partiya: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR 1953–1985 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003); Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 345–52.

28. S. V. Volkov, Intellektualnyi sloi v sovetskom obshchestve (Moscow: Fond Razvitie, 1999), 30–31, 126–27.

29. Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited, 23; L. G. Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia (London, Routledge, 1973), 9.

30. The role of Tvardovsky and Novy Mir in the 1960s remains contested in Russian publications to this day. See, for example, Yuri Burtin, “O Staliniste Tvardovskom, kotoryi terpel i molchal,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 April 2000; Regina Romanova, Alexandr Tvardovsky: Trudy i dni (Moscow: Vodolei, 2006); E. Vysochina, ed., A. Tvardovsky, M. Gefter: XX vek, Gologrammy poeta i istorika (Moscow: Novii khronograf, 2005).

31. Vladimir Shlapentokh, Strakh i druzhba v nashem totalitarnom proshlom (St. Petersburg: Zvezda, 2003), 169–74; physicist Arseny Berezin to the author, interview in Washington, DC, 15 November 2000.

32. Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 172; also see Malin notes in A. A. Fursenko, ed., Prezidium TsK. 1954–1964. Chernovyie protokol’nyie zapisi zasedanyi. Stenogrammi. Postanovleniya, vol. 1 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), 865; and Rudolf Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz: Istoriya Vlasti, 1945–1991 (Moscow: RAGS, 1998), 283.

33. KGB to the CC CPSU, 3 March 1965, RGANI f. 5, op. 30. 462. ll. 19–22.

34. On Soviet economic debates, see Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and the Seeds of Soviet Reform: The Debates of the 1960s (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 134–35; Pekka Sutela, Socialism, Planning, and Optimality: A Study in Soviet Economic Thought (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1984). On the role of cybernetics, see Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Boston: MIT Press, 2002); Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

35. Roy Medvedev, “Dissidenty o dissidentstve,” Znamya-plus (1997/1998): 171; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Obrazovantshina,” in Iz-pod glyb (Paris: YMCA, 1974) and reprinted in Likhachev, Russkaya Intelligentsia, 136.

36. Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

37. Report of Martin Schtigler, “The Youth of the Soviet Union,” 14th Conference of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, Munich, 1962, 70, the Open Society Archive, Budapest, The Collection of “The Red Archive,” Box 497; Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy (London: Longman, 2003), 97.

38. An American journalist wrote in October 1968 that most signers of collective letters (podpisanty) were from Moscow. In terms of professions, the group’s composition was as follows: thirty-four civil engineers, twenty-four physicist-mathematicians, twenty-two philologists, twenty writers, seventeen mathematicians, seventeen teachers, fifteen scientific researchers, thirteen undergraduate students, ten literary critics, ten historians, nine editors, nine graduate students, eight physicists, eight philosophers, seven economists, seven translators, seven linguists, and six art critics, among others. The only sizable group outside the capital included the scientists from the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. Paul A. Smith Jr., “Protest in Moscow,” Foreign Affairs (October 1968).

39. Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals, 174.

40. B. A. Grushin, Chetyre Zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniya. Epokha Brezhneva (1) (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2003), 29–30.

41. John Scott’s speech for the NYU Radio Liberty Conference, “On Communication with Soviet Youth, 10 March 1967,” The Open Society Archive, Budapest, 300/80, Box 496.

42. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniya, 101–15; KGB to the CC CPSU, 5 November 1968, Istoricheskii arkhiv 1 (1994): 175–207.

43. Jeremi Suri, “The Promise and Failure of ‘Developed Socialism,’” Contemporary European History 15, no. 2 (2006).

44. Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982), 48–51.

45. More details in English, Russia and the Idea of the West, 70–72. 46. Aleksandr Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’. Vospominaniya (Moscow: Zakharov, 2003), 180–84; Nikolai Shmelev, “Curriculum vitae,” Znamya-plus (1997–1998): 112. 47. Shmelev, “Curriculum vitae,” 112.

48. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, 189.

49. Mikhail Agursky, Pepel Klaasa (Jerusalem: URA, 1988), 328.

50. Vladimir Lukin, “Tanki na zakate leta,” Literaturnaya Gazeta, 18 August 1993; English, Russia and the Idea of the West, 110–11.

51. Arkady Vaksberg, Moya zhizn’ v zhizni, vol. 1 (Moscow: Terra Sport, 2000), 342, 391, 397.

52. Maya Turovskaya to the author, 25 June 2000, Moscow; also Tony Judt, Postwar, 421.

53. Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom (New York: Norton, 1968).

54. Yevtushenko, Volchii passport, 299–301.

55. Weiner, “Déjà Vue All Over Again,” 181; Augursky, Pepel Klaasa, 329; A. Alexandrov to the CC CPSU, 3 July 1969, in V. I. Fomin, Kino i Vlast’. Sovetskoe kino—1965–1985 godi. Dokumenti. Svidetel’stva. Razmyshleniya (Moscow: Materik, 1996), 337–42.

56. Recollections of Natalia Gorbanevskaya, “Chto pomniu ia o demonstratsii,” Prava Cheloveka v Rossii, http://www.hro.org/editions/karta/nr21/demonstr.htm (accessed 13 July 2008).

57. Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, vol. 1 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 117–19, 157–59.

58. See English, Russia and the Idea of the West, 111.

59. Yevtushenko, Volchii passport, 299–301.

60. Igor Dedkov, “Kak trudno dayutsia inye dni!—Iz dnevnikovikh zapisey1953–1974 godov,” Novyi Mir 5 (1996): 144; Information from Vladimir Pechatnov, MGIMO student in 1968, 11 November 2006; Weiner, “Déjà Vu All Over Again,” 190.

61. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:119.

62. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:157–59.

63. G. S. Batygin, ed., Rossiiskaya sotsiologiya shestidesiatykh godov v vospominaniyakh i dokumentakh (St. Petersburg: Russkii khristianskii gumanitarnii institut, 1999), 398; Smeliansky, The Russian Theater after Stalin, 29–30.

64. Dmitry Furman, “Perestroika glazami moskovskogo gumanitariya,” in Proriv k svobode. O perestroyke dvadtsat’ let spustia (kriticheskiy analiz), ed. Boris Kuvaldin (Moscow: Alpina Biznes Buks, 2005), 316–19.

You will understand that we had no choice.

The forty years that separate us from the Czechoslovak crisis in 1968 is, historically speaking, a relatively short time span for historians to arrive at a balanced analysis of those events and to publish both the key facts and the relevant details that are needed for a comprehensive historical reconstruction of the “Prague Spring.” This kind of reconstruction has, in part, been made possible by archives in the countries of the former Socialist system becoming accessible and above all by the possibility of doing research on documents of the supreme organ, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which ceased to exist in 1991.¹ Archival material that has become available for the first time only during the last few years has been the basis for studying the most diverse aspects of the Prague Spring, notably the political processes that were played out among the top ranks of the Soviet leadership and that ultimately resulted in the military invasion of the independent “fraternal state.”

What is of supreme interest in the present context, in addition to drafts of resolutions and other documents that served as the basis for forthcoming announcements, are resolutions of the Politburo of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU, the de facto, though not the de jure, highest organ in the system of the Soviet party and the Soviet state. An analysis of these documents enhances our understanding of how the mixing of political ingredients was actually performed and of what mechanisms were at work in decision making with regard to the Czechoslovak crisis. Obviously, quite a few of the decisions that were to prove final were made on the spur of the moment during actual Politburo meetings. However, as a rule these meetings served for the rubberstamping of documents that had been elaborated in advance and had already met with all-round approval. It was an exception for these documents to be returned to the sender for further elaboration, and it was even more unusual for them to be rejected altogether. In cases where discussions flared up in the Politburo and issues were hotly contested—the atmosphere in the meetings encouraged speeches which were often emotional rather than coolly rational in character—participants’ role in the meeting was to demonstrate agreement with the leading figures of the party hierarchy. The final editing of the documents then took place in calmer waters, and the politician in charge of putting the final touches to the draft had the opportunity and, above all, the leisure to weigh carefully all the pros and cons and to come up with a result that was as finely honed for the purpose as possible. The many instances in which Soviet leaders returned to drafts of documents again and again to introduce major changes to texts that had already been edited by their own hand before are all cases in point.

The materials of the Politburo of the CC CPSU from the months before the invasion can be grouped as belonging to four different stages, by means of which it is possible to trace the change of heart on the part of the Soviet leadership with regard to the “Czechoslovak problem.”

THE PERCEPTION OF THE PRAGUE SPRING BY THE POLITBURO OF THE CC CPSU

In what may be considered the first stage, January and February 1968, relative calm was observed in Moscow vis-à-vis developments in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR). Activities were limited to noting that the situation in the country was difficult and contradictory and to attempting to “give support” to the Czechoslovak leadership, be it in political, economic, or military/technical terms.²

The beginning of the second stage can be dated to March 1968 when a far-reaching review of the Soviet position took place with regard to SovietCzechoslovak relations. Prior to this date, it had been the resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s (CCKSČ) presidium to abolish censorship in Czechoslovakia that had been the greatest cause for worry for the USSR; now, at the beginning of spring, the incipient mass dismissal of “preselected” functionaries at the medium and lower levels, for which the free press was largely responsible, rattled Moscow.³ It did so all the more since all attempts by the USSR to obtain from the Czechoslovak leadership an assessment of the situation had produced no solid result so far. What Prague transmitted to Moscow was reassuring announcements that everything was under control. At the same time, members of the presidium of the CC of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) were making statements in their speeches to huge audiences that diametrically contradicted this.

The first signal that might have alerted observers to the fact that Moscow had moved beyond the stage of carefully monitoring developments in the ČSSR and was now beginning to nurse grave misgivings was a letter of the ČSSR CPSU to the KSČ leadership, which was discussed in the Politburo meeting of the CC CPSU on 15 March. The draft of the letter, prepared by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and the then head of the CC Department for Relations with Communist Parties in Socialist Countries and the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was drastically revised.⁴ The revision resulted in underscoring the two key theses: anticommunist forces were trying to establish a capitalist system in Czechoslovakia, and the Western countries were trying to drive a wedge between the members of the Warsaw Pact by dragging “free” Czechoslovakia off to join NATO. Formulations that appeared to take matters to extremes (such as statements like “While you are coasting along in the wake of the reactionaries, Fascism is rearing its head in Germany”⁵) were ultimately left out, yet the overhauled document was still quite harsh in comparison to the first version.

On the same day, three letters of the Ministry of Defense to the Czechoslovak leadership were discussed in the Presidium session. The topics of these missives were the visit of a delegation of the Political Administration of the Red Army and the Navy, command-staff exercises to be conducted by the armies of Warsaw Pact countries on the territory of Czechoslovakia, and an invitation to the USSR of a Czechoslovak military delegation.⁶ Three days later, it was decided that only the last letter was actually going to be forwarded to Prague; a brief note attached to this resolution states that “the missives regarding the command-staff exercises and the Soviet military delegation’s visit to the ČSSR… have not been dispatched on account of the ongoing changes in the leadership of the ČSSR.”⁷ The changes mentioned here apparently referred to the enforced resignation of Antonín Novotný from the post of president of the ČSSR. This development caused great ill feeling among Soviet leaders, for only two months earlier, when Novotný had had to vacate the post of general secretary of the CC KSČ to accommodate Alexander Dubček, both Novotný himself and Moscow had been given assurances that Novotný would be safe in his post as president of the state under any circumstances. It does not come as a surprise therefore that, given the latest twist, the Soviet leadership felt downright betrayed by the new KSČ leaders.⁸

It has to be borne in mind that the general secretary of the CC CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev, was caught in a most precarious dilemma at that stage. Through his trip to Prague in December 1967, when the “endless plenum” of the CC KSČ was in session there, he de facto gave a hand up to the leader of the “new wave,” Dubček; afterwards, feeling responsible for his protégé, he constantly tried to defend and protect him. Even within the Socialist camp, he singled out Dubček for special support. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Communist takeover of power (the “Victory of the Czechoslovak Working Class” in February 1948),⁹ for instance, it was none other than Brezhnev who insisted that the Eastern European countries dispatch their highest ranking party delegations to Prague.¹⁰ At the same time, the majority of members of the CC CPSU felt intensely uncomfortable about the new KSČ leader right from the start. He was criticized for his indecisiveness, for the constant concessions he made to rightist forces, for his weak interpretation of Marxism, and so forth. This criticism hurt Brezhnev as well, if indirectly, and he was compelled at a later stage, when the misgivings of the Soviet leaders concerning Dubček increasingly turned out to be justified, to prove to all and sundry that he had supported “Sasha”¹¹ only until the latter began, through his activities (or the lack thereof), to jeopardize the “achievements of socialism” in Czechoslovakia.¹²

If there were differences of opinion in the Politburo of the CC CPSU regarding developments in Czechoslovakia, these did not go beyond what was usual in discussions. They most certainly did not amount to a split of the Soviet leadership into a “liberal Western” and an “internationalist Leninist” camp, as is sometimes asserted in the literature, notably in Western literature. A comparable split of the CPSU leadership (into “conservatives” and “revisionists”) occurred much later. At the time being discussed in this chapter, the positions held by the Soviet leaders were determined in many ways by their personal perception of the Czechoslovak crisis; their perception was, in turn, shaped by the amount of information to which they had access, by their own political experience, and by the position they occupied in the hierarchies of party and state. The imperative calls to “reestablish order” in Czechoslovakia articulated by the defense minister of the USSR, Andrei Grechko, and by Petro Shelest, a Politburo member, are easy enough to understand as justified, given their point of view. The former worried about weakening the defensive potential of the Warsaw Pact on the one hand and, on the other, about a possible “depropagandization” of the soldiers of the Czechoslovak People’s Army which might result, should the “Day X” dawn, in former “brothers in arms” turning into a military power bent on active resistance.¹³ Shelest, who was also the general secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, feared that the “Czechoslovak contagion” might spread to his republic, particularly to its western regions. The positions of other Soviet leaders were not quite as clear cut and were occasionally modified in one direction or another, dependent on circumstances.

Mikhail Latysh in particular comes to the conclusion, in the light of the interviews he conducted and recorded at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s with people who had inside knowledge of the apparatus of the CC CPSU—namely Vadim Zagladin, Ivan Udal’tsov, and Aleksandr Bovin—that the Soviet prime minister, Aleksei Kosygin, always considered rather “weak” in the West, maintained, in fact, a “consistently rigorous” attitude toward both the ideas of the Prague Spring and the majority of the Czechoslovak political leaders associated with it.¹⁴

On the one hand, this view might well be true. What commends it, for example, is the CC CPSU missive of 15 March mentioned above. Kosygin’s comments on the draft of this resolution were by far the most rigorous and the least inclined to compromise.¹⁵ On the other hand, it must be remembered that on his return from Karlovy Vary, where he was said “to be taking the waters,”¹⁶ the same Kosygin gave a very moderate assessment of the situation in the ČSSR;¹⁷ later, he tried repeatedly—and urged his colleagues in the part leadership to do the same—to come up with an answer to the most difficult of questions, namely: “So, having marched our troops into Czechoslovakia, what do we do next?”¹⁸ He was raising the issue of an exit strategy.

Differences in the assessment of the situation in the ČSSR and of the extent of a potential interference in its internal affairs were to be observed not only in the higher reaches of the political hierarchy. The Pravda correspondent Aleksei Lukovets, who had spent the month of May in Prague, reported on serious differences of opinion within the Soviet embassy in Prague on the “crisis in the country.” Even though Ambassador Stepan Chervonenko favored, according to the journalist’s reports, an objective assessment and warned against mistakenly equating the KSČ’s line with the opinions of isolated individuals, the embassy’s minister, Udal’tsov, insisted that the only proper course to take was rigorously to criticize all developments in the country, including the line taken by the leadership of the CC KSČ and continued to dispatch notably negative reports to Moscow.¹⁹ It was obvious that Udal’tsov’s course was in alignment with that of the Kremlin hardliners. It must, however, be borne in mind that the information issuing from the embassy nevertheless contributed, whether by design or otherwise, to the assessment the Soviet leadership formed of the Czechoslovak crisis.

The Kremlin’s frantic search for solutions to the “Czechoslovak problem” and the ambivalent positions of the Soviet leaders with regard to this issue become apparent from the genesis of another Politburo resolution. This resolution concerns the preparation of an information communiqué for Communist Party leaders in a number of Eastern European countries on the results of Kosygin’s visit to Karlovy Vary. The original draft was again subjected to several rather drastic revisions (not all of which were subsequently incorporated into the final text). The contradictory nature of those that were incorporated imparts an air of incompleteness and ambivalence to the final result.

Among the proposals was the inclusion of several lengthy passages (the so-called expanded version of the missive), which contained a more detailed description of the situation in the ČSSR and in the KSČ leadership and was designed to illustrate the salient points of the developments by means of concrete examples.²⁰ One of the sponsors of this variant was the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Nikolai Podgornyi, who had been Shelest’s predecessor as party leader of Ukraine. The following points of his variants are particularly noteworthy, even though they were not included in the final document. First, more emphasis was put on the understanding Dubček and the other Czechoslovak leaders showed for the situation that had developed in the ČSSR. Secondly, it repeated the urgent request voiced by leading figures in the KSČ and addressed to the CPSU and the other fraternal parties “not to take any steps that might speculatively be exploited by the enemies of socialism to undermine the authority of the present KSČ leadership and of the ČSSR and that might give comfort within Czechoslovakia to tendencies hostile to fraternal countries and parties.”²¹ All this was left out in the final version of the document.

In what was arguably a first, doubts were expressed openly in the resolution as to the capability of the KSČ leadership and of the ČSSR “to rally the healthy forces around them, take the initiative into their own hands and strike back at the intrigues of the counterrevolution.”²² The final version of the document, which was ultimately dispatched to the leaders of those countries that were soon to participate in the invasion, referred to the fact that it was impossible to say with certainty whether the ČSSR leadership was capable, if the need arose, to take “decisive action, including the use of force, for instance, by workers’ militias.”²³ Yet in the preparatory stage of the document, part of the Politburo successfully advocated the inclusion of an additional formulation of proposals to assist the KSČ and the ČSSR that would readily be understood by everyone, including “an alternative type of help that might become necessary if events take a negative turn.”²⁴

Evident from the documents are the shifts in the Soviet leaders’ position regarding the possibilities and capabilities of the so-called healthy forces in the Czechoslovak leadership to keep the situation under control. At the beginning of 1968, the KSČ leadership is perceived in the Soviet documents as a monolithic force engaged in the struggle against the class enemy’s “hostile” and “antisocialist” intrigues. In a next stage, particularly after the mass dismissal of party leaders of the old guard, which was implemented under the motto of “new politics with new people,” a terminology is promptly at hand in the Kremlin for the groups to which the Czechoslovak leaders are supposed to belong: “the rightists,” “the indecisive,” and “the healthy forces.” Even Dubček was counted among the “indecisive” more and more often, even if it was impossible for the USSR to discount his enormous popularity in the party and in the country. This was also the reason why there was little else that could be done in the existing situation than regularly and insistently to tell Dubček to be guided by the judgment of the “healthy forces” within the KSČ leadership, to rely on them, and so forth. It was noted in Moscow with growing unease that these “healthy forces” were getting steadily fewer and weaker. One of the alterations that Brezhnev undertook in the above-mentioned resolution “On the Results of Kosygin’s Visit to the ČSSR” may look insignificant at first sight, yet it is, in fact, extremely telling in this context. In the sentence “The majority of the KSČ and the ČSSR leaders make noticeable efforts to consolidate the healthy forces around them,” the general secretary substituted the phrase “part of” for “the majority.”²⁵ The resolution was passed with this alteration. It is obvious that the Soviet head of state was motivated in this by the information he had received from Czechoslovakia (and above all by what Kosygin’s visit had netted). This amounted to a virtual acceptance of the fact that the “healthy forces” in the Czechoslovak leadership were no longer in the majority and had, in fact, lost control of the situation.

That the situation in the ČSSR dominated Soviet foreign policy in the summer of 1968 can be inferred from the steadily growing number of CC decisions and resolutions revolving around the Czechoslovak problem. From May onward, issues related to Czechoslovakia were on the agenda of Politburo sessions at least once a week and sometimes more often. During the same period, a special commission was called into being by a Politburo decision and charged with the task “of dealing with questions concerning Czechoslovakia in an operative manner and to submit, when called upon to do so, their proposals in the CC CPSU.”²⁶ The amount of information reaching the CC from a number of different organizations and from Soviet individuals who were either permanently residing in the ČSSR or visited the country in an official capacity (delegations of party officials, representatives of twin towns, scientists, artists, and so forth) rose steadily.

As regards the analysis of decisions and resolutions on Czechoslovakia that were hammered out and adopted in Politburo sessions, it is necessary to underscore several characteristic peculiarities. There was above all the tendency to adopt a more cautious and moderate attitude in assessing the situation. CC documents dating from spring 1968 mostly tended to assume a more demanding, threatening tone in the final version compared to their original draft. At times, one gets the impression that Moscow was ready every day to use military force. The beginning of summer saw a complete reversal of this situation. Much confrontational language was either deleted from the drafts altogether or at least toned down. This was all the more remarkable because the situation in the ČSSR deteriorated steadily in the eyes of the leading Soviet figures themselves! This can be explained, in part, by Moscow worrying it was exposing itself to charges of exerting “excessive pressure” on Prague. In addition to this, the Soviet leadership, which was well aware of the complexity of the situation, was still trying to get Dubček to “re-establish order in the country of his own free will,” as he had already repeatedly promised.

In Politburo documents dating from this phase, other, more general common characteristics are to be found. First, all the numerous references were deleted from almost all final versions of resolutions pertaining to “rightists” in Czechoslovakia rallying under the banners of the struggle against the “legacy of the personality cult,” the “dominance of the conservative party nomenclature,” and so forth. Secondly, care was taken not to conjure up facile associations by avoiding in the documents all kinds of comparison of the situation in the ČSSR with the events in Hungary twelve years earlier. On the other hand, in drafts of Politburo resolutions as well as in analyses of the Czechoslovak crisis within the framework of the Warsaw Pact and even in speeches before Soviet audiences (for instance in Brezhnev’s speech in the plenum of the CC CPSU on 17 July), such comparisons were openly made.²⁷

At the same time, the unmistakable parallels inevitably influenced the Soviet leaders in elaborating and adopting resolutions on Czechoslovakia. Andropov, who had been the Soviet ambassador to Budapest in 1956 and had witnessed the Hungarian Revolution on the spot, said as late as March 1968 that “the methods and forms that were being applied in Czechoslovakia, were strongly reminiscent of the Hungarian ones…. In Hungary things also started to get moving in this way.”²⁸ In addition to broad similarities in terms of the general situation (economic problems, a precipitous decline in the authority of the Communist Party, demands for changes in the political system, the revitalization of diverse political clubs and civic associations, strongly marked anti-Soviet and anticommunist tendencies in the mass media), there were less obvious correspondences, which might have escaped an outside observer, but did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin. Just as in the summer of 1956, when Moscow was driven by the fear “to betray its principles and show weakness” and did everything in its power to keep the Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi in power, so now the USSR was just as desperate (and equally unsuccessful!) in keeping Novotný at least in the post of the Czechoslovak president. In 1956, the future Hungarian Communist Party leader János Kádár rose in the eyes of the Kremlin within a few months from a “right-wing opportunist” to a “dedicated Marxist-Leninist”; in Czechoslovakia twelve years later, Gustáv Husák, who had been classified as “politically suspect” only a short while, before quickly accumulated bonus points in the assessment of the Soviet leaders, who were casting around for an acceptable candidate to replace Dubček. Another similarity, if a coincidental one, is the fact that in both cases Poland played a role in the initial stages.²⁹ There was one more detail which was deeply embarrassing for the USSR under the existing circumstances, namely the tenth anniversary of the execution in the summer of 1958 of Imre Nagy—his face one of the emblems of the Hungarian Revolution. The Czechoslovak “free press” commemorated this event with an openly anticommunist article, which caused great indignation in Moscow. An explanation was immediately supplied by Dubček.³⁰

There were, however, also basic differences between events in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia. This is particularly noticeable in the attitudes of the leading Soviet figures, most of whom were working hard to avoid a solution that involved the use of force. Moscow realized that however much cause the USSR might have to complain to the world about the intrigues of imperialism and Western plots against Socialist Czechoslovakia, “reestablishing order” in the Eastern Bloc through the use of military means was only going to give the world at large one more reason to doubt the viability and the progressive character of socialism. This is presumably why the military maneuver of the Warsaw Pact countries, which were conducted on Czechoslovak territory in June 1968, did not escalate into a military intervention, despite the fears (or conversely, the expectations) harbored by many. Not even the delay in the evacuation from Czechoslovakia of the Soviet troops after the maneuver, which was immediately branded as “massive meddling in the internal affairs of the ČSSR” by the country’s press, was directly related to the invasion, the preparations for which had already been completed.³¹

By the standards of the Hungarian revolutionaries, the Czechoslovak reformers proceeded with extreme caution and circumspection, for the simple reason that they, too, feared a replay of the events in Hungary. They also had many more possibilities for maneuvering and for accomplishing the tasks they had set themselves one by one. In Hungary, Rákosi was succeeded by András Hegedu“s (who actually pursued the same course as his predecessor), and the reformer Nagy did not take over as head of state until the revolution was already underway. By contrast, Dubček assumed power in Czechoslovakia straightaway; there were no intermediaries, even though candidates for the part might have been found among Novotný’s supporters, such as Josef Lenárt, Bohumír Lomski, or other top functionaries.

Yet it was precisely this evolutionary development of events which seemed most ominous to the Soviet nomenclature and almost automatically spurred them into decisive action. Fear was rife in the USSR that one might fail to notice—and preempt—that moment when Czechoslovakia would metamorphose into a bourgeois, democratic country with all the baleful consequences for the Socialist camp. There was, of course, the additional prospect that a restoration of the capitalist system was not going to be accomplished without bloodshed; in Moscow, there was even talk of the danger of a civil war in Czechoslovakia. Whatever the scenario, it was reasonable to assume that military intervention under the rapidly changing circumstances would take a great toll, both in human lives and in political and economic terms. The fear of “delaying the re-establishment of order” until it was too late, on the one hand, and the blatant difference between the bloody uprising of the people in Budapest in October 1956 and peaceful Prague in July 1968, on the other, created a situation that made it extremely difficult for Moscow to explain even to its most stalwart supporters its reasons for what looked from outside like a totally inadequate reaction to the developments in the ČSSR.

To an extent, Dubček himself also contributed to the invasion in that his constant promises of an imminent improvement in the situation (which never materialized) caused the number of Soviet leaders who advocated the use of force to solve the problem to grow. Dubček even gave specific dates. First the promise was made that sweeping changes for the better would occur after the “April plenum” of the CC KSČ, which was going to give the green light to the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s “Action Program.” In Moscow, some felt the “program” had several flaws, yet given the circumstances, it was not reasonable to expect that anything better could be cobbled together. This “program” was never realized. At the end of May, Dubček gave a new pledge to Kosygin that the forthcoming plenum was going to make all the difference. The resolutions that were going to be adopted by it would bring about a drastically altered situation and enable the KSČ leader at long last to take an “offensive line.”³² The plenum came, the plenum went, and things continued the same as before. The same scenario was played out again at the next plenum, on which Dubček had also pinned the hope that it was going to make a change. It was, therefore, no coincidence that there was no one left in Moscow who still gave credence to the assurances of the Czechoslovak party leader that the forthcoming 14th Party Conference of the KSČ was going to bring the “breakthrough.” To be precise, it was the other way round. A commonly held belief in the USSR was that this party conference would prove “decisive,” but not in the sense Dubček meant. The belief had taken hold that this party forum was going to yield the result that the Czechoslovak party leader and his supporters were ousted from power, that the KSČ would end up demoralized and in a shambles for good, and that power would be seized by “reactionary” forces. It was a deeply apprehensive Brezhnev who voiced these concerns and who remarked that “a way out of the present impasse could also be the elimination of all the present members of the Presidium of the CC KSČ from the party leadership.”³³

Any discussion of the demands and claims that Moscow addressed to Prague must underscore the fact that issues connected to reforms of the ČSSR’s economy always took second place, even though Ota Šik’s reforms were clearly angled at a market economy. In part, this may have been due to the Soviet leadership’s deeply held conviction that these reforms were doomed to early failure—price rises, soaring rates of unemployment, and other side effects of such reforms would necessarily, in the Kremlin’s rationale, trigger vociferous protest among the majority of Czechoslovakia’s population, particularly among the working class. This assessment was compounded by an assumption that was widely shared in the Soviet Union and in the other East European countries—namely that the actual economic situation in the ČSSR was not as bleak as the Czechoslovak leadership as well as the “rightist forces” chose to paint it. The leader of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED), Walter Ulbricht, went so far as to assume that the ČSSR’s regular pleas directed at the USSR for economic and financial aid were no more than moves in the great political game the Czechoslovak leadership was playing and had one sole objective: in case the request was turned down by the USSR, the ČSSR would “have no choice” but to turn to the West for help.³⁴

On the other hand, such problems as free mass media and a possible shift in the political system of ČSSR which would include the creation of a multiparty system, featured prominently in Soviet party documents. It may be said that the Kremlin was panic-stricken at the idea of the Czechoslovak society losing its ideological focus, a process signaled, in the eyes of the Politburo members, by the stirrings of the Czechoslovak Social Democrats. It was feared in Moscow at first that once the Social Democrats returned to the political stage, they would develop into a major player capable of toppling the Communists, seizing power, and guiding the country to the “bourgeois fold.” However, as events unfolded the danger increased that the KSČ itself was doomed for a de facto disintegration and that part of it was going to become the basis for the newly emergent social democracy. This was a development that had to be prevented by the USSR at all costs. Since a comparable scenario was within the bounds of probability at the 24th Party Conference of the KSČ, which was scheduled for autumn, the very fact that this party forum was drawing near, particularly when seen in conjunction with the ambivalence of the policies of the KSČ leadership, was one of the reasons for the ultimate fatal twist in this saga.

One of the virtually insoluble problems was that Czechoslovakia’s mass media had been freed from the constraints of censorship in January 1968. Originally, the USSR had even been prepared to accept a measure of Czechoslovak glasnost until the consistent one-sidedness of what was happening became evident.³⁵ The pendulum abruptly changed direction. In the past, it had been impossible to circumvent the control of the party and get into print negative reports on the CPSU, the KSČ, Soviet-Czechoslovak relations, and so forth. Now it was almost equally impossible to find any positive reports in the Czechoslovak mass media on any of these topics. In the USSR, statesmen noted with rising indignation that in the Czechoslovak mass media “all Communists” were automatically tagged as conservative; that “Communists who had become the target of public criticism and vilification had no possibility of defending their point of view,” simply because papers would not accept their statements for publication; and that “there was no freedom of information” any longer in Czechoslovakia, only “freedom for political thuggery and the complete and utter defenselessness of those who were methodically victimized by the press.”³⁶

Such grievances may sound strange, particularly when uttered by political leaders who had been using similar and even more drastic methods in the struggle with their political opponents for decades. Nevertheless, it was the activities of the Czechoslovak mass media that irked the Soviet leadership the most, and in the last resort, they provided one of the most important impulses for the USSR’s decision in favor of armed intervention. Both in Moscow and in Prague, people knew only too well what a crucial role the Czechoslovak mass media and the propaganda spread by them was playing in the situation as it actually existed. This was also why a compromise in this area was improbable from the start. Even in the earliest stages of the military operation Soviet leaders claimed repeatedly that Prague was rife with underground radio stations (“One radio station has its neck twisted; another one takes its place”), and Soviet troops encountered the first major resistance precisely when they were about to take the radio and TV center in Prague.³⁷

Ultimately the main charge that was leveled at the KSČ’s leadership was one of utter helplessness and ineptitude (or a lack of inclination) when confronted with the task of reestablishing control of the country. Moscow did what it could to alert Dubček to the fact that many local party organizations either ignored or contravened the resolutions of the presidium of the CC; that members of the presidium kept on announcing in public the most contradictory political principles; and that the KSČ leadership did not muster the resistance that was required—not even when socialism and the party itself were targeted. One of these attacks—the opposition manifesto of the “2,000 Words,” which the Czechoslovak leadership again failed to rebuff adequately in the Kremlin’s opinion—became in many ways the point of no return in Soviet-Czechoslovak relations and marks the beginning of the third stage.

This stage is marked by the fact that the majority of Soviet leaders had come to the conclusion that a military intervention was inevitable. Moscow’s final running out of patience can be reconstructed in detail from the discussion and elaboration of the following memorandum of the CC CPSU to the CC KSČ (particularly on the occasion of the manifesto of the “2,000 Words”) as well as from the steps that Soviet leadership took immediately afterwards.

The first draft of the memorandum as well as the outlines for the meeting between the Soviet ambassador and Dubček at Brezhnev’s behest were prepared by Mikhail Suslov, Boris Ponomaryov, and Konstantin Rusakov and presented to the members and candidate members of the Politburo of the CC CPSU on 29 June 1968.³⁸ The prepared document did not satisfy the majority of the Soviet leadership despite the harshness of a number of formulations. Comments and suggestions poured in from all sides whose common denominator was a hardening of the Soviet position and demanding from the Czechoslovak leaders decisive and, above all, immediate, action.³⁹ Even from faraway Uzbekistan, a cable arrived from first secretary of the Communist Party of that republic containing similar demands.⁴⁰ The arguably weightiest proposals came from Aleksandr Shelepin, who not only demanded finalizing an agreement with the CC KSČ that would cover all the details but a redraft of the entire text of the document,⁴¹ for he considered it “pointless” to dispatch the original version, given the fact “that we have already spoken on more than one occasion with [the KSČ leaders] along the selfsame lines contained in the memorandum that has now been forwarded to the comrades in the Politburo.”⁴²

After a number of alterations the document wound up being discussed in a session of the Poliburo for two days, on 2 and 3 July, and it took several rounds of voting for it to be passed by the leaders of the CPSU.⁴³ The resolution was fairly nonpartisan in tone, despite the fact that not nearly all proposals put forward by some in the Soviet leadership were incorporated into the final text. For instance, a passage claiming that the CPSU “was sympathetic to the resolutions of the latest plenum of the CC KSČ, which were aimed at streamlining administrative procedures and methods and at speeding up progress along the road of Socialism,” was deleted from the original version. After the statement that “rightist forces had no support among the broad mass of the workers” the warning was inserted that, the situation being what it was, this “did not mean they might not be successful after all”; this warning had been missing in the first draft.⁴⁴ In some cases, compromise variants carried the day. The draft of the missive spoke of “many” Czechoslovak mass media outlets that were controlled by elements hostile to the party. The hardliners wanted to substitute “nearly all” for “many”; the final version has the more moderate phrase “the most important mass media.”⁴⁵

At the same time, open attacks on the KSČ group of leaders gained no traction, and grave accusations, which charged them, among other things, with cowardice and apathy, were dropped. In an attempt not to cause emotions to flare, passages such as “We are firmly convinced that openly anti-Communist assaults of reactionary elements are literally possible any day” were left out of the text. At the end of the session, Shelepin’s proposal to dispatch Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgornyi to the ČSSR as soon as possible so that they could form their own impression of the situation fell through.⁴⁶ In its place, a resolution was adopted in the Politburo to forward the memorandum to the party Action Committee, to dispatch copies to the party leaders of Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and to organize a meeting of the party leaders of these countries, to which representatives of the ČSSR would also be invited.⁴⁷

Of the greatest importance was editing the key paragraph of the memorandum where the final version has a passage saying that the KSČ’s leaders could always count on “help as required” from the CPSU and the Soviet government.⁴⁸ In the original version, this phrase had a much blander ring:

These editorial changes and corrections may not look spectacular at first sight if it were not for a huge “but”: they may be unspectacular, but every word that was added or deleted affected the fates of thousands of people and of entire nations. Therefore, a whole week passed from the first appearance of the missive to its final dispatch.

The CPSU informed its own party Action Committee and the Soviet public of developments in Czechoslovakia in “open” and “secret” letters and in the plenum of the CC CPSU; the same purpose was served as regards the USSR’s close allies in the Warsaw Pact—the GDR, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria—through regular meetings devoted to this topic.⁵⁰ The results of these discussions usually had a profound effect on the activities of the Soviet Union. At first these meetings of the allies included the ČSSR, as in Dresden in March 1968, where the KSČ leaders were confronted for the first time with critical questions on developments in their country and on the future course the party proposed to adopt. Their efforts notwithstanding, the participants of the meeting did not manage to extract conclusive answers from either Dubček or his colleagues, nor were the Soviet leaders any more successful at a bilateral meeting with a KSČ delegation, which had come to Moscow at the beginning of May. This was obviously the reason why no Czechoslovak representatives were invited to the Moscow conference of the party leaders of the five East European Communist parties which was scheduled for 8 May. The conference itself was entirely given over to a discussion of the situation in the ČSSR. The prevailing tone was a relatively agitated one: all speakers mentioned the activation of antisocialist forces in the ČSSR, the feebleness and haplessness of the KSČ leadership, the targeted discrediting of Socialist ideas, and so forth.⁵¹ Nevertheless, the Soviet leaders succeeded in persuading the participants of the conference to refrain “for the time being from launching wholesale attacks on the KSČ leadership,” in the hope that the “healthy forces” in the ČSSR might ride to the rescue (with, perhaps, the planned military maneuvers of the Warsaw Pact countries on Czechoslovak territory to encourage them). Brezhnev, who presumably did not consider this scenario realistic, expressed his opinion that “we will have to meet again, perhaps several times, to sort these matters out.” He underscored the “readiness on our part to fly wherever is necessary, be it day or night, we can be on the spot in a matter of two to three hours, however busy we are.”⁵²

The fact that no representatives of the ČSSR had been invited to attend the conference caused considerable irritation in Prague; Moscow had to justify its decision and set out to prove that the participants “had no secrets they did not want to share with the KSČ” and that the agenda had consisted exclusively of issues that had already featured at the meeting of the heads of state of the two countries in the USSR not long before. The Soviets also pointed out that “another visit of the Czechoslovak leaders in Moscow within such a short time” might have given rise “to any number of interpretations and speculations about presumptive ‘difficulties’ in the relations between the CPSU and the other fraternal countries, on the one hand, and the KSČ, on the other.”⁵³ When the Soviet Union proposed a meeting in July in Warsaw, the KSČ leaders declined the invitation, knowing only too well what would be in store for them there. They proposed to hold a number of bilateral meetings instead, involving the leaders of the “fraternal parties” (notably those of the CPSU). The reason they gave for not accepting the invitation to Warsaw was that “at that time, attending a meeting would overly exacerbate the work load on our party.”⁵⁴ The KSČ letter containing the negative reply was not dispatched until 13 July. At that time, the delegation of all parties had already arrived in Warsaw. For this reason, the draft of a reply was written on the spot in Poland by Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgornyi, and Shelest. The party apparatus back in Moscow was given the order “to vote on the resolution, to adopt it, and to dispatch it to the indicated address.”⁵⁵

The way the leadership of the ČSSR acted played directly into the hands of the hawks in the Kremlin. This state of affairs was further compounded by the fact that Brezhnev was presumably the only one among the Soviet participants of the meeting in Warsaw to still pursue a moderate course. The party leaders of Poland and Bulgaria, Władysław Gomułka and Todor Zhivkov—and even more the GDR’s Walter Ulbricht—only poured oil onto the fire. They all emphatically advocated a military intervention. The latter had already classified Dubček as “a basket case” during the Moscow meeting in May;⁵⁶ in Warsaw, he declared with a sideswipe at Kádár that the KSČ and the ČSSR was no longer about a struggle with the revisionists (as the Hungarian leader had claimed), but about fighting the counterrevolution and asserted that “the next blow will be directed against you, against the Hungarian People’s Republic.”⁵⁷ Even though no groundbreaking resolutions were officially adopted at the conference⁵⁸ and the leaders of the CPSU declared they were prepared to hold another bilateral meeting with the ČSSR leadership, the distant thunder of the imminent military operation was sounding for everyone to hear. When Kádár told the story of how Dubček and Černik had burst into tears in the middle of a discussion with him about the party and the country’s situation, not even Brezhnev could help remarking mordantly, “They are always bursting into tears!”⁵⁹

At the beginning of July, with the CC CPSU still busy putting the final touches on the abovementioned letter to the CC KSČ, another missive was dispatched from Berlin to Prague, where, as opposed to the Soviet variant, the readiness of the GDR was openly offered “to support all your resolutions and measures according to the obligations that member states of the Warsaw Pact are bound by in the spirit of Socialist internationalism.”⁶⁰

In this context, the Warsaw Conference became for Moscow the next indispensable step in the preparations for the military operation, which were visibly gaining in momentum. Only a day after the end of the conference, on 17 July, the plenum of the CC CPSU was convened in order to rubberstamp the imminent intervention. The extremely short notice at which this important party forum was convened is also in evidence in the composition of the participants: it was hardly due to the holiday season that twenty CC members, thirty-one candidate members, and ten members of the Central Revision Committee failed to turn up—they simply could not make it to Moscow in time.⁶¹ Most of those who were present wanted to move from words to deeds and signaled agreement with launching a military operation against Czechoslovakia.⁶² At the same time, remembering his promise to conduct one more bilateral meeting with the KSČ leadership, Brezhnev underscored both in his speech and in his closing remarks that “before extreme measures are taken, we will exhaust, together with the fraternal parties, all political means at our disposal to assist the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the Czechoslovak people in keeping and defending the achievements of Socialism.”⁶³

This promise, however, did not impede the buildup of preparations for the military operation. On 19 July, the Politburo began the planning of the “extreme measures,” which took a week to complete. On 20 July, the government of the USSR sent a note to the government of the ČSSR to protest against the criticism that had been voiced in Czechoslovakia with reference to the “Warsaw Letter” as well as against negligent security at Czechoslovakia’s border with Austria. This was a threat to the security of the entire Socialist camp.⁶⁴ On 22 July, Defense Minister Andrei Grechko was given the permission, apropos developments in Czechoslovakia, “to take measures in accordance with planning dates and the exchange of opinions in the session of the Politburo.” It goes without saying what “measures” were meant; after all, at the same time documents were being prepared in Moscow that were later claimed to have been authored by the future ČSSR leadership, which was to replace the one presently in power according to Soviet planning. On 20 July, a first version of a Declaration of the Presidium of the CC KSČ and the Revolutionary Government of the ČSSR on the country’s domestic and foreign politics was prepared, which was followed by the second version and a speech to the Czechoslovak people on 26 July.⁶⁵ On the following day, 27 July, the Politburo rubberstamped the speeches to the Soviet people and to the Czechoslovak People’s Army.⁶⁶ All these documents had to be published once the invasion of Czechoslovakia began.

At this stage, the world at large, both foes and friends, had to be prepared for what lay ahead. Dealing with the foes was the easier task, as is frequently the case. The United States was tied down in Vietnam and was hoping the USSR would act as an intermediary between the parties. On 22 July, Secretary of State Dean Rusk expressed to the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatolii Dobrynin, the U.S. government’s concern with “the increasingly serious Soviet accusations that the U.S. was meddling in Czechoslovak affairs.” On the very next day, the CC CPSU confirmed it was drafting a resolution to acknowledge Rusk’s statement “that developments in Czechoslovakia concerned solely the Czechs and the other Warsaw Pact countries”;⁶⁷ this statement was of the greatest importance for the Soviets, as it virtually gave them the green light for their planned moves in Czechoslovakia.

Moscow found dealing with its own allies much more difficult. The publication in Pravda of the letter the five parties had addressed from Warsaw to the CC KSČ on 18 July was the CPSU party leaders’ attempt to mobilize “the Communist community in all countries to support this important document.”⁶⁸ Not only did Romania and Yugoslavia express open sympathies, but there were also Communist parties in capitalist countries that warned of a potential interference in the affairs of the ČSSR and/or that exhibited “no awareness of how critical the situation was and what consequences might arise from it,”⁶⁹ as the Soviet leadership put it. The Communist parties of Italy and France proved particularly recalcitrant. Italian Communist Party (PCI) leader Luigi Longo opined that the KSČ must be left to follow “the road of the purges” to the end and then had to start “from scratch.” Without consulting the CPSU, the French wanted to convene a conference of the European Communist and workers’ parties on developments in Czechoslovakia.⁷⁰ Such a conference was, of course, impossible to reconcile with USSR planning, which was already in the middle of the preparations for the military operation. The Soviet leadership had to expend a great deal of time and energy in order to get the leaders of the CPI⁷¹ and the representatives of the other “procrastinating” Communist parties to “understand” their view of the developments in Czechoslovakia.⁷²

There is one more important detail in this phase that must not go unmentioned. In the second half of July, the resolutions that were passed by the CC CPSU in connection with Czechoslovakia came to acquire an increasingly laconic tone. It was not just words or phrases that were deleted in the original drafts, but whole sentences, entire paragraphs. Such strict editing can certainly not be accounted for merely on the grounds that these documents were written under great pressure. Because it was a foregone conclusion that the situation would lead to military intervention, Moscow began to doctor the documents and to remove passages that could either be interpreted as proof of the USSR’s readiness to use military force or, conversely, as proof of the USSR committing itself to exclusively using peaceful means for the solution of the crisis.⁷³

On 19 July, when the Politburo briefed the ambassadors of the USSR to inform the leaderships of thirty-three Communist parties on events in Czechoslovakia and the results of the conference in Warsaw, the following phrase was removed from the document at the very last moment: “Make sure you leave no doubt that if the situation exacerbates any further, the CC CPSU will be prepared alongside the other fraternal parties, who took part in the meeting in Warsaw, to take the most drastic measures to defend the position of Socialism in the ČSSR.”⁷⁴ Despite the fact that the USSR had lost all belief in Dubček and the entire KSČ leadership’s capacity to take any constructive course of action, preparations were underway in Moscow for another meeting. Almost the entire leadership of the CPSU traveled to Čierná nad Tisou at the Czechoslovak side’s request, but not without laying down a number of conditions for the Czechoslovaks: communiqués for the press would be given after the meeting, not before; the stenographic minutes of the negotiations would be recorded separately by each of the two sides; no audio taping of the negotiations would occur; and no gatherings, demonstrations, or journalists near the conference facilities would be permitted.⁷⁵ No sooner were the conditions published than the other side violated them. On 26 July, the Soviet leadership learned that Western correspondents accredited in the ČSSR knew where the meeting was going to take place and were preparing to be there. It took an exchange of telegrams and the threat to break off negotiations for the Czechs to regain control of the situation again.⁷⁶ The Kremlin’s expectations regarding the potential result of the negotiations are most clearly seen in a letter that the Politburo of the CC CPSU dispatched on the eve of the conference, on 27 July, to its four main allies. It stated that the members of the Soviet delegation “were going to aim at ending” the meeting in Čierná nad Tisou no later than 30 July and to issue an invitation for the afternoon of the same day to the participants of the meeting in Warsaw to Moscow to inform them of the results of the negotiations and to discuss with them “the options on how to proceed.”⁷⁷ It is probable that the Kremlin assumed that the negotiations with the KSČ leadership would end without results as usual and that there was no point in spending time on talks that led nowhere. It is also not difficult to imagine what “options on how to proceed” would have resulted from the discussion with the allies in case the negotiations had ended in an impasse.⁷⁸

Yet against all odds, the meeting turned out prima facie to be a success and went on not for a matter of hours, but for three days. Afterward, the participants went to Bratislava, where they were joined by the remaining participants of the Warsaw meeting. In Bratislava, a joint declaration of the six Communist parties was accepted on 3 August that was intended, despite its formulaic phrases, to speak to the unity of the countries in the Socialist camp and the readiness of the Czechoslovak leadership to adhere to the line of the Soviet Bloc. The basis for the successful conclusion of the negotiations had been the unofficial and rested upon unpublished assurances of the KSČ leadership during talks of teams of two and eight in Čierná nad Tisou.⁷⁹ In these assurances, the KSČ leadership committed themselves to ensuring that the presidium of the CC KSČ would establish strict control in the very near future of the mass media and would prevent anti-Soviet and antisocialist material from being published; that the activities of various clubs and organization, including the Social Democratic preparatory committee, would be suppressed; that the Interior Ministry would be reorganized; and, most important of all, that the representatives of “rightist” forces would be removed from positions of power.⁸⁰ When Moscow deferred so much to its negotiating partners, it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that Dubček might be making all these promises off the cuff, without the slightest clue about how or when to keep them.⁸¹ At this stage, at least part of the Politburo of the CC CPSU considered the problem at least partly, if not wholly, solved. This was why the question of a military intervention moved to the background for the time being. The majority of the Soviet leadership went off on their holiday, and Moscow viewed the 21 and 22 August requests made by U.S. presidential candidate Richard Nixon during his tour of Europe positively. In the end this visit did not occur.⁸²

The “euphoria” occasioned by the results of the negotiations in Čierná nad Tisou and Bratislava disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. Despite the promises that had been made by the Czechoslovak side, hardly any changes became noticeable in the political life of the ČSSR. Not only did anti-Soviet materials not disappear from the Czechoslovak mass media, they became even more aggressive in tone. Nor did the changes in the party cadres materialize. In the run-up to two sessions of the presidium of the CC KSČ, Dubček told Soviet representatives that he was going to solve this issue; when the sessions began, it was not even on the agenda. The KSČ leadership reacted to all Soviet protests and notes with the same nervousness and agitation and with the repetition of the assurance that everything that was possible was, in fact, being done.⁸³

The straw that finally broke the camel’s back for Moscow was Brezhnev’s telephone conversation with Dubček on 13 August.⁸⁴ When the Soviet leader peremptorily insisted on the enforcement of the agreements made at Čierná nad Tisou, Dubček gave evasive answers and kept on claiming that the situation within the country had changed and that it was impossible to come up with instantaneous answers to all the important questions. What he had promised to accomplish within a matter of days was now adjourned to a relatively distant future (“September,” “the end of October”). Even more worrying for the Soviet leaders than the time delays was above all the fact that, as opposed to his assurances at Čierná nad Tisou, Dubček was no longer prepared to guarantee that the promised resolutions were going to materialize at all (“pending the decision of the presidium”). What clinched matters for Brezhnev was the fact that Dubček, who was already confused and a complete wreck owing to the pressure from all sides, mentioned during the telephone conversation his readiness to concur with his own dismissal.⁸⁵ This amounted to an admission that he was unable or unwilling (or possibly both) to lead the presidium of the CC KSČ. In this case, all his commitments proved to be no more than “idle talk” since the Kremlin knew only too well what kind of forces would gain power within the KSČ leadership if Dubček were to resign either of his own free will or under pressure. Dubček, who when all is said turns out to have been a very weak political leader, notably in the difficult transition phase the country was experiencing, contributed a great deal to those forces in the “fraternal countries” who had pleaded for a military solution of the “Czechoslovak question” from the beginning finally gaining the upper hand. The Czechoslovak leader kept on repeating either thoughtlessly or dispiritedly the phrase: “Take whatever measures the Politburo of the CC deems necessary.” De facto Dubček was asking for himself and his country to be handed down the “sentence” on 13 August.⁸⁶

It is obvious that Soviet leadership, the majority of whom were on holiday in the Crimea, came to the final conclusions two days after the telephone conversation outlined above that it was now time to embark on the military phase of the solution. This marks the beginning of the fourth and last phase.⁸⁷ Until 15 August, all the documents and Politburo materials remained within the bounds of the agreements that had been reached in the negotiations with the KSČ. The Politburo, for instance, passed a relatively moderate conclusion on 13 August informing the fraternal parties on the results of the negotiations in Čierná nad Tisou and Bratislava,⁸⁸ which underscored both the success of the meetings and the problems, whose solution now depended solely on the Czechoslovak leadership.⁸⁹ The text was prepared on 10 August; Brezhnev signed it on the twelfth, Kosygin on 13 August. On the same day, the Politburo of the CC CPSU approved the guidelines for the Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Chervonenko, regarding his conversation with Dubček and Černik on the antisocialist and anti-Soviet campaign in the Czechoslovak press—the tone was tough, but not threatening.⁹⁰ The ambassador was also told to meet President Svoboda, to thank him, and to ask him for his continued assistance in the struggle against rightist forces.⁹¹

Up to the middle of August, the Politburo’s Commission on Czechoslovakia, which had been put together in May, was busy preparing documents and motions for the session of the Politburo on 15 August. The material included a “Summary of the Material on the Situation in Czechoslovakia of 13 August”⁹² as well as the draft of an official memorandum of the Politburo to the Presidium of the CC KSČ, which was rendered more aggressive on 15 August by the insertion of several new demands and an assessment of the latest telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Dubček. It was this very memorandum that subsequently became one of the most important propaganda tools regarding the military intervention.

The fact that the situation changed decisively on 15 August is also vindicated by other clues and documents. After the situation in the ČSSR had been discussed by the inner circle of Politburo members in the Crimea, where most of them were on holiday anyway, a telegram in cipher arrived on the same day from Yalta in Moscow signed by Brezhnev that was to be relayed by Ambassador Chervonenko in Prague to Dubček.⁹³ However, the cipher telegram contained the directive: “Do not relay to Prague before receiving explicit orders to do so.” It was, therefore, held back in Moscow until further notice. The telegram was addressed to Andrei Kirilenko, who was not only “responsible” for the Commission on Czechoslovakia but had also stayed in Moscow during the summer holiday season as the highest ranking Politburo member to do so. On the following day, 16 August, another variant of the document contained in the cipher telegram which was virtually identical with the first one but had now obviously been put to the vote was sent from Yalta to Moscow, this time addressed to Konstantin Chernenko.⁹⁴ At the same time, an edited version of the above mentioned Politburo memorandum to the Presidium of the CC KSČ of 15 August arrived from Yalta, which was kept in Moscow. Brezhnev’s letter to Dubček was rubberstamped regarding the text and relayed to Prague without further delay.

Brezhnev’s letter contained an informative note to the Soviet ambassador which requested him to inform as many members of the CC KSČ as possible who were still considered “healthy forces” by Moscow of the letter and its contents. Because the letter repeated virtually everything that had been said in the telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Dubček on 13 August and because it contained reproaches to Dubček for not keeping his promises, we may assume that it was a move in the political game, namely the opening gambit in a solution of the ČSSR crisis involving the use of force. The “healthy forces” were supposed to inform the KSČ leaders, on the one hand, that Dubček was conducting negotiations with Moscow behind their back—it was obvious that the KSČ leader did not nearly inform even his close collaborators about everything. On the other hand, this was a clear signal to the “healthy forces” that the moment which many of them had been dreaming about and whose advent some had urged the Soviet leadership to move toward was drawing near.⁹⁵

For the world at large, the impending intervention became obvious at the latest when Moscow requested UN Secretary-General U Thant on 16 August to postpone his visit to Prague; the visit was designed to calm the situation down and at least cause a delay of whatever action Moscow was planning. The reasoning behind the secretary-general’s trip to Prague, which had been arranged on a short-term basis as an excursion during his stay in Vienna, where he took part in a conference, was that it was extremely unlikely for a serious confrontation to erupt during U Thant’s presence in Prague. The hint from Moscow, which was delivered by UN Ambassador Leonid Kutakov, was outspoken enough; U Thant was asked to rethink once more “all aspects of this question” lest he should “find himself in a difficult situation against his will.”⁹⁶ U Thant saw the light.

At the same time, on 16 August, the top Soviet leadership convened a “big meeting” in Moscow. On 17 August, all members and all candidate members of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, as well as the party leaders of some of the Union’s republics who hardly ever took part in sessions in Moscow, assembled. The preparations for the military operation were propelled by a keen sense of purpose, which did not prevent small stumbling blocks from making a nuisance of themselves. What occurred at the time was the rare case of a Politburo resolution that had already been signed (the “signed version”) having to be annulled; even Brezhnev’s signature had to be crossed out again! The stumbling block took the form of a passage of a text dealing with convening a conference which would involve the party and state leaders of the USSR, Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR and Poland on 18 August in Moscow. The purpose of the meeting as stated in that first version was the discussion of the “topical issue.” This formulation was replaced forthwith⁹⁷ by another equally soft one typical of the Soviet party apparatus:⁹⁸ the idea of the meeting was “to discuss questions related to joint actions to provide assistance to the Communist Party and the government of Czechoslovakia in their struggle against reactionary and counterrevolutionary forces.”⁹⁹ The participants of the Warsaw Conference, who had come to Moscow within a few hours, ratified the resolution that had already been passed a long time before on participation in the joint military intervention, even though they needed more time for the detailed formulation in individual documents on which the five countries had agreed; Kádár’s last additions were not inserted until the afternoon of 19 August.

Materials were fetched from party safes that had already been prepared around 20 July. Some alterations were made in these materials which had become necessary in view of the changed situation. At Suslov’s suggestion, the word “revolutionary” was deleted from the title of the prepared declaration to be delivered by the “Revolutionary Government of the ČSSR”; in the address of the declaration of the five interventionist countries (“Comrades, workers, agricultural laborers, intelligentsia of the people; Czechs and Slovaks, fighters of the people’s militia, members of the Communist Party”), the mention of the members of the Communist Party was eliminated. After consulting its allies in the Interventionist Coalition on the topic, the CPSU leadership provided an answer to the question who inside the ČSSR was to be named as allegedly having requested the five countries to undertake a military intervention in the name of protecting the achievements of socialism—from the end of July up to (and including) 18 August several blank lines had marked the place for the insertion of this piece of information.¹⁰⁰ The government of the ČSSR was named as the party responsible for this, even though some documents also contain references to the “majority of the Presidium of the CC KSČ.”¹⁰¹

Finally, the story of the memorandum that the CC CPSU addressed to the CC KSČ, which had already been written on 15 August, reached closure. Even before it had been delivered to its addressee, it was reedited several times and shuttled around within a few days along the route Moscow–Yalta–Moscow–Prague–Moscow–Prague. The circuitous detour of the document resulted from the fact that, after the text of the memorandum had been finally approved at the Politburo session on 17 August and dispatched to Chervonenko for him to hand it to Dubček, problems surfaced in Prague concerning the document. The Soviet ambassador, having consulted a representative of the “healthy forces” in the Presidium of the CC KSČ, immediately sent back his assessment of the text of the memorandum to Moscow. On the one hand, he suggested several sweeping changes; on the other, he advised handing the document to KSČ leadership not on 18 August (the date specified in the resolution of the CC CPSU), but on 19 August.¹⁰² The ostensible reason given for this change was that 18 August was a Sunday, and it would have been difficult to find any KSČ leader who was on duty. The real reason was that both Chervonenko and the “healthy forces” wanted to reduce the time span between the presentation of the memorandum and the beginning of the invasion as much as possible. An indirect corroboration of this assumption derives from the phrase that

This resulted in the memorandum being returned to Moscow once more and not getting back to Prague until after last alterations had been made.

The activities in the phase of rising tension in the Politburo of the CC CPSU immediately before the beginning of the invasion are characterized by two divergent tendencies. On the one hand, the need to react in operative terms to even the smallest changes in the run-up to the military operation resulted in several resolutions being noted down, as it were, almost on a haphazard basis by a handful of people in pencil on note paper.¹⁰⁴ On the other hand, the most important resolutions were passed immediately in sessions of the Politburo of the CC CPSU by the entire Soviet leadership. Even more remarkable is the fact that even the second names are given in the materials of the CC of those who were directly involved in the formulation of one or the other resolution. As far as the situation that existed at the time is concerned, it is possible to witness a rare picture regarding the Soviet party nomenclature. As regards the most important resolutions, the roll-call of individuals participating in the sessions of the Politburo was almost identical with the roll-call of those who had prepared the resolution. This might of course be interpreted as the realization of the principle of “collective leadership,” to which Soviet leaders loved to pay lip service, yet it actually makes a more forceful case for the interpretation that what the CPSU leadership desired was the establishment of a kind of “joint liability,” a collective responsibility for the dramatic and politically dubious decisions.

Regardless of all the efforts and the careful preparation of the “military/political operation,” the invasion as a whole did not unfold the way the Kremlin had planned it or the way the Soviet leaders would afterwards make the world believe it had unfolded. While the military component unfolded on the whole without a hitch, the political side was anything but satisfactory. Above all, a total fiasco occurred at the beginning of the operation when the “healthy forces” who, not content with being unable to gain control of the country and the party, became pariahs themselves, and had to be shielded and protected.¹⁰⁵ This was obviously linked to the inevitable political “reanimation” of Dubček and his entourage, who were whisked from Uzhgorod, where they were de facto under arrest, to Moscow for negotiations. In the eyes of the Soviets who wanted to restore order in the country with the help of Czechs and Slovaks, there was at the moment no one apart from Dubček who seemed capable of keeping the country in the Soviet camp, even if the name of an alternative candidate had been put forward who commanded a following in the party. During the time that it took to find such a candidate (the choice was soon to fall on the Slovak politician Gustáv Husák), it was not only necessary to keep Dubček in power, but also to make sure he was taking orders from Moscow. This was to be guaranteed by the allied troops stationed in Czechoslovakia and by Dubček’s assurances that, after the debacle of Čierná nad Tisou, they were going to be put down in writing in every single case. We may assume that it was thanks to the ineptitude of the “healthy forces” that proved unable to assume power that Dubček was spared the fate of Rákosi, Nikos Zachariadis, or even Imre Nagy.¹⁰⁶

Another failure for Moscow was the attempt to persuade the president of the ČSSR, Svoboda, to play an active role on its side. Chervonenko had familiarized him with the Politburo missive explaining the inevitability of a military invasion only an hour before the operation began. The Soviet ambassador had also been ordered, should Svoboda “be positively inclined toward the request of the fraternal states,” to hand him—“with the tact that the situation requires”—a draft composed in Moscow of the president’s address to the Czechoslovak people.¹⁰⁷ It is impossible to tell whether the Soviet Union seriously believed that a man of Svoboda’s caliber would consent to such a step. As was to be expected, the attempt failed. Even though the president of the ČSSR took an active part in the ensuing “negotiations” in Moscow and did everything in his power to defuse the situation, it was plain for the USSR to see that he was not positively inclined to what was happening.

The party leaders of the five Socialist countries had clearly misjudged the domestic situation in Czechoslovakia and its development following the invasion, and they openly admitted as much at the meeting in Moscow on 24 August. The intervention had a unifying effect on Czechoslovak society, albeit in an antisocialist and anti-Soviet direction. Under these circumstances, not only the remains of the “healthy forces” but also each ordinary citizen who did not agree with the political line of the KSČ leadership were automatically dubbed “traitors to their native country” and “Moscow’s agents.” Dubček, Černík, and Smrkovský, who had only shortly before been attacked both from the “Right” and from the “Left” were elevated to “national heroes and martyrs for ‘the Idea.’” The troops of the Interventionist Coalition, who had been told prior to the invasion they were being given marching orders at the request of the new state leadership of the ČSSR and of the whole Czechoslovak people found themselves in a situation that was more than ambiguous. There was no new (revolutionary or national) government that had requested military assistance, the Extraordinary 24th Party Conference of the KSČ that had been convened demanded the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from the territory of the ČSSR, and the majority of the country’s population regarded the foreign military contingents as occupants, not as defenders of socialism.

It is instructive in this context to compare two meetings of the countries participating in the “military-political operation” that took place in Moscow within six days—one three days before the invasion, the other three days after it. On 18 August, the participants were reasonably optimistic in their assessment of the impending operations. Brezhnev pointed out that the “healthy forces” had already united, that they had already demonstrated “unity,” and that they were “ready for a decisive battle with the right.”¹⁰⁸ By way of corroboration, details of Chervonenko’s latest negotiations with representatives of the “healthy forces” within the KSČ leadership were shared as were their plans for the following days. In addition to this, a letter was read out that a group of leaders of the Slovak Communist Party had handed to Brezhnev already in Bratislava asking for a military invasion. All the other participants at the meeting voiced unanimous agreement with the Soviet leaders, with the sole exception of Gomułka, who tried to make the point that a great deal was going to depend on the domestic situation in the ČSSR: “What the Czechoslovak comrades and the forces on the left will say is of the greatest importance.”¹⁰⁹

The mood was an entirely different one at the consultations on 24 August, when it had become obvious that much of what Moscow had been banking on was simply not going to materialize. In addition to the assessment that the “healthy forces” were failing to deliver (“A number of them took refuge in the embassy and were, therefore, unable to lead propaganda activities,” “They got scared,” and so forth)—the participants vied with each other in assuring each other that the operation had been justified and inevitable in the prevailing circumstances.¹¹⁰ Brezhnev tried to convince the allies that the unavoidable negotiations with the interned KSČ leadership did not mean that the USSR did not adhere to the decisions previously jointly adopted.¹¹¹ The most controversial issue was how to inform the Czechoslovak public and the world about these negotiations.

Propaganda work during the military invasion was not successful either. In Eastern European countries as well as in the ČSSR, neither the secret agreements struck in Čierná and Bratislava were mentioned, nor was anything about the leaders of the KSČ sabotaging these agreements. It was, therefore, extremely difficult to explain to the world—and above all to the Czechoslovak people—the reasons that had necessitated the invasion only two weeks after the “successful conclusion of negotiations.” Such explanations became downright impossible in the wake of the invasion for two reasons. First, all the ČSSR’s mass media outlets were in the hands of “rightists”; second, given the outburst of national patriotism that took hold of the public after the invasion, no one would listen to arguments justifying the aggression, no matter how weighty they might have been.

The allies, who had pinned their hopes on the “healthy forces” in the ČSSR, had in addition to all this failed to establish propaganda cadres and to prepare high-quality materials in the Czech and Slovak languages for distribution virtually within hours after the invasion.¹¹² It was not until 23 August (that is, two days after the invasion) that the hurriedly edited text of the “Address to the Citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic” in Czech and Slovak was dispatched to Czechoslovakia from Moscow.¹¹³ Access to information for the population of the Socialist countries was also almost nonexistent. In the West, events in Czechoslovakia dominated the headlines, trumping all other news; in the Warsaw Pact countries, citizens were fed the news in tiny doses encrypted in official propagandese. Many critical questions were simply ignored altogether.¹¹⁴

A Kremlin analysis of the military operation that was done three months later confirmed that the advance of the troops on Czechoslovak territory took place during the first days in a “propaganda vacuum”; the first leaflets in Czech did not appear until the fifth or sixth day of the occupation, there were no special papers for the occasion, no radio or TV commentaries, and so forth. In Moscow it was conceded, if through clenched teeth, that it had been this “absence of propaganda” in conjunction with the active, goaloriented activities of “rightist forces” that resulted in the latter de facto securing the lion’s share of the Czechoslovaks’ sympathy. Soviet troops, according to a Soviet assessment, could act at the beginning of the invasion “with the support and the understanding of roughly 50 to 60 percent of the population”; after the first week, between 75 to 90 percent of the population saw the invasion as an “occupation.”¹¹⁵ It is not surprising that this author did not entertain at least for a moment the possibility that such a massive rejection of the “military-political operation” could have been caused by the national humiliation that had been inflicted on the Czechoslovak people, which was a fact that was not altered by the noble goals that the occupiers claimed to be pursuing. There was a conviction instead that there was a “lesson to be learned for the future” from the events in Czechoslovakia, for imperialism would not desist from its attempts “to use these same means to reverse to its advantage developments in the socialist countries.”¹¹⁶

This last statement was by no means coincidental. Within the Soviet leadership not the least doubts surfaced as to the justification and the timing of the “military-political operation” either in the summer of 1968 or in later years. The differences of opinion that did exist did not concern questions of principle, but mainly such issues as the pacing and the methods of “regulation” of the Czechoslovak crisis between August 1968 and April 1969, a phase in which Dubček and his comrades-in-arms attempted to keep some elements of their former political line alive. This conviction of the Soviet leaders cannot be explained in terms of their conservative mind-sets or their open fear of an impending collapse of the Soviet camp. A significant role in this concrete case must be assigned to the factors of the Cold War and the bipolar world order. The Brezhnev Doctrine as well as the Sonnenfeld Doctrine, which both concern the definition of the spheres of influence of the two superpowers and which were not frequently cited officially but often applied in practice were most strongly in evidence during the Czechoslovak crisis in the summer of 1968.

The knowledge and analysis of the declassified documents relating to the ČSSR crisis in the context of the time enables us to correct several theses, which have been formulated in recent years regarding the Czechoslovak crisis, including in particular claims to the effect that events in Czechoslovakia are said to have established the impossibility, in principle, of reforming the Socialist system.¹¹⁷ This also applies to the thesis which sees Dubček as not only engaged in building some kind of a “Utopian society,” but also as someone who was a notoriously more orthodox Marxist in the Socialist sense of the nineteenth century than the Soviet leaders themselves.¹¹⁸ It is quite obvious that both postulates are in need of a certain amount of refinement.

As far as the impossibility of reforming the Socialist system is concerned—it is a fact that all attempted reforms either ushered in Soviet tanks or a complete switch to a capitalist system—one must not lose sight of the fact that this concerned a Soviet variant of the Socialist system of which, to use a contemporary metaphor from genetics, a cloned copy was installed in most Eastern European countries involving the use of force. Even Vladimir Lenin admitted repeatedly that there was a huge difference between the proletarian revolution of Marxist theory and what had emerged as a result of the Russian Revolution. All subsequent statements which claimed that the road chosen by the USSR was the one and only model to be followed, as well as the fact that the “progressive” Soviet experiences were forced on the other countries, were the sole responsibility of the Soviet party functionaries and ideologues. The result was the inevitable isolation of the Soviet model of communism in most “people’s democracies”—in our concrete case, in Czechoslovakia. This, in turn, led to the impossibility of reforming the inadequacies of this model.

Painting Dubček in the role as the last of the Marxist-Leninists is hardly borne out by the facts. In order to get to the top in a Communist Party of the Leninist-Stalinist persuasion, which the KSČ was beyond a shadow of a doubt, one had to have character attributes and capabilities that are entirely incompatible with the “heroic figure” of a fighter against Soviet totalitarianism. If there is talk of struggles within the KSČ leadership, it must not be overlooked that even those who passed in the Soviet Union for “rightists” were as much representatives of the party nomenclature as their “leftist” or “conservative” opponents. Many of their activities would inevitably conform with those rules of the game that had originally been defined by the circles of the party apparatchiks. Even if they came up with nice mottos featuring “democratic socialism” or “socialism with a human face,” they themselves had hardly a clue how socialism was to be humanized in practice without running afoul of a communism that was prepared to resort to the use of violence.

This is why the positive action program of the Czechoslovak reformers was confined in a number of ways to mere words and promises that defied realization in practice. Their sole use was to fan in the population negative emotions directed against those that “hindered” Czechoslovakia in the process of becoming really free and independent—that is, against the USSR, the CPSU, the orthodox faction within the KSČ, and the Slovak nationalists. These external factors, the hotbed from which sprang newspaper headlines, rallies, and demonstrations, worried the Soviet leadership much more and prompted them much more strongly to take aggressive action than the contradictory processes unfolding subliminally inside the Czechoslovak society. Without even a hint of absolving the USSR and the other four countries that became guilty of crass interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state from their responsibility, one can assume with an increasing degree of certainty that it was also the shortsighted and ill-considered acts of the Czechoslovak reformers, that is, of those in the party elite of the KSČ on the extreme “right,” that contributed to the absolutely inadequate, if at the time seemingly inevitable, form that the reaction of the USSR and of the other member countries of the Warsaw Pact culminated in: military invasion.

NOTES

Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.

1. It is owing to this development that over the last few years a large number of documents have been published and many studies have been written which either address the history of the Czechoslovak crisis directly or treat the topic within another context. For details, see Mark Kramer, “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: New Interpretations, Part 1,” CWIHP Bulletin 2 (1992): 1, 4–13, and “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: New Interpretations, Part 2,” CWIHP Bulletin 3 (1993): 2–13, 54–55. See also R. G. Pikhoya, “Chechoslovakiya, 1968 god,” Novaya i novejshaya istoriya 6 (1994), 1 (1995); Lutz Priess et al., eds., Die SED und der “Prager Frühling” 1968: Politik gegen einen “Sozialismus mit menschlichem Antlitz” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996); Mikhail Latysh, “Prazhskaya vesna” 1968 g. i reaktsija Kremlya (Moscow: Moskva, 1998); R. G. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 1945–1991 (Moscow and Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf, 1998); Jaromir Navrátil et al., eds., The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998); Mark Kramer, ed., “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968, Part 1, New Evidence from the Diary of Petro Shelest,” CWIHP Bulletin 10 (1998); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Frank Umbach, Das rote Bündnis: Entwicklung und Zerfall des Warsaw Pact, 1955 bis 1991 (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2005); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

2. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 145, pp. 7–8, 12, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, “Questions Concerning Czechoslovakia,” 25 January 1968; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 146, pp. 4, 29–30, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, “On Functions in Connection with Dubček Visiting the USSR,” 29 January 1968; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 151, pp. 2–12, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, “Questions Concerning GKES, the Gosplan of the USSR and the USSR Defense Ministry.” Attachment: resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, “Über die technische Zusammenarbeit der Tschechoslowakei und Polens in der Organisation von Infanteriemaschinen und über den Ankauf solcher Maschinen für die Sowjetunion in der Tschechoslowakei.” Attachment nos. 1, 2, 3 to the resolution of the Council of Ministers, 21 February 1968.

3. The attitude of reformist members of the Czechoslovak leadership is illustrated by a statement made by M. Tokar, an attaché at the ČSSR embassy in the GDR, in a meeting with a Soviet diplomat (Tokar was considered to be “pro-Soviet,” for he had graduated from the Moscow Institute for International Relations and had married the daughter of Mikhail Men’shikov, who was foreign minister of the RSFSR until August 1968): “In order to be able to solve the political and economic tasks confronting the ČSSR, 50,000 individuals who have held until now key positions in all areas of the political, state and economic administration have to resign from their post or face dismissal.” RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 299, p. 155, minutes of a conversation between the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in the GDR, Vsevolod Sovva, with the attaché of the Czechoslovak embassy in the GDR, M. Tokar, 5 April 1968.

4. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 744, pp. 9–13, an excerpt from minutes of the session of the Politburo CC CPSU, “On the Memorandum of the Politburo CC CPSU to the presidium of the CC,” 15 March 1968.

5. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 744, pp. 5–6, 9–13.

6. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 155, pp. 9–12, decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU], “Regarding the Invitation of the Czechoslovak Communist Party chiefs to spend their vacation in the Soviet Union,” addendum to the letter by Leonid Brezhnev to Dubček, 15 March 1968.

7. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 155, pp. 2–3.

8. After the invasion of the troops on the territory of Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev confirmed that the Soviet Union never tried to protect Novotný: “I did not know a thing then, only said, that if you don’t want to make him your president, then don’t.” RGANI, F. 89, op 38, d. 57, p. 32, stenographic protocol of the negotiations between Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, and Nikolai Podgornyi with the Czechoslovak president Ludvík Svoboda, 23 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #108. Indeed, there were grave concerns about Novotný in the Soviet Union; he enjoyed only little control in his country and the party, was unpopular with the Czechoslovak population, was critical about Nikita Khrushshev’s firing in 1964, and so forth. However, given the activation of “revisionist forces,” Moscow was interested in having even a conservative leader head Czechoslovakia as long as he believed in the ideas of “Soviet socialism.” The Soviets took assurances (from Prague) at face value for a while that Novotný’s resignation from the position of first secretary of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was only a means to divvy up the jobs in the party’s leadership. The massive attacks on Novotný ensuing soon thereafter, which in the end led to his removal for the post of the presidency, however, were less easily tolerated by the Soviet Union (from a Central Committee of the CPSU resolution a few days after Novotný’s removal): “one cannot discount the possibility that those forces who want to remove Czechoslovakia from its Socialist path and destroy the fraternal ties between the Soviet Union and the ČSSR, will also put pressure on Novotný to give up his job as President. We believe that General Novotný will have sufficient stamina to obviate those endeavors.” RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 155, p. 120, resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SPSU, P 74 (43), “regarding instructions to the Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia,” 14 March 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #5.

9. Communist putsch in February 1948, dismissal of twelve bourgeois ministers from their posts by the Communist president, Klement Gottwald, which was a definitive takeover of power by the Communists.

10. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 60, p. 12, stenographic notes of the negotiations between Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgornyi with the party leaders of the ČSSR, 26 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #114.

11. Sasha is short for Aleksandr in Russian. Brezhnev dispensed with all formalities in his conversations with Dubček. For details, see the transcripts of their conversations. RGANI, F. 89, op. 76, d. 75, pp. 1–18, telephone conversation of L. I. Brezhnev with A. S. Dubček, 13 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #57; ÚSD, sb. KV ČSFR, 8, Soviet transcript of a telephone conversation of L. I. Brezhnev with A. Dubček on the fulfillment of the agreements of Čierná nad Tisou and Bratislava, 9 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #53. Reprinted in English in Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, #77.

12. According to Suri, both Dubček and Brezhnev knew that reforms were overdue in Czechoslovakia, but they did not agree on the timing. The Soviet leader felt it was important to opt for an implementation step by step; Dubček, on the other hand, favored speed. Suri, Power and Protest, 200.

13. Moscow was following with a growing sense of unease developments within the Czechoslovak People’s Army where, as in all other armies of the Socialist countries, the principle of the leadership of the party and its control over the soldiers was strictly observed. However, in circumstances where the party itself was subject to political erosion, the control exercised by some political organs within the Czechoslovak army had the opposite effect. The political organs in parts of the Czechoslovak People’s Army demanded calling an extraordinary party conference, the establishment of trade unions in the army, a review of Czechoslovakia’s military strategy, and the country’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Some of these party ideologues were actually advocating ideas that were in direct conflict with the general line that most KSČ leaders still upheld at the time, and by doing so, they created an atmosphere in the army that was hostile to the USSR and to the other Socialist countries.

14. Latysh, “Prazhskaya vesna” 1968, 216.

15. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 744, pp. 15–19, notes for the transcript of the minutes of the session of the Politburo CC CPSU, “On the Politburo CC CPSU Memorandum to the Presidium of the CC,” 15 March 1968.

16. “Comrades, Karlovy Vary only serves as a smoke screen!” Brezhnev declared quite openly in a speech in the plenum of the CC CPSU on 17 July 1968. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 28, stenographic notes of the plenum of the CC CPSU. Speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, Brezhnev, “On the Results of the Meeting of the Delegations of Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist Countries,” 17 July 1968.

17. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 177, pp. 26–27, Politburo Resolution P 84 (50), “On the Information of the Party Leadership of the BCP, USAP, PVAP and SED with Reference to Kosygin’s Trip to Czechoslovakia.” Attachment: telegrams to the Soviet ambassadors in Budapest, Warsaw and Sofia, 31 May 1968.

18. See R. G. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 317.

19. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 266, pp. 27–28, report filed by the correspondent Lukovec to the editor in chief of Pravda, Mikhail Zimyanin, on the situation at the Soviet embassy in Prague, 20 May 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #35.

20. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 820, pp. 52–54, materials for the Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU of 31 May 1968, “On Informing the BCP, USAP, PVAP and SED regarding Kosygin’s Trip to Czechoslovakia”; the notes of Konstantin Katushev and Konstantin Rusakov, 27 May 1968.

21. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 820, p. 54.

22. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 177, 27 (see note 17).

23. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 177, p. 27.

24. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 820, 54 (see note 20).

25. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 820, p. 56; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 177, 27 (see note 17).

26. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 170, p. 3, Politburo Resolution des CC CPSU P 82 (II), “Concerning the Situation in Czechoslovakia,” 23 May 1968.

27. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 47, stenographic notes on the session of the plenum of the CC CPSU, speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, “On the results of the meeting of the delegations of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist countries in Warsaw,” 17 July 1968.

28. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 309.

29. On 15 March 1968, Dubček tried to conciliate Brezhnev in a telephone conversation by assuring him that “there will be no incidents either in Prague or elsewhere in the country; things are looking bad in Poland right now, and they need help straightaway.” Quoted in Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 309.

30. Dubček apologized for the “unfortunate article” about Nagy, which had appeared in the periodical of the Czechoslovak writers’ association Literární listy under the title “One More Anniversary,” and assured Brezhnev that the situation after the publication of the article was meanwhile back to normal. “There will be no repetition of this… everything is in order now.” Quoted in Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 324.

31. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 311, pp. 1–6, report of the military attaché of the Soviet embassy in the ČSSR, Lt.-Gen. Nikolai Trusov, to the CC CPSU on Czechoslovak press reports and radio and television programs on the Warsaw Pact exercises in the ČSSR, 18 July 1968, reprinted in: Karner et al., Dokumente, #91; some statements of Czechoslovak leaders concerning the Warsaw Pact further exacerbated tensions between the two countries. In Moscow, the statement of the head of the state administrative department of the CC KSČ, Václav Prchlík, provoked a storm of indignation. Prchlík criticized not only the pact’s structure and activities, but in doing so even “allowed,” as the document notes, “top secret data to be published.” RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 189, pp. 6, 48–52, Politburo Resolution of the CC CPSU P 92 (2), “On the note to the government of the ČSSR.” Attachment: note to the government of the ČSSR, 20 July 1968. The demands for a reform of the Warsaw Pact system and even for a withdrawal option called up new associations in Moscow with Hungary in 1956, with Nagy announcing Hungary’s withdrawal from this organization at the climax of the revolution.

32. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 820, p. 53 (see note 20).

33. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 45, stenographic notes of the session of the plenum of the CC CPSU, speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, “On the Results of the Meeting of the Delegations of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist Countries in Warsaw,” 17 July 1968.

34. RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 324, p. 23, minutes of the meeting of the leader of the CC CPSU with the leaders of the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR and Poland, 8 May 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #214; RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 324, p. 23, stenographic minutes of the meeting of the Interventionist Coalition in Moscow, 18 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #87; Kosygin held the same opinion, particularly after the KSČ leadership had asked the USSR in spring 1968 for a loan of 500 million rubles in gold: “They know that their request will be turned down, that we cannot possibly grant them a loan under the conditions that they are offering—and this is precisely what they are banking on.” In Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 316.

35. Another difference between the situation in Czechoslovakia and events in Hungary in 1956 was the relationship of the local mass media with the Soviet Union and its politics. In their struggle with their conservative opponents, the Hungarian reformists pointed to the example of Moscow, where, as they thought, the process of “true” de-Stalinization and the democratization of society had set in after Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist speech at the 20th Party Conference of the CPSU. By contrast, the tide of criticism of the USSR kept on rising in Czechoslovakia during the course of 1968. Even when Moscow attempted to demonstrate a measure of loyalty to and understanding of the specific situation in the ČSSR (as is evidenced above all by the alterations in the Pravda print version of large parts of the speech that Dubček gave at the April plenum of the CC KSČ, which concerned all passages that sounded “suspicious” to Soviet ears), no positive reaction was in evidence in the Czechoslovak mass media.

36. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 42, stenographic notes of the session of the CC CPSU plenum, speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, “On the Results of the Meeting of the Delegations of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist Countries in Warsaw,” 17 July 1968.

37. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, p. 9, stenographic notes of the meetings of the Soviet leadership with the state president of the ČSSR, L. Svoboda and M. Klusák, 23 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #107; RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, S. 49, stenographic notes of the meetings of the state president of the ČSSR, L. Svoboda, 23 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #108.

38. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 838, pp. 7–17, 18–22, report by Suslov, Ponomaryov, and Rusakov, “On the Memorandum of the CC CPSU addressed to the CC KSČ,” 29 June 1968; draft of a memorandum of the CC CPSU addressed to the CC KSČ, with guidelines for the Soviet ambassador’s meeting with Dubček; text of a letter written by Sharaf Radishov from Tashkent, 1 July 1968; Shelepin’s report to Brezhnev, 30 June 1968.

39. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 838, pp. 25–32.

40. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 838, p. 38.

41. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 838, pp. 25–32.

42. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 838, p. 39.

43. Similar cases, in which the Politburo (and/or the Presidium) of the CC CPSU discussed one and the same issue for two days, were limited to the great political crises: Hungary (1956), Cuba (1962), and 1964, when Khrushchev was ousted.

44. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 183, pp. 3, 5–13, Politburo Resolution of the CC CPSU P 88 (I), “On the Memorandum of the Politburo of the CC CPSU addressed to the Presidium of the CC KSČ,” 3 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #37.

45. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 183, pp. 3, 5–13.

46. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 838, p. 49, stenographic notes of the session of the plenum of the CC CPSU, speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, “On the Results of the Meeting of the Delegations of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist Countries in Warsaw,” 17 July 1968.

47. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 183, p. 4, Politburo Resolution des CC CPSU P 88 (II), “On Organizing a Meeting of the Representatives of the Fraternal Parties,” 3 July 1968.

48. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 183, p. 13.

49. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 845, p. 15, report on the Politburo Resolution of the CC CPSU, “On Organizing a Meeting of the Representatives of the Fraternal Parties,” report by Suslov, Arvı-ds Pel’she, Shelepin, 3 July 1968.

50. Another member of the Warsaw Pact, Romania, was left out of this meeting owing to the “special” attitude of its leading political figures, who were at pains to flaunt their “independence” of the USSR.

51. The participants declared themselves particularly appalled by the demonstration on 1 May in Prague, where there had not been a single banner in honor of the Communist Party, where sympathizers of previously dissolved and banned organizations had turned up with nationalist catchphrases and even “a U.S. flag,” and where all this had been applauded by the Czechoslovak leadership with Dubček at the head.

52. Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 324–25; RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 235, 27, minutes of the meeting of the head of the CC CPSU with the leaders of the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR, and Poland, 8 May 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #77.

53. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 175, pp. 5–7, Politburo Resolution of the CC CPSU P 83 (37), the “Missive of Comrade L. I. Brezhnev to Comrade A. Dubček on the Question of the Meeting with the Leaders of the KSČ, BCP, USAP, SED, and PVAP on 8 May 1968 in Moscow,” 26 May 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #78.

54. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 308, p. 63, appeal of the Presidium of the CC KSČ to the Politburo of the CC CPSU on the inadvisability of a conference of representatives of the CPSU, KSČ, BCP, SED, USAP and PVAP in the near future, 19 July 1968; for further details, see the following documents: SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3618, 105–7, meeting of the ambassador of the USSR to the GDR, P. A. Abrasimov, with W. Stoph, A. Norden and H. Axen, 10 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #79; letter of the Hungarian CP leader, J. Kádár, to L. Brezhnev, 10 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #80; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 186, p. 19, Politburo Resolution of the CC CPSU P 90 (12), “Letter of the Communist Fraternal Parties to the KSČ,” 11 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #81.

55. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 852, p. 44, notes for the Politburo Resolution of the CC CPSU, “On the Memorandum of the Politburo of the CC CPSU to the Presidium of the KSČ”; Chervonenko’s accompanying letter to the CC CPSU, 18 July 1968; the dissatisfaction of the CPSU leader and of the leaders of the “Big Five” with the course of action taken by KSČ leadership was easy to explain. Moscow dispatched its invitation to Prague as early as 6 July in the name of all participants, the beginning of the conference being scheduled for 10 or 11 July; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 184, p. 24; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 185, p. 50, Politburo Resolution of the CC CPSU P 89 (30), “On the Letter of the CC CPSU to Dubček,” 6 July 1968. The Czechoslovak side did not only delay the answer for an unreasonably long period, but also informed the public both of the fact that a meeting was scheduled in the near future and of its possible agenda.

56. RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 235, p. 2, minutes of the meeting of the leaders of the CC CPSU with the leaders of the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Hungary, the GDR and Poland, 8 May 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #77.

57. Navrátil, The Prague Spring 1968, 218–19.

58. Particularly noteworthy is the passage in the document that says, “We are convinced that a situation has come about, in which the danger threatening socialism in Czechoslovakia jeopardizes the vital interests of the Socialist countries. The peoples of our countries would never forgive us if in the face of such dangers we were to remain indifferent and carefree.” RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 110, p. 9, joint letter of the CC BCP, the CC USAP, the CC SED, the CC PVAP and the CC CPSU to the CC KSČ on the results of the Conference of the Communist Parties in Warsaw, 15 July 1968.

59. Navrátil, The Prague Spring 1968, 216.

60. SAPMO, DY 30/ 3618, 27, memorandum of the CC SED to the Presidium of the CC KSČ, 4 July 1968.

61. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, 25, stenographic notes of the plenary session of the CC CPSU, words of welcome from the secretary of the CC CPSU, M. A. Suslov, 17 June 1968.

62. First secretary of the CC CPSU Shelest asserted, “The Soviet Union and her allies in the Warsaw Pact will not stand idly by as the counterrevolution attempts to drive a wedge between the Communist Party and the Czechoslovak people; it is legitimate for them to fulfill the obligations that arise from the Pact and to defend the Socialist achievements of the Czechoslovak people.” RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 61, stenographic notes of the plenary session of the CC CPSU, discussion of the speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, “On the Results of the Meeting of the Delegations of the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist Countries in Warsaw,” speech of the first secretary of the CC CP of the Ukraine, P. E. Shelest, 17 July 1968. First secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU, Viktor Grishin explained: “The Politburo of the CC CPSU has to be urged to continue to take all necessary measures in order to support the healthy forces in the KSČ—which also includes the most extreme measures to get the situation in Czechoslovakia back to normal”; RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 68, first secretary of the CC CP of Kazakhstan Dinmukhamed Kunaev said: “If the appeal of the participants in the Warsaw Conference does not suffice to bring the leaders of the KSČ to their senses and if Dubček does not resort to decisive measures to suppress the counterrevolutionary forces in the country, then we have no alternative left but to rely openly on the healthy forces in the KSČ and to channel with their help development again into the direction that is required by us.” RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 72.

63. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 114, p. 118, stenographic notes of the plenary session of the CC CPSU, closing speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, 17 July 1968.

64. Jitka Vondrová and Jaromír Navrátil, Mezinárodni souvislosti Československé krize, 1967–1970. Červenec—Spren 1968 (Brno: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR v nakl. Doplněk, 1996), 331–33.

65. Pikhoya mentions these resolutions of the Soviet leadership, which were filed in the Politburo “Special Folder,” and refers in this context to the Presidential Archive. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 98, pp. 58–89.

66. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 189, pp. 2, 4, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 92 (II), “On the Question of the Situation in Czechoslovakia,” 20 July 1968.

67. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 860, p. 83, materials for the Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, 26 July 1968, “On the Memorandum to the Ambassador of the USA in Moscow on Questions Relating to the Events in Czechoslovakia,” Gromyko’s report, 24 July 1968.

68. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 852, p. 15, materials for the Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, “On the Directives to the Soviet Ambassadors in Connection with the Publication of the Five Communist Parties’ Letter to the CC KSČ,” 19 July 1968.

69. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 860, p. 30, materials for the Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, “On the Information of the Fraternal Parties Concerning Events in Czechoslovakia,” 26 July 1968; on this subject, the CC CPSU wrote a special memorandum addressed to the forty-four “fraternal parties” explaining the Soviet policy regarding the situation in the ČSSR. The memorandum contained additional paragraphs written with the Communist parties of Great Britain, India, and Australia in mind, which had shown a particular “lack of understanding” for the USSR’s position on the Czechoslovak question; RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 860, pp. 24–25.

70. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 491, p. 79, Waldeck Rochet’s telegram to the 29th CC of the Communist Parties of the European Countries, including the CC CPSU, with the proposal to convene a conference on the events in Czechoslovakia, 17 June 1968.

71. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 188, pp. 27, 92–93, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 91 (31), “On the Answer to the CC of the Communist Party of France,” 18 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #165; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 188, pp. 5, 14–15, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 91 (III), “On the Answer to Comrade W. Rochet,” 19 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #135.

72. At the October plenary session of the CC CPSU, Brezhnev said that in order to make the position of the USSR clear regarding the Czechoslovak crisis “the members of the Politburo and the Secretaries of the CC CPSU conducted more than fifty meetings and talks with leading figures of the fraternal parties.” RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 130, p. 20, from the stenographic notes on the plenum of the CC CPSU. Speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, Brezhnev, “On the Foreign Political Activities of the Politburo of the CC CPSU,” 31 October 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #122.

73. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 852, p. 23, materials on the resolution of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, “On the Answer to Comrade W. Rochet,” 19 July 1968.

74. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 852, p. 10, materials on the resolution of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, “On the Briefing of the Soviet Ambassadors in Connection with the Publication of the Five Fraternal Parties’ Letter to the Central Committee of the KSČ,” 19 July 1968.

75. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 860, pp. 44–45, materials on the resolution of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, “On the Telegram to the Ambassador of the USSR in the ČSSR,” 26 July 1968.

76. It took Moscow’s threat to move the meeting to Chop, a border town on Soviet territory, for the KSČ leaders to issue a guarantee that the press would be kept away from the negotiations in Čierná nad Tisou. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 860, p. 97, materials on the resolution of the Politburo CC CPSU, “On the Brief Given to the Ambassador of the USSR in the ČSSR,” 26 July 1968.

77. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 189, pp. 3, 5, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 92 (III), “On the Meeting of the Leaders of the Socialist Countries’ Fraternal Parties,” 20 July 1968.

78. A good indicator of the mood in which the participants were looking forward to the meeting is the note of the Soviet ambassador to the GDR, Pyotr Abrasimov, to the CC CPSU of 28 July 1968, stating that Walter Ulbricht and his entourage were prepared to be in Moscow “on 30 July at 5 or 6 p.m.” for a discussion of options concerning Czechoslovakia, including “a collective strike.” Vondrová and Navrátil, Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize, 33–34. An indirect corroboration of the fact that the beginning of the interventions had been scheduled for the end of July or the beginning of August is to be found in a note in Valerij Vartanov, “Die militärische Niederschlagung des ‘Prager Frühlings,’” in Karner et al., Beiträge, 661–71. Vartanov states that “in the night of 29/30 July 1968, the squadrons of the Soviet air force, which were dispersed across the entire Soviet Union, were unexpectedly ordered, under the pretext of a drill, to leave the barracks and report at the assembly points” (p. 663).

79. In addition to the negotiations between the entire delegations in Čierná nad Tisou, there were other small-scale meetings. Brezhnev talked with Dubček tête-àtête, and in negotiations with four participants on each side, the teams consisted of Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgornyi, and Suslov on the Soviet side and of Dubček, Svoboda, Smrkovský, and Černík on the side of the Czechoslovaks. This is corroborated not only by the fact that no minutes of the negotiations in Čierná nad Tisou of any kind are to be found in Russian archives, but also by another piece of evidence, namely that the Soviet leaders subsequently accused Dubček during the negotiations in Moscow of not honoring the obligations into which he had entered, but were unable to produce a single document to prove to the KSČ leader precisely what kind of obligations he had, in fact, assumed.

80. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 130, pp. 2–3, stenographic minutes of the plenary session of the CC CPSU, speech of the secretary-general of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, “On the Foreign Political Activities of the Politburo of the CC CPSU,” 31 October, 1968. The most important topics are the dismissals of František Kriegel from his post as a member of the Presidium of the CC KSČ and as chairman of the National Front, of Česimír Císar from his post as the secretary of the CC KSČ, and of Jiří Pelikán from his post as head of the television company.

81. Shortly afterwards, Brezhnev pointed out to Dubček in a telephone conversation that there had been no need for the Soviet delegation during the negotiations in Čierná nad Tisou to raise certain topics themselves: “You raised these questions at the time, without any arm twisting on our part, of your own accord and quite independently, and you yourselves promised to come up quickly with solutions.” RGANI, F. 89, op. 76, d. 75, p. 5, Brezhnev on the phone to Dubček, 13 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #57.

82. In Moscow, the idea was even floated of inviting Nixon to the Crimea, in case the majority of the Soviet party leaders were still away on holiday at the time.

83. On 9 and 10 August, Stepan Chervonenko was given the order twice by Moscow to pay the Czechoslovak leadership an official call because of the anti-Soviet and antisocialist campaign that continued to be waged in the country. At the same time (on 9 August), Brezhnev talked to Dubček on the phone; the tone was tense but relatively cordial—Dubček promised again he would stand by what he had committed himself to in Čierná nad Tisou, and Brezhnev wished him luck. Vondrová and Navrátil, Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize, 164–66.

84. RGANI, F. 89, op. 76, d. 75, pp. 1–18, transcript of the telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Dubček, 13 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #57.

85. “I would dearly love to throw in the towel and return to my former job…. At the next plenary session they are going to elect a new first secretary of the CC KSČ… I would do any kind of work. I don’t like this post. Whoever wants to have it, let him have it, it doesn’t matter to me who is going to be the first secretary of the CC KSČ.” RGANI, F. 89, op. 76, d. 75, pp. 1–18 (see note 89).

86. The notes that accompany this document, which has been published in Navrátil’s volume, The Prague Spring 1968, float the idea that Brezhnev may have understood some of Dubček’s statements as a signal (“green light”) for the interventions to begin (327). Even if one assumes that Dubček did not want deliberately to provoke military measures taken by the Soviet leadership, the line he opted for as the leader of a party and a country that were under the threat of “fraternal military help” from the beginning of 1968 onward was utterly irresponsible in the existing circumstances.

87. This was actually borne out by Brezhnev, who said at the meeting of the five countries taking part in the military intervention on 18 August in Moscow that “the Politburo of the CC CPSU had discussed these questions in detail yesterday, the day before yesterday and three days ago [i.e., on 15 August].” RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 246, p. 22, stenographic minutes of the meeting of the Interventionist Coalition in Moscow, 18 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #87.

88. In the original draft of the document, the request addressed to KSČ leadership “to find the strength and the courage to mobilize the party” for the struggle against the counterrevolution was removed as well as remarks on the de facto split of the CC KSČ, and so forth. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 871, pp. 138–39, materials on the Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, “On the Information of the Fraternal Parties Regarding the Results of the Meeting in Čierná nad Tisou and the Conference in Bratislava,” 13 August 1968.

89. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 193, pp. 45, 75–80, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 94 (102), “On the Information of the Fraternal Parties Regarding the Results of the Meeting in Čierná nad Tisou and the Conference in Bratislava,” 13 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #56.

90. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 193, pp. 45, 71–73.

91. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 193, p. 74.

92. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 862, pp. 69–74, materials on the Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, 16 August 1968, “On the Situation in Czechoslovakia”; Kirilenko’s reports, 15 August 1968, with attachment; the materials that had been prepared by the commission were concerned particularly with the inadequacy of Soviet international propaganda concerning the results of the negotiations in Čierná nad Tisou and Bratislava. At the same time, the Czechoslovak diplomats considered the results of these negotiations as a victory for themselves. This assessment was shared by many western Communist parties. The leader of the Austrian CP, Franz Muri, told the bourgeois weekly Wochenpresse that the negotiations had shown the Austrian Communist Party’s opinion to be correct that the international Communist movement could not be regarded as “a monolithic block.” RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 862, pp. 69–74.

93. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 862, pp. 16–19.

94. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 862, pp. 13–15. Konstantin Chernenko was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and Soviet president of state from 1984 to 1985.

95. Navrátil, The Prague Spring 1968, 324–25.

96. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 196, pp. 111–12, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 94 (128), “On the Directives to the Vice UN Secretary General, Comrade Kutakov, on U Thant’s Planned Trip to Czechoslovakia,” 16 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #60.

97. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 197, pp. 3–6, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 95 (I), “On the Question of the Situation in Czechoslovakia,” 17 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #62.

98. Unintelligible formulations which were designed to keep events shrouded in secrecy as much as possible were not the only means to prevent information about the beginning of the military intervention in Czechoslovakia from spreading. More than seventy staff members of the party apparatus of the CC CPSU, who were involved in varying degrees of intensity in the preparations of the meeting and in the meeting in Moscow, had to formally commit themselves to speak to no one under any circumstances whatever about “what they heard or seen on 18 August in the House of Receptions on the Lenin Hills.”

99. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 874, p. 27, materials on the session minutes of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, 17 August 1968, “On the Situation in Czechoslovakia,” draft of a Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU.

100. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 874, pp. 74, 86.

101. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 198, p. 18, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 96 (III), 19 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #65; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 198, p. 38, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, P 96 (1), 19 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #166.

102. Even though changes, such as the classification of the paper Student as a rightist publication or the change in the role ascribed to Czechoslovak mass media in the reporting on the meetings in Čierná nad Tisou and Bratislava were really rather minor in character; the request of the “Czechoslovak friends” to delete the phrase “The counterrevolutionary forces are gathering signatures to have the Communist Party liquidated” bear witness to one of two options: one, that Moscow was harboring basic misconceptions as to the situation in the ČSSR; or two, that it was set to fan existing partisanship in order to justify the impending military intervention. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 874, p. 112, materials on the resolution of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, “On the Telegram to the Soviet Ambassador in the ČSSR,” 16 August 1968.

103. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 874, p. 11, materials on the resolution of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, 16 August, 1968, “On the Telegram to the Soviet Ambassador in the ČSSR”: cipher telegram from Chervonenko in Prague of 17 August 1968.

104. Officially, many of these resolutions were passed almost ten days later, on 27 August; in many cases, there were no so-called voting slips, which would make it possible to tell who from the ranks of the senior Soviet leadership had at least seen the document in question.

105. The action plan that the group of “trustworthy persons in the CC KSČ” had committed themselves to fulfill on condition of the guarantee that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was going to take place in the night of 20/21 August and that Brezhnev had reported on in so much detail at the meeting of the Warsaw Five on 18 August, turned out as completely illusory in practice—not a single one of its points was realized. It is obvious that there were several people present at the meeting in Moscow who doubted that everything was going according to plan. Brezhnev himself admitted at the end of the meeting, when he answered a number of questions from Eastern European leaders by saying that “there are several things we do not see clearly either.” RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 246, p. 50.

106. Imre Nagy (1896–1958), in October–November 1956, was the head of the revolutionary government of Hungary and of the Politburo of the Central Leadership of the Hungarian Workers’ Party (USAP). After the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, he was arrested by the Soviet troops who had occupied Budapest and was sentenced to death in June 1958. Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971) was a Hungarian politician. He was dismissed in July 1956 from his post of first secretary of the USAP, and he subsequently emigrated to the USSR, where he remained to his death as a political refugee without the right to return to Hungary. Nikos Zachariadis (1903–1973) was a Greek politician. He was secretary-general of the CC of the Greek CP until 1956, then in political exile in the USSR and, like Rákosi, committed suicide in 1973. Both Rákosi and Zachariadis were kept in the USSR against their will, first, because the new political leaders of the Communist parties in Hungary and Greece requested it and, secondly, because Moscow feared the parties might split—the influence and the authority of the two leaders who had fallen from grace remained considerable for a long time. For details, see, for example, Csaba Békés, “The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and World Politics,” CWIHP Working Paper 16 (1996); Janós Rainer, Imre Nagy, Vom Parteisoldaten zum Märtyrer des Hungarian Volksaufstandes, Eine politische Biographie, 1896–1958 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006); Jan Foitzik, Entstalinisierungskrise in Ostmitteleuropa 1953–1956: Vom 17. Juni bis zum Ungarischen Volksaufstand: Politische, militärische, soziale und nationale Dimensionen (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2001); Erwin Schmidl, ed., Die Ungarnkrise 1956 und Österreich (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002); Csaba Békés et al., eds., The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002); Paul Lendvai, Der Ungarnaufstand 1956: Eine Revolution und ihre Folgen (Munich: Bertelsmann, 2006).

107. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 198, p. 8.

108. Navrátil, The Prague Spring 1968, 324–25.

109. RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 246, p. 37, “Minutes of the Talks of the CPSU with the Fraternal Parties,” 24 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #109.

110. The meeting gave rise to a remarkable exchange between Kosygin and Gomułka. In reply to Gomułka’s vehemently advanced opinion that the Communist Party had virtually ceased to exist in Czechoslovakia, Kosygin said there must still be such a thing as a Communist Party. To make his point, he resorted to a strange and rather controversial argument: “It is true that we have had a very difficult situation in Czechoslovakia for the past few days—yet the workers in the factories have not stopped working; no one takes to the street. Surely that means that there is someone who still controls the working class; therefore, the Party cannot be said to have virtually ceased to exist in Czechoslovakia.” RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 247, p. 30, stenographic minutes of the meeting of the Interventionist Coalition in Moscow, 24 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #109.

111. RGANI, F. 10, op. 1, d. 247, p. 30, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #109.

112. The first attempts of the allied armies at broadcasting to a Czechoslovak audience resulted in extremely negative reactions in the ČSSR, even among those who were in favor of the military operation: the commentators’ poor command of Czech, their obvious ignorance of daily life in the country, and serious factual blunders caused those who claimed to be acting in the name of the “Czechoslovak patriots and the defenders of Socialism” to unmask themselves.

113. RGANI, F. 3, op. 68, d. 877, p. 173, materials on the resolution of the Politburo of the CC CPSU, “On the Address to the Citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic”; text of the Proclamation to the Citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. When they informed the allies that such a text was being prepared, the Soviet leaders added that “no publication of the proclamation in our press is planned,” 22 August 1968.

114. On 28 August alone, forty articles and news items were devoted to Czechoslovakia in the London Times, sixty-eight in the Paris Le Monde, and forty-eight in the Bonn Die Welt. In the USSR, too, a collected volume of documents on the situation in the ČSSR was published in September 1968, which had been compiled from press material by Soviet journalists, K sobytiyam v Chekhoslovakii: Fakty, dokumenty, svidetel’stva pressy i ochevidtsev, 1st ed. (Moscow: Moskva, 1968). The small number of copies printed and the late publication date prevented the volume from playing the significant role on which the Kremlin propagandists had counted.

115. RGANI, F. 89, op. 61, d. 6, pp. 2–4, internal order of the departments of the CC CPSU regarding the question of preparing military-political operations on 21 August 1968.

116. RGANI, F. 89, op. 61, d. 6, pp. 1–2.

117. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 342–43.

118. Suri, Power and Protest, 200.

Political leaders of the Soviet Union were particularly sensitive to even minor deviations from the ideological concepts and guidelines officially adopted by the USSR by countries of the Socialist Bloc. With regard to Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR), the situation was further exacerbated by the fact that the totalitarian system imposed on the country by the Kremlin was experienced as alien and at odds with the historical tradition of pluralism and democracy that was characteristic of Czechoslovakia.¹

Changes in the political climate and the first stirrings of the civil rights movement can be traced to the end of Antonín Novotný’s time in office. After the January plenum of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ) in 1968, the democratization of Czechoslovakia’s political system, the process of the revision of antiquated ideological dogmas, and, ultimately, the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinist repression got off to a good start. This process was diametrically opposed to the domestic politics of the USSR that had been taking shape after Nikita Khrushchev’s ousting. Here the process of rehabilitation was shelved completely by the new leadership under Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) crushed all forms of thought that did not toe the party line and all independent activities in the population. From this point of view, the Kremlin’s radical opposition to the political reforms in Czechoslovakia was a foregone conclusion. It is obvious that “the struggle against dissent in Czechoslovakia strengthened the uniformity of official orthodoxy in the USSR.”²

There was another substantial reason why Czechoslovakia was at the center of the Kremlin leadership’s attention. There is plenty of evidence that Brezhnev asked Novotný as early as 1966 to consent to the stationing of Soviet troops on ČSSR soil.³ Novotný gave his consent to the stationing of rockets, but refused to sanction the presence of Soviet troops on Czechoslovak territory, which irritated Brezhnev considerably, for as he saw it, the implementation of new military strategies in the struggle with the West was imperative. The Kremlin strategists believed it was crucial to have troops in place at the western borders of each satellite state. Czechoslovakia formed a gap between the battle groups in the north, in Poland, and in the south, in Hungary. Aleksandr Mayorov, commander in chief of the 38th Army stationed at the Czechoslovak border, describes in his memoirs how Brezhnev had ordered him to Old Square (Staraya ploshchad’), to the CC Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza or CPSU), where the party leader told him: “Our focus must now shift north of Budapest to Prague…. And we must have more friends in the Czechoslovak army.”⁴

There is also evidence that Brezhnev nursed a grudge against Novotný, who had been one of Khrushchev’s protégés. Khrushchev had been especially open toward Novotný and had passed on information to him that he refused to discuss with other Warsaw Pact heads of state. After Khrushchev’s fall from power in October 1964 Novotný had a conversation with the USSR’s ambassador in Czechoslovakia, Mikhail Zimyanin, in the course of which Novotný mentioned some of the revelations he had received from Khrushchev. Zimyanin reported this to Moscow: “Comrade Novotný said that Comrade Khrushchev had mentioned last year in a conversation that Czechoslovakia was enriching herself at the Soviet Union’s expense.” During negotiations in Prague, Khrushchev “had also characterized relations between the USSR and the CPSU on the one hand and several fraternal countries and parties on the other—notably the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, and Romania—as well as the political leaders of these parties and countries in a manner that would in all probability—had his utterances been made public—have damaged the interests of the CPSU and the Soviet Union.”⁵

The way the Czechoslovak political leaders reacted to Khrushchev’s ousting was observed by the KGB representative in Prague. On 15 October, he reported to Brezhnev on his meeting with the minister of the interior, Lubomír Štrougal:

However, it appears to have been the case that Czechoslovakia’s political leaders were looking for danger in places where there was none. Štrougal, for instance, pointed to “the possibility of nationalistic and ‘left-wing’ (pro-Chinese) reactions of some elements also within the KSČ.”⁸ Security arrangements were stepped up in October 1964. According to another report of the KGB representative in Prague, Štrougal convened a meeting of senior cadres at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on 15 October 1964 to inform them of the dismissal of Khrushchev and the CC of the Presidium of the CPSU. Moreover, he ordered staff to be on twenty-four-hour stand-by duty, and put the police on alert as well as the security details for members of the government according to Line Five of the Czechoslovak Ministry for Foreign Affairs.⁹

THE RISE OF THE KGB’S INFLUENCE IN THE USSR

The internal situation in the USSR after Nikita Khrushchev’s ousting may be characterized as a phase of the settling of scores by “moderate” Stalinists and of the consolidation of “dogmatic” positions. The propaganda campaign before the spectacular festivities to celebrate fifty years of Soviet power assumed dimensions that were completely without parallel. Under these circumstances, the Brezhnev regime paid increased attention to suppressing any kind of dissent with or “defilement” of the Soviet ideals. It was obvious for the Politburo that the wave of revelations concerning Stalin’s personality cult initiated by Khrushchev was yielding concrete results: people were losing faith in the socialist ideals, a development that was thoroughly unacceptable to the Kremlin.

At the session of the Politburo of the CC CPSU on 10 November 1966, Brezhnev addressed the topic of ideology, which he considered the most important of all:

The future head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, registered his total agreement with Brezhnev’s point of view and explicitly identified Khrushchev as the source of all evils: “It is a fact that the period before the October plenum of the CC [1964] inflicted considerable damage on both our party and our people in the area of ideological activities.”¹²

Six months later, in May 1967, Andropov became head of the KGB. He immediately gave the struggle against “subversion” high priority. As early as July 1967, the Politburo approved Andropov’s proposal to add a fifth directorate with five subdivisions to the KGB for the struggle against “ideological diversion.” In addition to this, the network of local KGB offices was substantially enlarged. In 200 districts and cities, new KGB branches were installed, which were given the name of District or Municipal Departments of the KGB. This was decreed in a Politburo resolution (P47/97-op), which also provided for the increase of the KGB’s overall number of staff to 2,250 (of whom 1,750 were officers, including 100 officers newly appointed to the central apparatus in Moscow’s Lubyanka).¹³

Changes also affected other subdivisions of the KGB. The 11th Department of the KGB¹⁴ (which conducted liaison with counterpart services in other Socialist countries) was again made an integral part of the foreign intelligence by a Politburo resolution passed on 4 June 1968 and was now called the 11th Department of the First Chief Directorate of the Committee of State Security (KGB) of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.¹⁵ This was the result of Andropov’s explicit request to the Politburo.¹⁶ He wrote that hiving off the 11th Department and setting it up as an independent unit had weakened its “working contacts” with other subdivisions of the security services, which made its work less effective. According to Andropov, the activities of the 11th Department had degenerated in the end to “mere protocolar processing” of hosting state security delegations from other Socialist countries. In the meantime, “the imperialist powers and their secret services are engaging in activities that aim to subvert the unity between socialist countries and the liquidation of their socialist gains.”¹⁷

THE YEAR 1968

The changeover of power in Prague in January 1968 proved decisive in imparting a direction to the development of the Czechoslovak situation that proved unacceptable to the Kremlin. From this point onward, the Politburo of the CC CPSU regularly received reports from Czechoslovakia that were put on the agenda and required discussion. On 25 January 1968, for instance, a report by the ambassador of the USSR in Czechoslovakia, Stepan Chervonenko, was discussed, and Brezhnev was asked to “inform Dubček of the exchange of opinions in the Politburo.”¹⁸ In all discussions on Czechoslovakia, the head of the KGB, Andropov, played a prominent role. He belonged to all the Politburo committees dealing with the ČSSR.

The April plenum of the CC CPSU on 9 and 10 April 1968 contributed decisively to the positions on Czechoslovakia subsequently adopted by the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev delivered his speech “On the Current Problems of the International Situation and on the Struggle of the CPSU for the Unity of the International Communist Movement,” and in the ensuing debates, the quality of the ideological work in the USSR was touched upon again and again. Several speakers demanded devoting more attention to this area. The first secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Belarus, Pyotr Masherov, advocated the extirpation of “ideological weeds”; he felt that literature was being turned into a vehicle for “the libel of all things Soviet” and insisted that it was necessary to strengthen the ideological cadres and to institute “educational measures.”¹⁹ First Secretary Radishov of the CC of the Uzbek Communist Party referred to “ideological diversions” and the “subversive influence” of the West in general; he felt that it was this influence to which dissidents owed their existence in the first place: “Such people even appear in the guise of writers, as can be seen from the example of the contemptible dissidents Daniel’, Sinyavskii, Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovol’skii, Lashkova and others.”²⁰ Minister of Culture Ekaterina Fursteva used the plenum to voice her criticism of the Taganka Theatre and its director, Yuri Lyubimov. First Secretary Petro Shelest²¹ of the CC of the Ukrainian Communist Party criticized Nicolae Ceaus¸escu for “being heaped with praise”—from the wrong corner. He was particularly scornful of the president of the Council of Ministers of Romania, Ion Gheorghe Maurer, who had visited General C. G. E. Mannerheim’s grave while in Finland on a state visit. On this occasion, Shelest said that at the head of the Romanian government was a man who was “at the very least extremely suspect as a communist.”²² Yet the greatest source of anxiety was the situation in Czechoslovakia. First Secretary Sergei Pavlov of the CC Komsomol, speaking of a meeting with Czechoslovak colleagues, said: “We criticized the Czechs” for their lenient attitude toward the mores of Western modernity. Pavlov cited examples such as “the incomprehensible use of stupid Beatles music for advertising purposes, the springing up of so-called Big Beat ensembles all over the place and the massive epidemic of pathological dancing.”²³

Brezhnev had the last word at the plenum and made it clear in his speech that he, too, advocated a course of “putting on the screws.” Brezhnev had the example of Czechoslovakia in mind when he said that even a small dose of indulgence and procrastination might be enough to jeopardize Soviet principles: “One has to strengthen discipline in all areas of society and must not be reduced to a situation where one has to resort to extreme measures.” The plenum also approved Brezhnev’s proposal to enlarge the staff of the secretariat of the CC CPSU by one. Konstantin F. Katushev rose from the post of the first secretary of the Gor’kii Regional Committee to that of Secretary of the CC CPSU. There was no need for Brezhnev to tell the CC members what task the new secretary was going to be assigned because it was obvious to all that the proliferation of differences within the “socialist camp” made filling the vacancy left by Andropov’s departure from the secretariat of the CC CPSU a matter of urgent necessity;²⁴ Andropov had been in charge of the CC CPSU’s relations with the “fraternal parties” of the other Socialist countries.

From the spring of 1968 onward, the Kremlin’s apprehensions with regard to Czechoslovakia’s domestic political situation became ever more urgent. The same was true of the demands presented to Dubček and his government. As a first step, the Politburo nominated a small working group that was to address the situation in the ČSSR. After the group’s first briefing at the Politburo session on 6 May 1968, Mikhail Suslov, Pyotr Demichev, Konstantin Katushev, and Konstantin Rusakov were asked to prepare “a proper information sheet on the situation in Czechoslovakia for the party of the CPSU” and to brief journalists on how to present developments in the press and how to account for them to the public.

The USSR Ministry for Foreign Affairs was ordered to prepare a draft for a TASS report to counter the “false rumors with regard to Masaryk’s death that were being circulated by the ČSSR’s press and radio.” It was to contain the information that Andropov had already forwarded in a letter to the CC CPSU on 25 April 1968 stating that the discussion fanned by the Czechoslovak mass media—it was claimed that Masaryk had not committed suicide, as was announced in 1948, but had been murdered by the KGB on Stalin’s orders—was based on empty speculations.²⁵ According to Andropov, it was obvious in the light of new archival research that there was “no connection whatever” between the organs of the Soviet Secret Service (the Committee for Information, KI) and Masaryk’s suicide; therefore, the campaign in Czechoslovakia had to stop.²⁶ However, Section 4 of the Politburo resolution of 6 May is evidence, if veiled in the code of bureaucratic jargon, that this resolution was, in fact, the key to the development that followed and the precondition for the military intervention:

In plain language, this referred to drawing up a plan for the military option, including a time schedule and a detailed listing of all the measures required (“concrete steps”) after the invasion (“after the aforementioned measures have been carried out”). At that stage, the purely military aspect had already been resolved. A detailed plan for the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops (together with orders for the 38th Army) was presented to Brezhnev on the evening of 11 April 1968 by Minister of Defense Marshal A. Grechko, and by the commander in chief of the Transcarpathian Military District, Mikhail Ivanovich Povalii.²⁸ All that was needed now was the endorsement of the complex of political measures. Original planning had, of course, provided for the invasion of Czechoslovakia to be carried out using joint “military maneuvers” of the Warsaw Pact countries as a smoke screen.²⁹

After the establishment of a permanent ČSSR committee consisting of Nikolai Podgornyi, Suslov, Arvīds Pel’she, Aleksandr Shelepin, Demichev, Andropov, Katushev, Andrei Gromyko, Aleksei Epishev, and Rusakov³⁰ in May 1968, Andropov, who had a penchant for secretive measures, dispatched his special envoy, the KGB reserve officer Mikhail Sagatelyan,³¹ whose official function was that of an assistant editor of the foreign department of the paper Izvestiya, to Prague. There he had meetings with a number of ČSSR politicians and submitted his observations in a special report on 4 June 1968. The next day, this secret action plan was forwarded to the Politburo by Andropov (with a note added saying that “in the opinion of the KGB the recommendations contained in this report deserve to be followed”).³²

What Sagatelyan had put into his report did, indeed, deserve the Soviet leadership’s undivided attention. During his stay in Czechoslovakia he had managed to establish conspiratorial contacts with several political leaders, notably Deputy Minister of Culture and Information (and CC member) Bohuslav Chňoupek and to receive from him “a number of secret party and government documents.” It is evident from the report that Chňoupek engaged in these open talks with Sagatelyan “with Bil’ak’s knowledge.” The action plan amounted to the following measures. First, a “pro-Soviet faction” was to be created within the Czechoslovak leadership, which would then be instrumental in convening a plenum of the CC KSČ. At that plenum, “the KSČ leadership would be replaced,” and Dubček ousted from his job (in Sagatelyan’s view “a lesser evil than a military invasion”). Second, the contacts that had been established were to be developed to make sure the flow of information from Chňoupek would be kept up. Third, the Soviet leaders would talk to Vasil Bil’ak, Alois Indra, Dragomír Kolder, and all those who “were named by them as initiated into planning.” Fourth, the implementation of these measures was to be entrusted to a KGB operative who was to work “undercover” in the ČSSR for a month or a month and a half. This was due to the fact that according to Sagatelyan “the persons representing the KGB in Prague were well known to the Czechoslovak state security organs and therefore unsuited for such tasks.”³³ On reading Andropov’s letter and Sagatelyan’s proposals, Brezhnev realized their importance and drafted a resolution for the Politburo and the secretariat.³⁴

A typescript was found in Brezhnev’s desk after his death bearing the title “Notes on the Preparation of the Politico-Military Action on 21 August 1968.”³⁵ Theses notes contain clear and detailed outlines of the planned operations in Czechoslovakia committed to paper shortly before the invasion. The passage dealing with the activities of KGB secret agents embedded in the ranks of the Czechoslovak opposition reads as follows:³⁶

The KGB, therefore, carried out so-called special operations in Czechoslovakia. In April 1968, the KGB operative Vladimir Surzhaninov (active in Prague from 26 April) and two operatives of the “Illegals Directorate” of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, Gennadi Borzov and V. Umnov, were sent to Prague as undercover agents to reinforce the KGB apparatus in Prague.³⁸ Their tasks included not only the establishment of working contacts with the pro-Soviet faction within the KSČ, but also secret operations. On the basis of a resolution of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU of 16 April 1968 another two KGB operatives, Georgii Fedyashin and Aleksandr Alekseev, both officially journalists, were sent to Prague.³⁹

Its presence in Czechoslovakia having thus been considerably enhanced, the KGB was able to carry out two “special operations” in the country. In the first of these, code-named “Progress,” illegal Soviet agents assumed the identity of tourists, business people, or students from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Austria, Sweden, and other Western countries and entered Czechoslovakia, where they sought to establish contacts with various oppositional forces and to gather intelligence data and check it for reliability. If it was deemed necessary, the Soviet agents were also able to influence the activities of the opposition directly. Apart from other aspects, this enabled them to implicate the Czechoslovak opposition in suspicious Western contacts. The second operation, codenamed “Khodoki” by the KGB, was potentially even more provocative. It assigned illegal Soviet agents the task of fabricating proof that the Czechoslovak opposition was planning an armed counterrevolutionary coup. To this end, the KGB agents built “arms caches,” distributed flyers containing appeals to topple the government, and so forth. This was by no means all; the KGB even prepared plans for the murder of Russian women with Czechoslovak spouses. The murders were to be blamed on the “counterrevolutionaries,” which would further aggravate the situation.⁴⁰ Vladlen Krivosheev, an Izvestiya correspondent, recorded an instance of the activities of the KGB agents that were to serve as proof for the “activation of the counterrevolutionary forces.” He called them “activities of the Third Force.” He was given an assistant, a journalist previously unknown to him, “an expert in international affairs” and, as he did not realize until later, a member of the KGB. When a short time later a “weapons arsenal” was discovered in the western part of Czechoslovakia consisting of a couple of handguns and grenades, Krivosheev remembered that his new assistant had gone there the previous night in Izvestiya’s car, a Volga.⁴¹

A typical example of the disinformation campaign of the Directorate “A” of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB is an article in Pravda on 19 July 1968 entitled “The Adventurous Plans of the Pentagon and the CIA.”⁴² Citing a “strictly confidential operative plan” and documents of the commander in chief of the U.S. Army in Europe, it claimed that the Pentagon and the CIA were playing an active part in Czechoslovakia, engaging in “ideological diversions” and fomenting a “counterrevolutionary coup.” This plan, which had supposedly been leaked to Soviet journalists, had, in fact, been fabricated by the KGB.⁴³

The oppositional tendencies in Czechoslovakia were grossly exaggerated by Soviet propaganda. The multiplication of civic initiatives and the fact that there was rising criticism of totalitarian dictatorship of the Stalinist type were portrayed as evidence for the disastrous plan “of Czechoslovakia’s secession from the socialists camp.” All this was valuable only in terms of the USSR’s internal propaganda. It is thoroughly typical of the situation that the comprehensive report entitled “On the Activities of the Counterrevolutionary Underground in the ČSSR,” which was compiled in October 1968 by the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, devoted no more than a quarter of its text to the “activities of the antisocialist forces before the invasion of the Allied troops in the ČSSR.” There is not a word in this section about arms caches or any other tangible underground activities. What featured very prominently were the weakness of the local KSČ organs, the loss of their “leading role,” party infighting, chaos in the cadres, the proliferation of oppositional tendencies within society and the mushrooming of all kinds of organized civic groupings, including those of individuals who had been exposed to political repression in the past. There is only one passage that refers to isolated examples of the distribution of flyers and of the use of slogans hostile to the KSČ and the USSR.⁴⁴

The problems that had arisen in connection with events in Czechoslovakia also cropped up on the territory of the USSR. Several Czechoslovak correspondents in Moscow ran afoul of the KGB due to their independent positions and their critical reporting. This was Moscow and not Prague, censorship was totally in effect here, and tolerance of independent judgment was nil. At the instigation of the KGB, which kept the representatives of foreign media under close surveillance, a Politburo resolution was passed on 19 June 1968 entitled “On Anti-Soviet Statements by the Moscow Correspondent of the Czechoslovak Radio, L. Dobrovský.”⁴⁵ The issue was tricky in that it involved the correspondent of a “fraternal socialists country.” The resolution was, therefore, top secret and bears the stamp “Special File.” Yet there was no immediate solution to the problem in sight. It was not until after the military invasion that Andropov and Gromyko penned a joint letter on 9 September 1968 proposing Dobrovský “be expelled from the Soviet Union.”⁴⁶ The proposal was accepted by the Politburo, but the resolution was not officially recorded.⁴⁷

The KGB’s secret efforts in the spring and early summer of 1968 provided the Kremlin leadership with the arguments they urgently required to justify the tough line they were taking toward the political leaders of the KSČ. The plenum of the CC CPSU on 17 July 1968 was entirely given over to the developments in Czechoslovakia and the results of the meeting of the Communist and Workers’ Parties in Warsaw. Brezhnev gave a speech at the plenum and said that “a carefully camouflaged counterrevolutionary process” was unfolding in Czechoslovakia.⁴⁸ There were fourteen speakers at the debate. By way of conclusion at the end of the plenum, Brezhnev announced: “Tomorrow the fraternal parties’ letter to the Czechoslovaks will be published.”⁴⁹

THE BREZHNEV DOCTRINE

The military action carried out by the Soviet Union and its satellite countries against Czechoslovakia made it plain for all to see how little value was to be attached to the sovereignty of the Warsaw Pact countries. Shortly afterward, a propaganda campaign was initiated in support of the Kremlin’s new course. Pravda published an article with the programmatic title “Sovereignty and the International Obligations of the Socialist Countries,” which caused a sensation.⁵⁰ The article presented different aspects of the thesis that the security interests of the entire “Socialist community” were more important than the interests of individual countries within the community. According to the article, it was “inadmissible for the sovereignty of individual Socialist countries to be opposed to the interests of worldwide socialism.” As for the military action of the “five allied socialist countries,” it was, according to the author of this article, perfectly in keeping “with the basic interests of the Czechoslovak people.”⁵¹ The article, signed Sergei Kovalev, contained no additional information as to the author’s education or function, so it makes sense briefly to discuss him here.

Sergei Mitrofanovich Kovalyov was known for his tireless struggle against “bourgeois ideology and revisionism.”⁵² Having been educated at the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature and at the Party University, Kovalev worked at the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the CC CPSU. One of his first publications bore the title O natsional’noi gordosti sovetskikh lyudei (National Pride and the Soviet Man).⁵³ Kovalev quickly rose in the hierarchy and was made director of the state-owned publishing house for political literature in February 1951, where he made the mistake of not realizing in time that political change was in the air. He laid himself open to the charge of having made serious errors in publishing Istoricheskii materializm (Historical Materialism), which included “mistaken formulations that are in breach of the guidelines of the CC CPSU and harmful to the interest of our state”; Kovalev was dismissed from his post and his file sent to the party Control Committee of the CPSU for inspection.

It took Kovalev a great deal of effort to rehabilitate himself sufficiently to be allowed to work in the field of ideology again. He had learned his lesson and was determined not to forget it. By 1968, his standing was reasonably consolidated again and in June a Politburo resolution assigned him to the group around the Politburo member Andrei Kirilenko, who was due to travel to Italy on a state visit.⁵⁴ Then, in September 1968, Kovalev, by then a member of the editorial staff of Pravda, published an important article on the extremely sensitive topic of the relations between the Socialist countries. It is hardly conceivable that Kovalev could have written this article without previous briefing by the Kremlin.

The Pravda article was immediately spotted by the U.S. State Department and identified as a “new Soviet doctrine.” The KGB informed the CC CPSU accordingly in a letter dated 21 October 1968. In the same letter, the KGB also pointed out that in the view of U.S. State Department specialists the “new Soviet interpretation of the issue of sovereignty” contravened the UN Charter, an assessment that was also shared by UN Secretary-General Sithu U Thant. Despite this, Soviet foreign minister Gromyko formally underscored the new Soviet approach to the issue of “limited independence” at the UN Plenary Session.⁵⁵

The new course was developed further at the plenum of the CC CPSU on 30 and 31 October 1968. Brezhnev held a speech on the “Activities of the CC CPSU.”⁵⁶ He informed the comrades that, at the political level, “the situation in the ČSSR remained precarious even after the military action of 20/21 August.” According to Brezhnev, most Socialist countries—and that included Vietnam, Mongolia, North Korea, Cuba—had welcomed the military invasion. Only China and Albania had remained aloof.⁵⁷ “What worries us however is the equivocal and far from honest position of several members of the presidium of the KSČ,” Brezhnev noted.⁵⁸ Yugoslavia, too, was guilty of embracing a “mistaken position,” which, according to Brezhnev, had to do with that country’s “revisionist tendencies.” A similar charge had to be leveled against Romania, even though that country’s “position had lately become more moderate.” With regard to the general tendencies that were becoming apparent in the assessment of the Soviet invasion, Brezhnev regretted the “unclear positions” held by the French and Italian Communist parties and noted: “What is obvious in the politics of the leaders of several Western European Communist Parties is the deference to the tendencies of the petty bourgeois masses, the abatement of class consciousness and the underestimation of their international obligations.”⁵⁹ On the whole, Brezhnev could find no fault with the general reactions of the West: “The protests that the governments of these countries registered in their various ways actually had a formal, symbolic character and concerned in no way whatsoever the basis of our interstate and, above all, our economic relationships with these countries.” According to Brezhnev, the most important lesson to be drawn from the military action was this, “One thing has been made clear beyond any doubt: the assurances of the CPSU and of the Soviet Union that we will not allow anyone to prize away one single member from the socialist community are no empty propaganda.”⁶⁰ In this way the doctrine of “limited sovereignty” was given its final touches; it has entered the history books as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

AFTER THE INVASION

Senior representatives of the KGB arrived in Czechoslovakia at the same time as the invasion troops. Their tasks included the organization of operative KGB groups in Prague und Bratislava. At the head of the entire operation were two high-ranking KGB officers: First Deputy of the head of the KGB Nikolai Zakharov and the head of the Second Chief Directorate (Counterespionage) and member of the board of the KGB, Georgii Tsinyov. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who held the post of the First Deputy Director of the CC CPSU Propaganda Department at the time, was sent to Czechoslovakia with a group of journalists on 21 August 1968. Later he told how on his return he had informed Brezhnev of what he had seen: “The KGB generals Zakharov and Tsinyov were spreading fear in our Prague embassy and passing on disinformation to Moscow.”⁶¹ Brezhnev simply acknowledged this information without reacting to it or drawing any other conclusion from it apart from asking Yakovlev to keep it from Kosygin.⁶²

Brezhnev was convinced that the military action against Czechoslovakia would bear fruit sooner or later. At the plenum of the CC CPSU on 9 December 1968, he had already announced optimistically that the situation in Czechoslovakia was returning to “normal.” He also noted that V. Kuznetsov, who had been sent to Prague to assist the Soviet ambassador Chervonenko, “was doing a great job.”⁶³

In the autumn of 1968, the KGB regularly updated the CC CPSU on events in Czechoslovakia and on events related to the country. Those reports bore the signatures of the first deputy directors of the KGB, Nikolai Zakharov and Semyon Tsvigun, which was presumably due to the fact that Andropov was away on an extended leave beginning 1 September 1968.⁶⁴ In report no. 2159-C of 13 September, the KGB informed the CC CPSU of a BBC broadcast in which Moscow writers and their protests against the military invasion of Czechoslovakia had been the topic;⁶⁵ a report of 16 October dealt with programs planned by the radio station Svoboda;⁶⁶ another report (29 October) centered on one of the editors of the daily Rudé právo, Oldřich Švestka, and his comments on the situation in Czechoslovakia and some political leaders of the KSČ;⁶⁷ the report of 29 November dealt with the French government’s further plans regarding the development of relations between France and the USSR and other Socialist countries;⁶⁸ and the report of 27 December 1968 focused on the Italian Communist Party’s internal situation and that party’s position with regard to the events in Czechoslovakia.⁶⁹

In addition to the problems it had to face in Czechoslovakia, the KGB was also confronted with serious difficulties in the USSR itself. The Soviet propaganda declarations on the “indestructible unity between the party and the people” appeared somewhat discredited after a group of courageous people had dared publicly to register their protest in the Red Square against the occupation of Czechoslovakia. On 25 August, they unfurled banners there with the slogans “Hands off the ČSSR!” and “For your freedom and ours!” Six of the demonstrators were arrested, tried at the Moscow Municipal Court, and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to five years. Their arrest, its consequences, and the sentences were the subject of no less than three reports to the CC CPSU, by the KGB, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office respectively.⁷⁰

In the meantime, the Kremlin was undertaking its first move to consolidate the status of the troops in Czechoslovakia and to convert their stationing from a temporary to a permanent one: the Central Group of Forces (CGV) was created. Shortly afterwards, on 17 October 1968, a Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU called into being a special department of the KGB (Osobyi Otgel) and a government communication task force of the Central Group of Forces. For this purpose, new KGB personnel were recruited until a total of 334 officers was reached (its wartime total being 426 officers); of these, 32 officers belonged to Osobyi Otgel of the Central Group of Forces.⁷¹

All this was contrary to the promises that Brezhnev had previously made to Dubček. The Moscow Protocol of 27 August 1968 contained the explicit provision that the troops would be withdrawn from Czechoslovakia “after the normalization of the situation.” This did not happen until 1990.⁷²

The operative groups of the KGB stayed put as well. Not until 2 March 1970 did Andropov propose to Brezhnev that the KGB operative groups be withdrawn from Czechoslovakia. Andropov wrote that these KGB groups had been created in connection with the formation of the Central Group of Forces in Prague and Bratislava and “had done a certain amount of positive work since then.” Changes in the political situation and the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from these cities had reduced the groups’ scope for counterespionage. Andropov added that “their continued activities might be perceived as negative by the Czechoslovak comrades.” He therefore proposed that the work of these groups be terminated “in the near future.” Andropov’s letter bears the inscription: “Agreed. Brezhnev, Podgornyi, Kosygin 3. March 1970” and the remark: “Agreement signaled to Andropov’s S[ecretaria]t on 4 March 1970.”⁷³

The Czechoslovak events led to some rather strange conclusions in the Kremlin. In 1971, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued the decree “On the Award of Orders and Medals of the USSR to Members of Soviet Organizations in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and to Members of the Staff of the Central Administration.”⁷⁴ The decree was not designed for publication; contrary to normal decrees concerning the award of distinctions, it bore the stamp “not released for publication.” This represented, in a way, the final act of the Czechoslovak drama: the Kremlin was drawing a line and henceforth considered the problem as solved. The text that accompanied the distinctions was fairly basic and put in simple terms: “For the exemplary fulfillment of duties during the events in Czechoslovakia.” The men and women awarded high distinctions on this occasion included people from all walks of life—from cooks and chauffeurs at the Soviet embassies and consulates to the USSR’s special envoy to Czechoslovakia, Stepan Chervonenko. Yet it was not only diplomatic personnel who were honored, but members of the CC CPSU apparatus as well, such as First Deputy Director of the Propaganda Department Aleksandr Yakovlev and a large number of journalists and newspaper people. The decree reserves a special mention for a group of people whose functions remain unspecified and who are named together with their military rank: members of the KGB. Ninety people were honored on the occasion, fifty-seven of whom were awarded orders, the rest medals. Of the fifty-seven candidates for orders, as many as twenty were KGB members! The number of high ranking KGB officers included Deputy Director of the KGB Georgii Tsvigun and the director of the KGB’s 3rd Directorate (Military Counterespionage), Vitalii Fyodorchuk, who by the time he received this distinction had already advanced to the post of head of the KGB of the Council of Ministers of the Ukraine. The remaining KGB officers, who belonged mainly to the 2nd Directorate (Counterespionage), had formed the bulk of the KGB operative groups in Prague and Bratislava. In addition to these, a number of KGB operatives who worked for the press received distinctions, such as Deputy Director of the Novosti Press Agency Georgii Arsent’evich Fedyashin and Novosti’s representative in Czechoslovakia, Aleksandr Ivanovich Alekseev. Of these, Alekseev is especially noteworthy. Having worked for the secret service in Latin America for a long time, he was sent to Cuba in 1959, where he became Fidel Castro’s confidante and was made ambassador in 1962. In 1968, he brought his great expertise to the secret operations in Czechoslovakia. On completing his mission in Czechoslovakia, Alekseev was, in an interesting development of his career and again in the guise of a “representative of the Soviet press,” sent to parts of the world where the Kremlin sought to step up its influence, namely Chile and Peru.⁷⁵

CONCLUSION

It may be said by way of conclusion that the role played by the KGB in the Czechoslovak events was an extremely important one. In addition to gathering intelligence data on the situation in Czechoslovakia and on the tendencies and activities of the members of the KSČ leadership, the KGB operatives (legal as well as illegal ones) actively influenced developments and sought to guide them into the direction desired by the Kremlin. At first, the Kremlin leaders were more than pleased when Alexander Dubček rose to power: considered to be “his own man,” Dubček was fondly referred to in Moscow as “our Sasha.” He was presumably expected to be more obliging than Novotný regarding the stationing of Soviet troops, a question that arose as early as 1966. Even though he did not do so explicitly, Brezhnev himself gave his consent at least conditionally to Novotný’s dismissal. In December 1967, he referred to the matter in talks with the Czechoslovak leadership with the words “This is nobody’s business but yours,” presumably in the hope that the new Czechoslovak leadership would be more compliant in the matter of the stationing of troops. Yet subsequent developments took an entirely different turn. The change in the leadership in January 1968 was interpreted by the Czechoslovak people as a defeat of the old totalitarian system and as a summons to start building a civil society. In the end, Dubček was unable to control the liberal forces.

If one takes the medium-term development into account, this turn of events was to the Kremlin’s advantage because it was a step in the direction of the ultimate goal: the military action and the stationing of troops in Czechoslovakia. From May 1968 onward, Moscow had deliberately stoked fears of a military invasion. From this perspective, the secret activities of the KGB, which aimed for a destabilization of the situation and general disinformation, are perfectly understandable and so is their overall result. The medium-term goal was achieved: the invasion took place. From a longterm perspective, however, all this resulted in damage to the standing of the Soviet Union. The USSR was saddled with the role of the policeman who makes use of coercive methods, yet in the countries of the Eastern Bloc and later also in the Soviet republics, tendencies toward national liberation had gained a foothold and were on the rise.

NOTES

Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.

1. Zdeňek Mlynář, Moroz udaril iz Kremlja (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), 88.

2. Rudol’f G. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 1945–1991 (Moscow: Novosibirsk Sibirskii Khronograf, 2000), 293.

3. Mlynář, Moroz udaril, 177. Further evidence is found in the reports of a well informed Soviet journalist who worked in Prague between 1965 and 1968. See Vladlen Krivosheev, “‘ Izvestiya’ i tanki v Prage,” Izvestiya, 22 August 1998.

4. Izvestiya, 21 August 1998.

5. AP RF, F. 3, op. 22, d. 16, p. 35, published in Andrei N. Artizov et al., eds., Nikita Khrushchev: 1964, Stenogrammy plenumov TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty (Moscow: Materik, 2007), 281–85.

6. Underscored by hand in the original.

7. AP RF, F. 3, op. 22, d. 17, pp. 17–20.

8. AP RF, F. 3, op. 22, d. 17, p. 20.

9. AP RF, F. 3, op. 22, d. 17, p. 17. The term “Line Five” apparently alludes to the Fifth Department of the KGB dealing with “ideological diversion.”

10. This is a reference to a political activist, V. Klochkov, who fought with the Panfilov division and was killed in 1941 in the defense of Moscow. The myth relating the heroic deeds of the “28 Panfilovci” (Klochkov being one of them) has remained alive to this day in the collective memory of the Russians, notwithstanding the fact that as early as 1948 the USSR’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps had presented an expert claiming the whole story was the fabrication of one A. Krivickii, a journalist with the paper Krasnaya Zvezda. N. Petrov, “O. Edel’man, Novoe o sovetskikh geroyakh,” Novyi mir 6 (1997): 140–51.

11. Istochnik 2 (1996): 112.

12. Istochnik 2 (1996): 116.

13. AP RF, F. 3, op. 80, d. 453, p. 17, Resolution No. 676–222 of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, 17 July 1967, published in Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, eds., Lubyanka: VChK-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB, 1917–1991: Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratija, 2003), 711.

14. Prior to this, on 20 October 1966, the department had been spun off from the espionage directorate and made over into an independent subdivision of the central apparatus of the KGB of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

15. AP RF, F. 3, op. 80, d. 453, p. 70, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU 84 (91), 4 June 1968.

16. AP RF, F. 3, op. 80, d. 453, p. 71, letter no. 1252-A, Yuri Andropov’s letter, 30 May 1968.

17. AP RF, F. 3, op. 80, d. 453, pp. 70–71 (see note 15).

18. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 145, p. 7, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU 67 (III), “On Questions Concerning Czechoslovakia,” 25 January 1968.

19. See Vyacheslav Selemenev, “Der ‘Prager Frühling’ und Weißrussland,” in Karner et al., Beiträge, 929–40.

20. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 7, pp. 39–40, Stenogramm der Sitzung des Plenums des ZK der KPdSU, 9., 10 April 1968. See Markus Holler, “‘Für eure Freiheit und unsere!’ Demonstranten am Roten Platz,” in Karner et al., Beiträge, 849–68; and Vladislav Zubok, “Soviet Society and the Prague Spring,” in this volume.

21. See Mark Kramer, “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 (1998): 234–47.

22. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 7, pp. 31–32 (cf. note 20 above).

23. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 7, p. 53.

24. Until he was made director of the KGB in May 1967, Yuri Andropov was head of the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers’ Parties in Socialist Countries of the CC CPSU from February 1957. After 1962, he was also the secretary of the CC CPSU and, therefore, in charge of these matters.

25. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 88, pp. 114–21, Document no. 951/A-OP.

26. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 88, pp. 114–21, Document no. 951/A-OP.

27. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 90, pp. 7–8.

28. Aleksandr Mayorov, “Esli vy zhivy—prostite… ,” Izvestiya, 21 August 1998.

29. The integrated command exercises and maneuvers “Sˇumava” (“Bohemian Forest”) took place in June and July 1968 with the participation of the operative commands of the Czechoslovak, Soviet, Hungarian, East German, and Polish armies.

30. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 93, p. 1, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU, P 82 (II) “On the Question of the Situation in Czechoslovakia,” 23 May 1968.

31. Mikhail Rachyanovich Sagatelyan (1927–1988) was an international correspondent of the paper Izvestiya from 1968 to 1974 and codirector of the Novosti Press Agency from 1974.

32. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 94, pp. 27–36.

33. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 94, pp. 27–36.

34. AP RF, F. 3, op. 91, d. 94, pp. 27–36.

35. “Uroki avgusta 68,” Izvestiya, 22 August 1995.

36. “Uroki avgusta 68,” Izvestiya, 22 August 1995.

37. “Uroki avgusta 68,” Izvestiya, 22 August 1995.

38. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 329.

39. RGANI, Archive of the Resolutions of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU, Resolution of the Secretariat, Art. 50/172g-OP, 16 April 1968.

40. RGANI, Archive of the Resolutions of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU, Resolution of the Secretariat, Art. 50/172g-OP, 16 April 1968, 328–34.

41. “‘Izvestiya’ i tanki v Prage,” Izvestiya, 22 August 1998.

42. The Directorate “A” of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB at the Council of Ministers of the USSR had the function to carry out “active measures,” above all disinformation and moves to discredit Western politicians, the politics of the West, and so forth.

43. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievskii, KGB: Istoriya vneshnepoliticheskikh operatsii ot Lenina do Gorbacheva (Moscow: Nota Bene, 1992), 489. See also Donald P. Steury, “Strategic Warning: The CIA and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia,” in this volume.

44. Istochnik, 5–6/1993, 96–118; Istochnik, 1/1994, 62–71.

45. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 179, 68, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU 86 (51), “On the Anti-Soviet statements of the Moscow Correspondent of the Czechoslovak Radio, L. Dobrovskii,” 19 June 1968.

46. RGANI, File of the Resolutions of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU, Resolution of the Secretariat of the CC no. 2141-A, n.d.

47. RGANI, file of the resolutions of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU, report by Andrei A. Gromyko and Yuri V. Andropov no. 2141-A (vch. 5778), 9 October 1968, “On the Expulsion from the USSR of the Correspondent of the Czechoslovak Radio, Dobrovský.” On the report the remark: “Notified of this remark—the assistant of Comrade Andropov, Laptev, and the assistant of Comrade Gromyko, Kovalenko, 18 October ’68.”

48. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 8, stenographic minutes of the Plenum meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [hereinafter cited as CPSU], 17 July 1968.

49. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 8, stenographic minutes of the Plenum meeting of the CPSU, 17 July 1968.

50. Pravda, 26 September 1968.

51. Pravda, 26 September 1968.

52. Sergei Mitrofanovich Kovalev (24 September 1913–7 December 1990) was born in Miloslavichi in the district of Mogilyov and began his studies in 1935 at the Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature in Moscow, where he graduated after five years and went on to the Higher Party School of the CC CPSU. On graduation, he took up a post in July 1941 in the Propaganda Department of the CC VKP (b). After the war, he was made secretary of the regional committee of the VKP (b) in Kursk. From February 1951, he served as director of Gospolitizdat (a state-owned publishing house for political literature) and a member of the Central Board of the Printing Industry, Publishing and Book Trade of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. In 1954, he defended his thesis on the topic “The Communist Education of the Workers.” In September 1954, he was dismissed from his post of director of Gospolitizdat. From 1960 to 1965, he worked as editor of the periodical Problemy mira i sotsializma (Problems of the World and of Socialism), from 1965 to 1971 was a member of the editorial committee of the propaganda section of Pravda, from 1971 to 1980, acted as first deputy of the editor in chief of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and from 1980 was a professor at the Academy of Social Sciences of the CC CPSU. His most important publications are the following: Kommunisticheskoe vospitanie trudyashchikhsya (1960); O kommunisticheskom vospitanii (1966); O cheloveke, ego poraboshchenii i osvobozhdenii (1970); Formirovanie sotsialisticheskoi lichnosti (1980); and Samovospitanie sotsialisticheskoi lichnosti (1986). In September 1973, he was awarded the “Order of the Red Banner of Labor” on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.

53. Sergei M. Kovalev, O natsional’noi gordosti sovetskikh lyudei (Moscow: Gos. izdvo polit. lit-ry, 1950).

54. RGANI, file of the resolutions of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU 86 (1), 14 June 1968.

55. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 469, pp. 94–95, letter of the KGB of the Foreign Ministry of the USSR to the CC CPSU, Nr. 2437-z, 21 October 1968.

56. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 130, pp. 1–26, speech by L. I. Brezhnev at the session of the Plenum of the CC CPSU, 31 October 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #122.

57. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 9, p. 139.

58. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 9, p. 139.

59. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 9, p. 140.

60. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 9, p. 141.

61. “Ne zakladyvat’ miny,” Izvestiya, 21 August 1998.

62. “Ne zakladyvat’ miny,” Izvestiya, 21 August 1998.

63. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 10, stenographic minutes of the Plenum meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 9 September 1968.

64. The resolution to allow Andropov to go on leave from 1 September 1968 was passed on 23 May 1968 by the Politburo CC CPSU (82/XVI).

65. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 60, letter from Semyon Tsvigun to the Central Committee of the CPSU Nr. 2159-s, 13 September 1968.

66. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 37, pp. 45–48, Report No. 2404-z.

67. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 301, pp. 331–33, Report No. 2502-z.

68. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 492, pp. 158–60, Report No. 2680-z.

69. RGANI, F. 5, op. 60, d. 493, pp. 253–54, Report No. 2848-z.

70. RGANI, F. 89, op. 25, d. 72, pp. 56–60, 62–63.

71. AP RF, F. 3, op. 80, d. 453, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU 105 (24), 17. 10. 1968.

72. “‘Izvestiya’ i tanki v Prage,” Izvestiya, 22 August 1998.

73. AP RF, F. 3, op. 80, d. 453, p. 87. Report No. 534-A.

74. GARF, F. 7523, op. 105, d. 118, pp. 58–65.

75. John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Bantam, 1974), 548; Lutz Priess et al., Die SED und der “Prager Frühling” 1968: Politik gegen einen “Sozialismus mit menschlichem Anlitz” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996).

Tuesday, 20 August 1968, at 11 p.m. CET, the Soviet ambassador in Prague, Stepan Chervonenko, called on the president of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR), Ludvík Svoboda, to inform him that the troops of the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and Hungary were about to cross the borders of Czechoslovakia. He read out a text prepared by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU) and handed the Czechoslovak president an appeal to the people of the ČSSR drafted by the Soviets in Svoboda’s name.¹

Chervonenko said later that, while Svoboda did not welcome the invasion, he at least firmly promised that he “would never sever the links tying Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union.”² Before Svoboda was informed of the invasion, Czechoslovak minister of defense Martin Dzúr had been contacted by the Supreme Command of the Warsaw Pact troops involved in the intervention. Instead of immediately informing Prime Minister Oldřich Černík, Dzúr had issued an order to the Czechoslovak People’s Army (ČSLA) not to leave their barracks and not only to refrain from offering resistance to the invading troops, but to provide assistance to them if necessary.³

To what extent this move was actively supported by Svoboda, the de facto supreme commander of the ČSLA, remained unclear for a long time.⁴ Svoboda did, however, give Dzúr the explicit order, independently of Dzúr’s own activities, to avoid all bloodshed.⁵

FROM ČIERNÁ NAD TISOU TO THE INVASION

Before the final decision in favor of an intervention was taken by the Politburo of the CPSU, a last attempt was to be made to find a “political settlement” together with Alexander Dubček and the leadership of the KSČ on the basis of the Dresden demands.⁶ At the end of July, bilateral negotiations took place in the Slovak town of Čierná nad Tisou near the CzechoslovakSoviet border and contrary to the expectations of the Kremlin they ended on an upbeat note. We now know that a meeting of the “Warsaw Five” in Moscow had already been in the pipeline during the run-up to the meeting in Čierná nad Tisou. This was cancelled at short notice by the Politburo of the CC CPSU, all of whose members had collectively traveled abroad for the first and only time in the history of the Soviet Union to be present at Čierná nad Tisou.⁷ Dubček was given his “very” last chance. Immediately after the bilateral meeting in the east of Slovakia, the “Warsaw Five” met with the KSČ in Bratislava on 3 August. The Soviet leadership considered it imperative, according to Brezhnev, “to enshrine the results of our negotiations with the leadership of the KSČ in a collective document in order to put these results on an international basis. This was done at the conference in Bratislava. In principle… the results of the negotiations found their expression in the Declaration of Bratislava.”⁸

We may assume with a degree of probability bordering on certainty that there are no official Soviet records of the actual discussion between the Czechoslovak and the Soviet delegations in Čierná nad Tisou. During the “negotiations” after 23 August, Brezhnev merely referred to private discussions, one-on-one talks, and the like. Despite this basic situation, it appears certain today that the Czechoslovak side and most notably Dubček acceded in principle to the Soviet demands for changes in the cadres and for dismissals.⁹

Once the Declaration of Bratislava was signed, the Soviet side had a frame of reference that could be used for the justification of both their further course of action and that of the Warsaw Five. In Bratislava, the last compromise between the parties prior to the occupation of the ČSSR was formulated on the basis of a Soviet draft, which amounted to a legitimation of the “bureaucratic coup d’état” that was already being prepared in the presidium of the KSČ by the “healthy forces.” In Bratislava, Vasil Bil’ak handed the Soviet delegation the letter that was soon to become notorious, the “invitation by the healthy forces” in the KSČ asking for a “collective rescue operation” by the five interventionist states. The other KSČ leaders were left in the dark with reference to Bil’ak’s move.¹⁰

Dubček’s alleged infringement of the Bratislava accord was ultimately used by the Soviet side to justify the invasion. Moscow needed time to organize the “bureaucratic coup d’état,” which was supposed to take place in the presidium of the KSČ so as to coincide with the invasion. If Dubček failed to honor the accord, which, as he saw it, was a foregone conclusion in any case, the “healthy forces” now had a lever to oust him.

The straw that broke the camel’s back in Moscow’s eyes was the telephone conversation between Brezhnev and Dubček on 13 August.¹¹ Dubček was noticeably on edge and offered a string of excuses. The Kremlin’s primary interest was the prompt realization of the moves agreed on in Čierná nad Tisou. As it was, neither Jiři Pelikán was relieved of his post as head of TV, nor Zdeněk Hejzlar as head of the Broadcasting Company, nor was the Ministry of the Interior divided into two. This meant that Viliam Šalgovič, who was loyal to Moscow, had to continue in a position that was subordinate to Minister of the Interior Pavel Nowotný.

Three days after this conversation on the phone, on 16 August, Brezhnev addressed a handwritten letter on behalf of the Politburo of the CC CPSU to the KSČ leader.¹² In it, Brezhnev deplored the continued anti-Soviet attacks in Czechoslovakia and Dubček’s infringement of his undertakings to divide the Ministry of the Interior into two and to dismiss František Kriegel, Česimír Císař, and Pelikán. This letter was delivered to Dubček by the Soviet ambassador in Prague, Chervonenko. In a postscript to Chervonenko’s instructions, the Politburo mandated him to make the contents of the letter known to the “healthy forces” in the KSČ.

Two days later, on 18 August, the Politburo of the CC CPSU addressed another—this time, official—letter to the presidium of the CC KSČ in Brezhnev’s name. On page after page, Moscow documented in this “letter of warning”¹³ anti-Soviet attacks notably in the Czechoslovak media. In the same Politburo resolution, a letter to Alois Indra and Bil’ak was given the green light as was the draft of a declaration that might come in useful for the “friends” as the basis for an address to the Czechoslovak people after the invasion.

The letter to Dubček could not be delivered to him on 18 August, for he was not in Prague that day; he had gone to meet János Kádár.¹⁴ After consulting Indra and Bil’ak, who were both informed of the letter’s substance,¹⁵ Chervonenko advised “headquarters” to have the letter delivered on Monday, 19 August.¹⁶ The Politburo signaled their consent; taking up a suggestion of the “friends,” that is of Bil’ak and Indra, they also added to the letter a reference to Brezhnev’s letter to Dubček of 16 August.¹⁷ This was done to give Bil’ak and Indra an opportunity to underline Dubček’s mistakes and to criticize him for having kept the Kremlin’s “warnings” secret from his comrades. In contrast to the letter of 16 August, in which Brezhnev had referred in detail to the one-on-one talks in Čierná nad Tisou and had reproached Dubček with not having solved the “cadre issues,” by which he meant that Dubček had not dismissed Pelikán and those of his mind-set, none of these topics were mentioned explicitly in the second letter.

The letter was finally delivered to Dubček by the Soviet ambassador at around 10 p.m. on 19 August. Dubček’s failure to respond to the written requests was ultimately to serve the “healthy forces” as a pretext for a motion of no confidence against the KSČ leader in the session of the presidium of the CC KSČ on 20 August. Dubček interpreted the letter as yet another protest or reprimand in the Kremlin’s unending series. He failed to see anything new in it. This was also mentioned by Chervonenko when he reported to Moscow on the delivery of the letter.¹⁸

ON THE EVE OF THE INVASION

On 20 August 1968 at 2 p.m., the presidium of the Central Committee of the KSČ had assembled for a meeting; preparations for the Slovak Party Congress were to have been the most important item on the agenda. However, the real emphasis lay elsewhere. The members loyal to Moscow were planning to engineer a vote of no confidence against KSČ leader Dubček. However, things took a different turn; the session dragged on and on in interminable disputes on matters of procedure. The planning for the “bureaucratic coup d’état” started to unravel. No motion of no confidence against Dubček was proposed. The weakness of the forces loyal to the Soviet Union “made… an internal coup impossible so that it was the military intervention that ultimately provided the basis required for such an undertaking.”¹⁹ Shortly before midnight, Prime Minister Černík announced that he had just been informed by the minister of defense, Dzúr, that Czechoslovakia was at that moment being occupied by socialist “fraternal countries.”²⁰ It was only then that Dubček pulled Brezhnev’s last letter of 17 August addressed to him from his briefcase.²¹

At around 12:30 a.m., President Svoboda entered.²² The members of the presidium had called him asking him for his advice. According to Bil’ak, he was in a good mood; during the discussion of the condemnation of the intervention, he gave no indication as to which way he was inclined. Dubček is even said to have accused Svoboda of having actually called the Soviets.²³

At 1:30 a.m., the presidium of the CC KSČ approved the draft of a first declaration. It condemned the invasion yet requested the population to maintain calm. The motion was opposed by the Communists loyal to Moscow, Vasil Bil’ak, Drahomír Kolder, Emil Rigo, and Oldřich Švestka. František Barbírek and Jan Piller, who had pledged to support a vote against Dubček, now cast their vote, presumably in the light of the military invasion, in favor of the motion.²⁴

After the end of the session, most presidium members remained in the CC building; Černík returned to his official residence, and President Svoboda to the Hradshin. Two hours later, Černík was arrested. Shortly afterwards, the CC building was occupied. Dubček and other leading functionaries were placed under house arrest. At 6 a.m., Císař was arrested and cross-questioned. On the way to the Soviet embassy, he apparently managed to escape, leaving Prague and going underground for several days.²⁵

Early the next morning, the radio station Vltava [“Moldau”] began transmissions from the GDR in Czech and Slovak and presented the rationale behind Czechoslovakia’s military invasion by the Five from the invaders’ point of view.²⁶ At 6 a.m. the as yet unoccupied station Czechoslovak Radio broadcast a message from Dubček himself.²⁷ He appealed to the population not to stay home from work. The Foreign Ministry ordered the broadcasting company to keep on repeating that the occupation of the country was wholly unjustified, and at 8:15 a.m., Svoboda addressed the nation via radio. He appealed to his compatriots to refrain from acting emotionally and to remain utterly calm.²⁸

At 9 a.m., the building of the Czechoslovak broadcasting company was occupied by Soviet soldiers, and the same happened a short time later at the editorial offices and the print shop of Rudé právo. It proved, however, impossible to silence immediately the Czechoslovak journalists who had acquired a taste for the freedom of the press over several months. “Illegal” radio stations were genuine sources of information for the population for a number of days to come.

At 2 p.m., Dubček and fellow party members Josef Smrkovský, Kriegel, and Josef Špaček were ferried to Prague-Ruzyně airport in an armored personnel carrier and taken to the Soviet Union via Poland.²⁹ At 6 p.m. CET, Bohumil Šimon was taken to the airport to be followed by Černík in short order.³⁰

Dubček was held captive all of Thursday in the Carpathians³¹ and was taken to Moscow in the early hours of 23 August.

In the Kremlin, the insight had gained ground in the meantime that Czechoslovakia’s future was inextricably tied to Dubček. Ousting Dubček was clearly illusory, for it was obvious that he had popular support.

At 11 p.m., President Svoboda called on the Soviet ambassador in Prague, Chervonenko, requesting his permission to go to Moscow.³² Svoboda’s request was granted, and the allies were informed accordingly. On this occasion, they were also informed to be prepared to leave for Moscow for consultations at short notice.³³

The next morning, on Friday, 23 August, Svoboda announced in a radio address that he was about to leave for a state visit to Moscow to negotiate a solution for the present crisis with the leadership of the Soviet Union. He had asked the members of the government to authorize him to conduct direct negotiations with the representatives of the USSR. Svoboda was accompanied on this trip by Minister of Defense Dzúr; the members of the presidium of the CC Jan Piller, Bil’ak, Indra; the minister of justice, Bohuslav Kučera, and his own son-in-law, Milan Klusák. Half an hour after Svoboda’s radio address, Czechoslovak radio was at pains to emphasize that Svoboda was going to Moscow of his own accord and that he had by no means handed control to a government consisting of “collaborators” loyal to Moscow. At 9:30 a.m. CET, Svoboda’s special flight took off from Prague-Ruzyně airport. After a stopover in Bratislava, where Gustáv Husák, the first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party, joined the delegation, the plane took off again for Moscow.³⁴

At 11:30 a.m. Moscow time, that is, at the time of Svoboda’s departure from Prague, the first “negotiations” between Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgornyi, Aleksei Kosygin,³⁵ and Dubček began at an unidentified location.³⁶ The first round of talks lasted at least an hour and a half and involved, at first, only Dubček. He was later joined by Černík.³⁷ Brezhnev began the first round with a skillful gambit from his point of view. He proposed that instead of talking about the past they should be acting according to the “principles” of Bratislava. The Czechoslovak government was to abide also in future by the resolutions of the January and May plena of the CC KSČ, in other words, broadly on the basis of the reforms already initiated, but primarily with a view to strengthening socialism in the ČSSR.³⁸ Brezhnev stepped up the pace by conveying to Dubček that the Soviet side was giving him the benefit of the doubt: they were prepared to believe that the “rightist forces” had become active behind his back: “We don’t want to blame you personally, Alexander. You may not have been aware of this.” Brezhnev also conveyed to Dubček from the start that while he would continue to count on him, in future he was also determined to put him in his place. Dubček, who had been kept in complete isolation since his arrest and had no information how his comrades had behaved, could easily have felt cornered and could have allowed the conversation to escalate, which he did not. At the same time, he was aware that it was not he who was in a virtually desperate situation, but Moscow and its allies. The obvious lack of coordination regarding his own abduction convinced Dubček that things were not going according to plan for the Kremlin.³⁹

Brezhnev proposed to Dubček as the talks continued that they “should keep no secrets from one another.” He underscored that Czechoslovakia had, after all, not been occupied. Brezhnev said: “We want the country to be free and that she abide by the socialist cooperation that we agreed on in Bratislava.” At the end of his first statement, Brezhnev encouraged Dubček to address “different variants completely freely,” not “in a temper” as in Čierná nad Tisou, but “in a controlled manner.” Brezhnev wound up emphasizing that Dubček was still “an upright Communist” in the eyes of the Soviet leadership.

In his first reply, Dubček said that he was “in a very difficult state emotionally,” but determined nevertheless “to look ahead.” He underscored that he was unable to identify with the decision in favor of a military intervention, particularly in light of the fact that preparations had been underway for the Party Conference and for the solution of the cadre issues, in particular for the removal of the “rightist forces.” There was no need for Dubček to claim the prophet’s role when he told the Soviet leaders that the extreme measures “confronted not only our party and yours, but the entire international Communist movement with the most difficult problem with which this movement has ever had to cope.” Dubček underscored the fact that his country looked back on “centuries” of good relations with Russia and accused the Kremlin leaders of having arrived at an assessment of the situation in Czechoslovakia that was out of touch with reality: there was no realistic scenario for a counterrevolution. The result now was a “difficult and tragic situation.” Despite his entirely different view of the situation, Brezhnev did not want to pursue this line of argument any further and interpreted Dubček’s words as “the wish to find a solution in conjunction with us and with all socialist countries.” Brezhnev said to Dubček, “Is that what you’re saying, Alexander?” Dubček replied, “Yes, it is.”

As part of his next move Brezhnev informed Dubček about how the invasion had gone. Dubček underscored that one of the most important steps of the Presidium of the CC KSČ immediately after the start of the invasion had been to urge the population not offer any kind of resistance. Brezhnev told Dubček that a one-day Party Conference of KSČ had taken place on the previous day which had elected “exclusively people of the extreme right” to form a new CC. Neither Indra nor Bil’ak had been elected into the CC. The new CC did not include a single member of the old one, Podgornyi interjected. In addition to this, it was said that no more than five Slovaks had been present. Then Brezhnev informed Dubček that President Svoboda had asked for permission to come to Moscow to take part in the negotiations and that he had spoken to him repeatedly on the phone, but the connection had been interrupted again and again. As they spoke, Brezhnev said, Svoboda, accompanied by Bil’ak, Piller, Kučera, Ladislav Novák, and Milan Klusák, was “already in the air.”

Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgornyi repeatedly raised the objection that the Party Conference had been irregular (as there had been virtually no Slovaks present nor any members of the Presidium itself); moreover, recognizing the Presidium of the CC that had, in fact, been elected would mean “that Czechoslovakia was going bourgeois in no time,” as Brezhnev put it.

Dubček showed himself broadly in agreement with the line of the Soviet leaders. “We’ve got to find ways to bring about a certain consolidation of the leading organs of the Party and of the state.” Yet he could not help pointing out what it meant “if in Slovakia the Slovaks are taught by the Hungarian army the proper attitude to Socialism and to the Soviet Union… and if a Slovak soldier… is now being disarmed by a Hungarian soldier.” Brezhnev replied laconically that this was the state of affairs with which one had to cope. Dubček replied: “That anybody should take it upon themselves to attempt to teach the Czechoslovaks what socialism is about! German troops invade and we give orders to our population to do their bidding!” Brezhnev did not add then and there the correction that the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) of the GDR had not taken part in the invasion; instead, he chose to reproach Dubček with having sanctioned the meeting of the Sudeten Germans in Cheb.⁴⁰ When Dubček denied having done so, this was grist to Brezhnev’s mill: “a lot had been happening” behind Dubček’s back. In the final analysis, this exchange shows clearly how one-sided and plain wrong a good deal of the information was that the Soviet leadership received.

Once Černík had joined the group at the negotiating table, Brezhnev repeated once again his point of view⁴¹ and underscored that there had been no alternative to “taking this step if the aim was to prevent Czechoslovakia from leaving the path of socialism” and that Svoboda was on his way to Moscow. Before he arrived, Brezhnev said, those present should reassess the situation and think about a government with Černík at the top: “Perhaps we should recognize… a government with Comrade Černík as leader.” If, on the other hand, the Party Conference was to be considered legal, Czechoslovakia would find herself in the bourgeois camp in a matter of days. This was meant as an aide mémoire for Dubček and Černík.

Kosygin finally made the explicit point that the measures for which the participants were casting around and which would ultimately be taken to resolve the crisis would need to find the approval of both Czechoslovakia and the “fraternal countries.” Brezhnev continued along the lines of the strategy he advocated and stressed that the top priority at the moment was finding a way out, “It is only after we’ve managed to do that that we may indulge in mutual recriminations and work out who’s made the biggest blunder.” Much less conciliatory was the tone chosen by Podgornyi who thought he had understood Dubček as saying there was nothing one could do about the resolutions passed on the previous day at the Prague Party Conference. Černík reputedly tried to calm the situation down,⁴² and Kosygin painted once more on the wall the Kremlin’s most abhorred bugbear in connection with a recognition of the Party Conference: a bourgeois Czechoslovakia within a month, “perhaps even sooner.” At the end of the first round of talks, after about one and a half hours, Podgornyi topped this with another worst-case scenario: “If we do not take appropriate measures, this will lead to civil war—and you will be the ones to take responsibility for it.”⁴³ The meeting was adjourned without any results. The next step was not yet, as Dubček has mistakenly recorded in his autobiography, the meeting with the Svoboda delegation, as this did not take place until late in the evening. The delegation must have been shortly before touchdown in Moscow at this stage, and Brezhnev and the leading Politburo members were getting ready to go the airport to receive Svoboda with pomp and circumstance.

Shortly before 4 p.m. Moscow time, the special flight from Prague via Bratislava touched down at Vnukovo Airport near Moscow.⁴⁴ Because Svoboda was on a state visit, he was given the official VIP treatment. Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgornyi were all there in person on the tarmac of the air field; then the delegation was escorted to the Kremlin.⁴⁵

At first, Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgornyi received only the Czechoslovak president. Svoboda was accompanied by his son-in-law, Milan Klusák, the former Czechoslovak UN ambassador and Svoboda’s most important adviser. Brezhnev felt linked to Svoboda by shared memories of front warfare in WWII and had originally staked high hopes on him.⁴⁶ However, after the invasion Svoboda did not behave as the Soviet leadership had hoped he would. He did not read out the draft speech in the form in which it had been delivered to him by the Soviet Politburo through the Soviet ambassador to Prague; in Svoboda’s eyes, it only offered further proof of how out of touch the Soviets were with the situation on the ground.⁴⁷ Such direct words would have painted Svoboda in the eyes of the Czechoslovak public as Moscow’s vassal and would have destroyed his authority in the country at one blow. The Soviet leadership had presumably counted on Svoboda finding the right words. This demonstrates again how thoroughly the Soviet leadership misjudged the situation in the ČSSR, a fact for which the pointed disinformation and exaggerations on the part of the Politburo hardliners and, above all, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, must ultimately be held accountable. Andropov was never at a loss in construing all kinds of arguments that were supposed to justify the drastic solution advocated by him.⁴⁸

After the invasion, Svoboda had also rejected a proposal put forward by the Soviet ambassador in Prague, Chervonenko, to the effect of installing a new government comprising the famously “healthy” forces loyal to Moscow.⁴⁹ He may have done so less because he was averse to Chervonenko’s proposal as such than on the basis of an assessment of the country’s situation which was more realistic than that of the Kremlin.

Ultimately, he felt it was more appropriate to discuss the country’s future directly with the Soviet leaders, which was, at least from his point of view, the only option that was left. Dubček always felt that Svoboda had sympathized with the ideas of the “Prague Spring.”⁵⁰

In his very first statement, Svoboda referred to the above-mentioned “offer” to form a new government, saying, “I received an offer yesterday to form a new government. I think this would constitute a breach of the Constitution.”⁵¹ In what followed, Svoboda seems not to have expressed himself clearly so that Brezhnev had to ask him what point he was making. At this point, the minutes unfortunately do not provide a verbatim record of the talks. According to the recorder’s summary of Svoboda’s statement, Svoboda appears to have proposed that “Comrade Dubček return to Prague, confess his guilt, and give up his powers.” On the other hand, Svoboda is reported to have said that if someone else was going “to be given a turn,” then “this was likely to stir popular discontent even more.” Asked by Brezhnev who should take over as first secretary of the KSČ if “Dubček were to resign from power,” Svoboda replied, “It is obvious you have not really been following me.” Presumably Svoboda was simply extemporizing without having a clear idea as to what fate was in store for Dubček at the hands of the Soviet leadership. He had also been left in the dark with respect to how Dubček had been treated so far. Svoboda now enquired about Dubček’s whereabouts and Brezhnev replied: “He is well.” Svoboda said in response, “We would all benefit if he were to resign from his post. But if he stays on, we can live with that, too. Dubček should address these issues himself but should do so in Prague.”⁵²

From the start, Svoboda conveyed his readiness to drop Dubček, yet this was not the end of the matter. He underscored with great emphasis this would be the best solution but added that he was not prepared to take the responsibility for this step. Svoboda had betrayed Dubček.

In the course of the talks, Svoboda said that the entire government would remain in office only if Černík was retained as head of government (a point to which the Soviet leadership, as we have already seen, had signaled their approval in principle in the first round of talks at midday involving only Dubček and Černík but this fact had been kept from Svoboda). Bil’ak could not possibly, according to Svoboda, be recycled as head of government, for he was a traitor in the eyes of the people. Subsequently, Brezhnev rehearsed the scenario that was likely to unfold if Dubček were to return to Prague and publicly confess his guilt. Who would then be elected to succeed him, Brezhnev asked, by a party presidium that contained “neither Piller nor Kolder nor Bil’ak nor Indra.” It was, therefore, inevitable, Brezhnev continued, for Dubček, Smrkovský, and Černík to declare the Party Conference of the previous day illegal. Klusák then pointed out to the Soviet leadership that a majority of Communists believed “that this CC has been duly elected.” “If you declare it illegal… then there will be two parties in Czechoslovakia and most people will join the faction that has the new CC on its side.” This meant, in other words, that the KSČ was going to be subjected to attrition and that most party members would feel their loyalty lay with the new faction. In dealing with the comrades, it was, therefore, advisable, according to Klusák, not to “tackle this issue in too peremptory a manner.” Kosygin objected that given the status of Czechoslovakia as a federation there was no denying that the Slovaks had been underrepresented at the Party Conference. To make matters worse still, the Party Conference had been convened solely by the Prague Municipal Committee, and neither the CC nor the Presidium had been informed. Klusák tried to calm tempers down by emphatically pointing to the situation prevailing in Prague: “You’ve got to realize that the city is gripped by tumults. You can either prolong these tumults or you can come up with a sensible solution to this problem so that the population understands that quiet has been restored.” Klusák’s advice was for “these three,” namely Dubček, Černík, and Smrkovský, to return to Prague. Svoboda was also emphatic about giving people no pretext to say “that all this has been done on your orders, that we have betrayed the people, and that we have capitulated to you.” If they managed to do that, Svoboda felt “positive results were within reach.” Then he noted, “Afterwards we can do anything you want.”⁵³ Svoboda was ready to capitulate so that the CzechoslovakSoviet friendship would be kept unblemished.

Brezhnev insisted on the Czechoslovak leadership collectively declaring the Party Conference illegal; in his eyes, the only question was how to effect this most elegantly. It is crucial to stress here once more that Brezhnev, Podgornyi, and Kosygin understood perfectly well that a recognition of the Party Conference’s resolutions was inevitably going to lead to a de facto dissolution of the KSČ and to a loss of the party’s monopoly on power, to the transformation of the ČSSR into a “bourgeois” republic and, ultimately, to the country severing its links with the Warsaw Pact. In order to prevent this the Soviet leadership, very much against its original inclination, had to pay the price of leaving Dubček, Černík, and Smrkovský in their posts in order not risk a civil war, which had repeatedly surfaced in the talks as the superlative worst-case scenario. Brezhnev said, “We will not replace Černík, let him keep his post. After some time, he will reshuffle his government…. Let Dubček also retain his post. We did not seriously consider removing him. If he then resigns of his own initiative, that’s a different matter. And let Smrkovský stay on as well.” That is what happened.⁵⁴

Svoboda underscored once more that the formation of a new government that had at first been considered would turn out to be counterproductive (“Then people would spit at me”). Even though he was an old man, there was a lot he “could do to strengthen our friendly ties.” Svoboda went on to say, “Given the opportunity I would do anything.” Yet he immediately balked at being the first to denounce the Party Conference as illegal and linked this to Dubček’s consent (“Pending Dubček’s consent and that of other comrades, I will…”).⁵⁵ Brezhnev replied to Svoboda that there was no denying that he was the president and surely entitled in that capacity to voice his opinion. He explained shortly afterwards that the troops would not be withdrawn until there were appropriate formal declarations of commitment, which required moreover the consent of the allies. Klusák inquired whether German soldiers were stationed on Czechoslovak soil. Brezhnev assured him that there were no Germans among the invading troops; they had been “held back.” This had caused considerable irritation among the comrades in East Berlin, according to Brezhnev, and a sense that they “were somehow not considered trustworthy.”⁵⁶

Svoboda’s original planning had provided only for a short visit to Moscow and an early return to Prague immediately after the talks with the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev did not demur, but insisted that the other members of the delegation remain in Moscow for further “negotiations.” Svoboda, therefore, wondered whether it would not be best, in case his “influence was going to be needed during the negotiations… to schedule another round of talks” while he was still present. Klusák went one better declaring they had better all meet with Dubček, Černík, and Smrkovský “today.” Brezhnev signaled agreement and Podgornyi suggested taking a break, after which they would all assemble once more on the same day.

Because the strategy to be adopted was now clear, Svoboda declared that it was now possible for the comrades to join the talks. Brezhnev and Kosygin left the room. In the meantime, Podgornyi talked to Svoboda and Klusák. Summing up developments in Czechoslovakia, he said that the “rightists” had played their cards very cleverly in Czechoslovakia. They had organized everything in a manner that provided no reason for anyone to feel provoked. “They all kept on claiming that they were doing their utmost for the construction of socialism and for friendship, but what they were doing was in fact the exact opposite.”⁵⁷

Brezhnev and Kosygin returned shortly afterwards. All the other members of the delegation and the Czechoslovak ambassador in Moscow, Vladimír Koucký, also took part in the meeting. Brezhnev embarked on a monologue explaining that Svoboda had already been approached on the issue of how to find a solution “that will do justice to all sides.”⁵⁸ He emphasized that the Soviets had never opposed the resolutions of the January and the May plenary sessions of the CC KSČ and had never demanded a change of leadership. There had been a frantic search for a political settlement right to the very end. What was at issue was not whether the “headlong campaign” against the CPSU and the Soviet Union in the media was considered offensive, but that the “whole ideological influence had been one-sided to an extent that endangered the entire system of the state and the cause of socialism in Czechoslovakia.”⁵⁹ Brezhnev criticized Dubček (“Why has Dubček become the object of a cult to an extent we did not even experience with Stalin?”) and told Husák and Bil’ak about the two occasions he had spoken with Dubček from the Crimea, about which Dubček had not even informed the members of his Presidium. He had then sensed, in his own words, “treachery and dishonesty,” and it had been obvious that “if one allowed things to continue unchecked and did not take measures to counteract them, the Party Conference was going to pass a resolution that would propel Czechoslovakia along the road leading to the restoration of capitalism.” In order to prevent this, a guarantee was needed: “We had one [the agreement of Čierná nad Tisou], but it proved worthless. We don’t want to be had a second time.”⁶⁰

Brezhnev’s monologue amounted to a plea for finding a way to classify the Party Conference as illegal. Brezhnev conceded that this could not possibly be affected by Dubček and Černík from Moscow, so some other way had to be found. Podgornyi spoke next. He noted the necessity of the invasion; otherwise, the “progressive” forces loyal to Moscow would have been blown to smithereens “before the Party Conference or at the Party Conference.” Podgornyi continued, “There is no way we can tolerate hostile acts against the socialist community or against the Soviet Union. We will have no truck with such things.” According to Podgornyi, the responsibility for the situation that had arisen “lay with all of you,” “notably with Comrade Dubček.” “War and bloodshed” must not be tolerated.⁶¹

Now it was Husák’s turn. Having expressed his gratitude for being allowed to take part in the meeting, he explained that he understood only too well why the fraternal parties had expressed criticism on account of Czechoslovakia. Everybody was, of course, entitled, according to Husák, “to see things… from their point of view.” However, he could not help thinking “that the Soviet comrades had overestimated the danger inherent in the given situation and had overreacted” so that in Bratislava, too, the impression had been created “that one was, in fact, confronted with an occupation.”

Husák claimed there were only two possibilities for moving forward: either a totalitarian leadership for Czechoslovakia or a “political deal” that created “normal working conditions.” Speaking on behalf of the leadership of the Slovak Communist Party and the government of Czechoslovakia, he urged the Soviet leadership “to release the leaders who have been arrested.” Husák let it be immediately understood that he felt the Soviet demand for a declaration of commitment was only reasonable “to prevent Czechoslovakia” opting for a development “outside the socialist camp.” In addition to this, “the anticommunist and anti-Soviet propaganda must be liquidated.” These goals, however, could have been achieved, according to Husák, “without resorting to a military intervention.” Husák cemented his position in advance as far as the Party Conference was concerned. He felt it was going to be easy for him “to say that this Party Conference had not been legal,” yet one had to allow for the fact that the Party Conference was classified as legal by most of its participants. The situation was extremely difficult, but he was prepared to work for a solution with all his might.

Brezhnev subsequently became visibly aggressive. He and Podgornyi criticized Husák for not having become active—or for having not having become active enough against anti-Soviet and antisocialist propaganda. Brezhnev then changed tack: “Don’t let’s attack one another! Our talks are difficult enough as it is!” Husák replied that he had always clearly positioned himself at rallies. Podgornyi countered by asking him how much use this had been in his eyes if the media had failed to report it. Podgornyi reiterated once more the danger inherent in the propaganda of the other side. This could “make the cauldron boil over” so that “the result was a real civil war.” Brezhnev followed suit: “If you want to speculate on a civil war, then you yourselves will have to shoulder the responsibility.” Nowhere in Czechoslovakia, according to Brezhnev, had the military invasion met with resistance apart from Prague, at the moment troops had attempted to bring the mass media under their control. Brezhnev then attacked Husák directly: “If you were really a Communist, a true Leninist, then you would be grateful to us for having gone into Czechoslovakia. We went in to save you—yet you turn this against us.”⁶²

Finally it was the turn of Bil’ak, one of Moscow’s most loyal Communist followers. At the session of the Presidium of the CC on 21 August, he was one of only a handful to openly oppose convening the Party Conference. “They trumpeted that we were traitors and we were unable to shout back resoundingly and unmask them as the real traitors and counterrevolutionaries”; they did not control the media. Bil’ak gave a realistic appraisal of the state of affairs from his point of view and declared that surely President Svoboda was able to report from Moscow that Černík and Dubček had been present at the negotiations. It so happened that in a few days’ time the Slovak Communists’ Party Conference was due, which according to Bil’ak presented no danger of providing a stage for potentially anti-Soviet agitation. Brezhnev insisted nevertheless on Husák calling his comrades in Bratislava to tell them to abort the Party Conference, which had been scheduled for 24 August.⁶³

After the end of the talks, the Soviet leadership acceded to the wishes of the Czechoslovak delegation and had Dubček and Černík, who were put up in accommodations on the Lenin Hills, brought into the Kremlin. There are several clues that seem to suggest that Brezhnev took charge of the two at first and presumably informed them about the attitudes of the delegation’s members regarding the 14th Party Conference.⁶⁴

In this briefing, the two must have been confronted with the fact that all members of the delegation had agreed to declare the Party Conference and its resolutions null and void. Immediately afterwards, Dubček and Černík joined Svoboda and the other delegation members. Dubček had expected that Svoboda, “regardless of the pitiable circumstances, would be delighted and relieved” to see him. In light of the newly accessible passages of the minutes from which it follows that Svoboda would have loved to see Dubček ousted from his post, Svoboda’s reaction to seeing Dubček does not come as a surprise: “As I stood before him I was shocked to see a look of cold disdain in his eyes…. At that moment he seemed almost to radiate enmity, as if something had changed his innermost emotions.” Dubček never questioned Svoboda later as to the reasons for his cold reaction.⁶⁵ It is possible there was one more meeting between Dubček and Černík and the Soviet leadership, which apparently led to no significant rapprochement between the positions of the two sides.⁶⁶

On the next day, 24 August, Husák announced at 6:20 a.m. on Slovak radio from Moscow that Dubček and Černík were taking part in the negotiations.⁶⁷ Ahead of further negotiations, Brezhnev informed the leaders of the “fraternal parties” who had arrived in Moscow in the meantime, Władysław Gomułka, Walter Ulbricht,⁶⁸ János Kádár, and Todor Zhivkov, about the state of the negotiations.⁶⁹ In this he had the awkward task, as he saw it, of telling the allied comrades that Dubček could not be cast aside. The plan to install a collaborationist government in Prague, which the allies had agreed on in Moscow prior to the invasion on 18 August, had proven impossible to realize. As Brezhnev explained to the leaders of the allied Communist parties, it had not been feasible to begin at once with the political work. “Unfortunately our hopes proved unfounded,” Brezhnev said, “that these rascals would get scared and beat the retreat.”⁷⁰ “Confronted with this mass hysteria, part of the healthy forces took refuge in the [Soviet] embassy and gave up trying to deploy any active propaganda efforts,” he continued The forces loyal to Moscow were cowards and were considered traitors in Czechoslovakia. This was the reason, according to Brezhnev, why Dubček, Černík, Smrkovský, Kriegel, Špaček, and Šimon had been interned. He justified the invasion once more, failing which “Czechoslovakia would have become a bourgeois republic in a matter of days.” Then Brezhnev informed the allied Communist Party leaders about the “offer” that had been made to Svoboda of forming a new government, which the latter had declined saying that he would be toppled in no time. Svoboda had agreed, according to Brezhnev, to declare the 14th Party Conference illegal, yet he had urged the Soviet leadership “to conduct the negotiations in such a way that the government returning to Prague was a legal one.” This meant in plain language “that Černík, Dubček, and Smrkovský were due to return to Prague.” Brezhnev summed up the new point of departure succinctly: “We have no new demands in addition to those that we have already formulated in Čierná nad Tisou.”

Dubček’s attitude was criticized sharply by Brezhnev. Černík was the first, according to Brezhnev, to declare himself prepared to call the Party Conference illegal. Dubček then adopted “this idea,” “but not as firmly and with such determination as Černík.” There was in Brezhnev’s assessment a “certain amount of cunning” on the part of Dubček behind all this. The negotiations had, therefore, not moved beyond an initial phase, but the plan was to let Svoboda fly home ahead of the others and to issue a communiqué saying that the negotiations with the Czechoslovak delegation were being continued. Svoboda had declared he was going to persuade Dubček to resign, but in Brezhnev’s eyes, this was simply naive. There is no written evidence for this statement.⁷¹

While it is impossible to prove that such a conversation did not take place, it appears more plausible that Brezhnev used such words to make it clear that Svoboda was by no means loyal to Dubček; he could, therefore, be regarded as having proven his loyalty to the Soviet Union. However, as one had to take into account Svoboda’s position in the ČSSR in the prevailing circumstances, there was no other way out than keeping Dubček and Černík in place for the time being.

Of all the Communist Party leaders of the “fraternal countries,” SED leader Ulbricht was the most vehement in his opposition to this. In reply to Ulbricht’s interposed question whether it followed from all this that the delegation would return under Dubček’s leadership, Brezhnev became again extremely circumstantial, “Do not think for a moment that we are yielding ground by even one step…. All we are saying is that the situation is extremely complex.” Brezhnev tried to allay the comrades’ misgivings. In his assessment, it was crucial for Indra to be the next in line after Dubček. “In this case it would be possible to find some other job for Dubček after a while.” Gomułka insisted on the troops stationed in the ČSSR being given new orders for the struggle against counterrevolutionaries, saying, “Let’s face the situation with which we’re confronted. Czechoslovakia only exists in name. There are isolated communists, but there is no longer a Communist Party. The Communist Party has been transformed into a social democratic party, a party that makes common cause with the counterrevolution, that goes down the same road.” Ulbricht subsequently agreed that one had to reach a compromise regarding Dubček, but warned against mentioning him by name in any communiqué. Dubček had cheated on everyone before so often, there was no doubt he would do it again given only half a chance. Zhivkov chimed in in support of Ulbricht. It was his considered opinion that it was possible to “make use” of Černík for a while, but this did not apply to Dubček. Zhivkov said, “We must be on the offensive, Comrade Brezhnev, otherwise things simply go from bad to worse…. We must have our sights on the suppression of the counterrevolution. The gangs that are active in Prague must be liquidated,” to which Gomułka replied:

Brezhnev pointed out that Svoboda was going to insist that Dubček’s name was inserted in the communiqué. Gomułka came to Brezhnev’s aid and underscored that this was needed to appease the population. Ulbricht replied it would have opposite effect. Podgornyi reaffirmed once more that Svoboda would insist on Dubček and Černík being mentioned by name. Brezhnev in the end, resorted to a most drastic formula: “We fully expect a civil war, we reckon with its outbreak. There can be no such thing as capitulation. We count on you. We’ve got to find a way.”⁷³

For the afternoon, talks were scheduled between the Soviet leaders and Smrkovský, Špaček, and Šimon. Brezhnev used similar tactics as on the previous day. He said that he was far from blaming what had happened on the Czechoslovak comrades; “maybe all of this happened behind your backs.” He again conjured up the worst-case scenario of a civil war in the ČSSR and again explained in detail the significance of the 14th Party Congress and the consequences that would ensue if it was declared to have been legal. Asked by Brezhnev whether he considered the Party Congress to have been illegal, Smrkovský replied: “The Party Congress is as illegal as our own stay here in Moscow.” However, if the Czechoslovak people came out in support of the proposal to have the Party Congress reenacted, he was not going to raise any objections. Smrkovský declared he was opposed to bloodshed in his home country and to anything that threatened socialism. Once they were back in Czechoslovakia, they could also declare the Party Congress illegal.

Generally speaking, the dramatis personae have left accounts of the talks in which they are portrayed rebuffing heroically the demands of the Soviet leaders. The minutes of the talks did nothing to preserve the nuances of the wording and were presumably “touched up” in retrospect in any case, so they cannot be used to refute these claims. Podgornyi, for one, was decidedly less than impressed with Špaček’s attitude (“I have a feeling that Comrade Špaček is somehow devoid of all enthusiasm”); Brezhnev concurred (“What worries me is that Comrade Špaček is showing so little conviction in his answers”). In the end, after Brezhnev had assured them once more of his unqualified “support” and had requested Comrades Šimon and Špaček to modify their tone, all the people involved declared themselves prepared to have the 14th Party Conference annulled.⁷⁴ In the evening, Svoboda informed Prague via the Czechoslovak embassy that the negotiations were set to continue and urged the government” not to interfere in the unsolved problems of the Party.”⁷⁵ Later that night, Czechoslovak radio broadcast a message from Svoboda saying negotiations were making solid progress, but depended for their outcome on the maintenance of public order in the ČSSR.⁷⁶ Shortly afterwards, another message was broadcast that also originated with Svoboda and amounted to less than the truth: Svoboda claimed that he had insisted on Dubček, Černík, and Smrkovský being involved in the negotiations. This was the first step in the genesis of the myth of Svoboda as the savior of Czechoslovakia.

On Sunday, 25 August, Švestka, Josef Lenárt, Milous Jakeš, Barbírek, Rigo, and Zdeněk Mlynař joined the Czechoslovak delegation, which meant that the pro-Soviet wing within the delegation was strengthened.⁷⁷ Dubček was ill and in bed,⁷⁸ and Indra could likewise not take part in the internal Czechoslovak talks for health reasons. He had had a heart attack and was taken to a Moscow hospital.⁷⁹ Even Brezhnev was presumed to have fallen ill and to have spent the whole day in bed.⁸⁰ Late in the afternoon, it was, therefore, only Podgornyi, Kosygin, and Arvīds Pel’she who met with the heads of the “fraternal parties.” The Soviet leaders informed Ulbricht, Gomułka, Kádár, and Zhivkov about the state of the negotiations.⁸¹

On 26 August 1968, an “agreement” was finally signed, the so-called Moscow Protocol. It provided the basis for all reforms, resolutions, and staff decisions to be reversed that had been passed during the run-up to the 14th Party Congress of the KSČ as well as for the reintroduction of censorship and the stationing of Soviet troops—initially until the situation had reverted to being “normal” again. The Moscow Protocol was, as the Czechoslovak government committee saw it, a “classic case of a grossly asymmetrical agreement, imposed by force of arms and intimidation.”⁸² It would be going very far to call the Moscow Protocol the result of negotiations between equal partners.⁸³

The only “concession” on the part of the Kremlin was dropping the “charge” of “counterrevolution.” Dubček, Černík, and Smrkovský remained in office for the time being, for they were needed to steer Czechoslovakia without bloodshed back on to the path of “normalization.”

On 14 and 15 October 1968, the treaty on the permanent stationing of Soviet troops in the ČSSR was signed. This was the end of the chapter in the reform Communist movement that demonstrated the incompatibility of any reforms that went beyond mere cosmetic changes in the makeup of the regime within the Communist system.

SUMMARY

Newly accessible documents, notably the hitherto unpublished parts of the stenographic transcripts of the Moscow “negotiations” from 23 to 26 August 1968, prove that the Soviet leaders were partly clueless how to break the deadlock resulting from the invasion and/or failed to convey to the Czechoslovaks a clear idea of their strategy. The pictures of the military occupation served as a smokescreen for the actual sorry predicament of the Moscow-led interventionist coalition. Politically speaking, the Kremlin had ended up in a cul-de-sac. The plan to install a revolutionary government, which had been legitimated to an extent by “recommendations” given to Bil’ak and the “healthy forces” by the Politburo of the CC CPSU before the invasion, was in tatters.

Given the tense situation in Moscow, President Svoboda, subsequently and for long time to come was celebrated as “Czechoslovakia’s savior,” even proposed getting rid of Dubček as a political actor. Brezhnev however saw quite clearly that Dubček’s dismissal would only have prepared the ground for worse to come. The fact remains that Svoboda would have been prepared to betray Dubček. He dropped him because being in the USSR’s good graces was more important to him than continuing to support the reforms of the Prague Spring.

The “negotiations” in Moscow after the military intervention were conducted by the Soviets with the preeminent aim of preventing Dubček from returning to Prague wearing the martyr’s crown. In addition to this, the Soviets were determined to deal with the 14th Party Congress of the KSČ, which had elected a new party leadership immediately after the invasion, and to have it annulled. In the eyes of the Kremlin, this was the only alternative to Czechoslovakia’s relaunching itself as a western bourgeois republic and presumably turning its back on the Warsaw Pact. A revision of the results of World War II would have been the last thing the Kremlin was prepared to endorse.

Svoboda contributed a great deal to the “normalization” of the situation in the ČSSR; under his aegis, Communist rule was consolidated again. Slovakia’s autonomy, which was carefully nurtured by Husák, was one of the levers of this “normalization.” Dubček was cunningly exploited and degraded to a tool to further Soviet interests in the country, a role he came increasingly to embrace voluntarily. His successor, Husák, became a replica of János Kádár—with one difference: he did not advance to the post of first secretary of the party in the jaws of the invasion.

NOTES

Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.

1. Jitka Vondrová and Jaromír Navrátil, eds., Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize 1967–1970: Červenec—srpen 1968, vol. 4, no. 2 (Brno: Doplněk, 1996), 211–12; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 198, pp. 7–11, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 96 (IV), 19 August 1968; Jaromír Navrátil et al., eds., The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 405–8.

2. Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 408. Milan Klusák, Svoboda’s son-in-law, was present during the meeting. At the time of the Moscow negotiations, he was head of the First Department of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry; until July 1968, he had been the ČSSR’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, and from April 1969 he was deputy foreign minister.

3. Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 411–13; Jan Pauer, Prag 1968: Der Einmarsch des Warschauer Paktes: Hintergründe—Planung—Durchführung (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1995), 230–31. For details, see Valerij Vartanov, “Die militärische Niederschlagung des ‘Prager Frühlings,’” in Karner et al., Beiträge, 661–71; on the successful execution of the orders see SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 62–67, “Information der KPdSU an die SED über den Einmarsch in die ČSSR,” 22 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #104.

4. Pauer, Prag 1968, 231.

5. BStU, ZA, SdM 34, 104–9, transcript of the conversation between the minister for national defense of the GDR, H. Hoffmann, with the supreme commander of the Interventionist Alliance, I. Yakubovskii, 29 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, # 100.

6. For details, see Manfred Wilke, “Ulbricht, East Germany, and the Prague Spring“ in this volume.

7. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 192, pp. 18, 30, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU. P 93/6, 30 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, # 52.

8. RGANI, F. 2, op. 3, d. 130, pp. 1–26, L. I. Brezhnev’s speech at the plenary session of the CC CPSU, 31 October 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, # 122.

9. Cf. Brezhnev’s statements that he repeatedly made to Dubček on 23 August in Moscow and in the telephone conversations on 9 and 13 August 1968. There are primay sources on the one-on-one talks between Brezhnev and Dubček. No interpreters were present because Dubček was fluent in Russian. Dubček claimed that no agreements had been reached in Čierná nad Tisou and that in unofficial talks with Brezhnev the upcoming conference in Bratislava had been the only topic. See Alexander Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit: Die Autobiographie (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1993), 247–49, here 248. Cf. also the telephone conversations between Brezhnev and Dubček on 9 and 13 August 1968. Vondrová and Navrátil, Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize, 164–67; Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 336–38; RGANI, F. 89, op. 76, d. 75, pp. 1–18, telephone conversation between L. Brezhnev and A. Dubček, 13 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, # 57; Vondrová and Navrátil, Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize, 172–81; Navratil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 345–56; cf. also Vasil Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe: Der “Prager Frühling” aus der Sicht eines Beteiligten (Berlin: Edition Ost, 2006), 119–33.

10. Pauer, Prag 1968, 175–94; Lutz Priess, “werten Sie unsere Erklärung als nachdrückliche Bitte und Forderung um Ihr Eingreifen und um allseitige Hilfe,” Darch 12 (1994): 1252–55; AdBIK, Holdings “Prague Spring,” shorthand minutes of the meeting of the Interventionist Coalition in Moscow, 18 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #87.

11. For details, see Mikhail Prozumenshchikov, “Inside the Politburo of the CPSU: Political and Military Decision Making to Solve the Czechoslovak Crisis,” in this volume.

12. ÚSD, AÚV KSČ, F. 07/15, Zahr. Kor. No. 822. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 193, pp. 2, 6–8, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 94 (I), “On the Question of the Situation in Czechoslovakia,” 16 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #150; Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 366–67; Pauer, Prag 1968, 209.

13. Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 384–87.

14. For details, see Csaba Békés, “Hungary between Prague and Moscow,” in this volume.

15. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 193, pp. 2, 6–8 (cf. note 12 above).

16. This can be inferred from RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 197, pp. 27, 30, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU 95 (2), “On the Telegram to the Soviet Ambassador in the ČSSR,” 18 August 1968.

17. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 197, pp. 27, 30.

18. Černík was also present when the letter was delivered. Dubček in retrospect dated the delivery wrongly (“Sunday evening”). Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 400; Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 258, 263–64.

19. Pauer, Prag 1968, 237.

20. Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zur Hilfe, 154; Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 261; Zdeněk Mlynař, Nachtfrost: Das Ende des Prager Frühlings (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988), 185–86; Werner Marx and Günther Wagenlehner, eds., Das tschechische Schwarzbuch: Die Tage vom 20. bis 27. August 1968 in Dokumenten und Zeugenaussagen. Zeitpolitische Schriftenreihe 6 (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1969), 9–13.

21. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 258, 263–64.

22. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 264; Mlynař, Nachtfrost, 187.

23. On this point, the published memoirs of the dramatis personae either contradict one another or differ in the weight they attribute to the controversy between Dubček and Svoboda. Dubček only mentions that Svoboda appeared approximately forty minutes after he first rang him. Neither he nor Mlynař make any mention of the reputedly heated controversy. See Mlynař, Nachtfrost, 187, 192; Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe, 154–55; Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 264–66; Pauer, Prag 1968, 252–53.

24. Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe, 159; Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 264–65; Mlynař, Nachtfrost, 191–93; Pauer, Prag 1968, 237–39.

25. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 268. It would appear more probable that the security police erroneously discharged him. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 62–67 (cf. note 3).

26. At 5:22 a.m., Vltava aired the TASS communiqué, and at 5:45 a message to the Czechoslovak People’s Army. Both the TASS communiqué and the message to the army are reprinted in Prager Schwarzbuch (Bonn: Edition Atlantic Forum, 1969), 22–25.

27. At 7:30 a.m. Czechoslovak radio announced that the station was surrounded by tanks. At 9 a.m., the building of the radio station was occupied by Soviet soldiers.

28. Prager Schwarzbuch, 33.

29. Later Dubček learned that in all probability he was made to stop over in Legnica in southern Poland. This is where the headquarters of the allied forces was stationed. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 270–71.

30. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 269ff; Prager Schwarzbuch, 38–39.

31. For details, see above all Pauer, Prag 1968, 292.

32. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 62–110, stenographic transcript of the talks between the Soviet leadership and the first secretary of the KPČ, A. Dubček, and the president of the ČSSR, O. Černík, 23 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #106.

33. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 199, p. 25, and RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 200, p. 52, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 97 (47), 23 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #105.

34. Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe, 171–72.

35. Among those present at the time was also Gennadii Voronov, who only spoke once. Brezhnev told Dubček that Svoboda was on his way to Moscow and was “in the air now.” Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe, 171–72.

36. It has proved impossible to date to ascertain what venue was used for the talks. They did not take place in the Kremlin. In setting the scene, Brezhnev said, “We will conduct the negotiations with Ludvík Ivanovič [Svoboda] in the Kremlin as usual. Secret negotiations will be conducted in this room; as he will be here on an official visit, we will have to make a report. Our meeting will therefore take place where our meetings with statesmen are normally scheduled.” RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 62–110 (cf. note 32). The assumption that the Soviet leadership had talked to Svoboda before talking to Dubček is not borne out by the evidence. Dubček himself saw excerpts from the minutes of the talks, which partly jogged his memory, partly confused it. Dubček’s version that Brezhnev had used Svoboda to confuse him is most probably due to his reading the minutes after an interval of more than twenty years. Whether Dubček refrained from a reference to his first meeting with the Soviet leaders on purpose is a moot point. We would suggest that Dubček’s patchy memories had better be attributed to the ordeal of arrest, abduction, sleeplessness, and impaired health. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 276–89.

37. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 62–110 (cf. note 32).

38. The May plenum of the CC CPČ lasted from 29 May to 1 June 1968. Contrary to the hopes of the “fraternal parties,” which had been banking on a decisive victory of the “healthy forces” and the end of the reformist movement, the plenum resulted in a compromise that fell short of the expectations of the “Five.” By way of reaction, the political pressure against the CPČ was stepped up. See Lutz Priess et al., Die SED und der “Prager Frühling” 1968: Politik gegen einen “Sozialismus mit menschlichem Antlitz” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 156–57. In the Kremlin, expectations during the run-up to the plenum were low. See Prozumenshchikov, “Inside the Politburo,” in this volume.

39. See Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 271.

40. For details, see Dubček’s memoirs, where he repeats he was convinced the conference did not take place in the ČSSR. See Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 282.

41. This is also mentioned by Dubček in his autobiography: “Finally Černík entered the room, and the whole scene had to be repeated for him.” See Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 287.

42. According to Dubček, it was not Černík who had suggested that the 14th Party Congress should be treated as irregular. See Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 288. The minutes are inconclusive on this point. See Document 32/2.

43. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 288.

44. Pauer, Prag 1968, 288.

45. See Arbeiter-Zeitung, 24 August 1968, 1; Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe, 172–73; Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 294.

46. Brezhnev and Svoboda had met at the end of the war. Svoboda was commander in chief of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps, which fought side by side with the Soviets. For details, see Michael Morozow, Leonid Breschnew, Biographie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973).

47. RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 198, pp. 2, 7–11, Politburo resolution of the CC CPSU P 96 (IV), “On the Instructions to the Soviet Ambassador in Prague,” 19 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #66.

48. See, for instance, his report to the CC CPSU, RGANI, F. 89, op. 61, d. 5, pp. 1–60, “Report of the Head of the KGB, Y. Andropov, to the CC CPSU on the Activities of the Counterrevolutionary Underground in the ČSSR,” 13 October 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #121.

49. Pauer, Prag 1968, 256–57.

50. “Svoboda and I were linked by years of a cordial relationship and had great respect for one another. We agreed on practically all matters regarding the ‘Prague Spring’; Svoboda was an upright supporter of our reforms.” Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 290.

51. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19, stenographic transcripts of the talks between the Soviet leadership with the president of the ČSSR, L. Svoboda, and M. Klusák, 23 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #107 (partially reprinted in appendix 8 of this volume); Pauer, Prag 1968, 289. Pauer was not yet able to make use of these stenographic transcripts. In his analysis, he nevertheless came to the correct conclusion that Svoboda considered the Party Congress irregular but wanted this assessment to be validated by the party delegation. Svoboda’s role needs to be reassessed in light of the sources now accessible. Up to now it had to be assumed that he was a fervent advocate before the Soviet leadership for Dubček and Černík keeping their posts. This is not borne out by the evidence, as will be shown in greater detail below. It was not until Svoboda had learned from Brezhnev that the Kremlin did not doubt that Dubček was an essential ingredient in the “normalization” of the situation in the ČSSR or that at least normalization could only be achieved at a disproportionately high cost without him that Svoboda began to argue in favor of Dubček and joined the Soviet leaders in the search for the best “solution.” Bil’ak, too, seems to have got wind of the idea to oust Dubček during a visit he paid Svoboda and to have come out vehemently against it for the following reasons: Dubček should not be accorded martyr status and he should be “made to face the music.” Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe, 183. Pauer inferred from the stenographic transcript of Kosygin’s talk with the “fraternal parties” that Svoboda had signaled his distrust of Dubček. Pauer, Prag 1968, 319.

52. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19 (cf. note 51).

53. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19.

54. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19.

55. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19; cf. also Pauer, Prag 1968, 289

56. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19 (cf. note 51). See also Rüdiger Wenzke, “Die Nationale Volksarmee der DDR. Kein Einsatz in Prag,” in Karner et al., Beiträge. According to Gomułka, the NVA, the GDR’s National People’s Army, was kept back at the express wish of the group around Bil’ak and Indra. Cf. Pauer, Prag 1968, 229.

57. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19 (cf. note 51).

58. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 19–61, stenographic transcripts of the talks of the Soviet leadership with the president of the ČSSR, L. Svoboda, 23 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #108. Only fragmentary excerpts of the transcripts have been available up to now. They were published in Czech in Vondrová and Navrátil, Mezinárodní souvislosti československé krize, 250–53; in English in Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968, 469–71; Pauer did not even have access to these excerpts. His analyses, therefore, had to make do with the memoirs of Bil’ak and comparable sources. Pauer, Prag 1968, 289–91.

59. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 19–61 (cf. note 58).

60. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 19–61.

61. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 19–61.

62. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 19–61.

63. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 19–61. This was a risk Brezhnev was not prepared to take. “One had to assume that the right would gain the upper hand there.” SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 212–61, minutes of the talks between the CPSU and the “fraternal parties,” 28 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #109; Bil’ak directed him into the direction desired by the Kremlin. Bil’ak, Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe, 176–78.

64. Brezhnev mentioned to the representatives of the “fraternal parties” on the following day, 24 August 1968, that he had spoken twice with Dubček and Černík. For details, see below. It may be assumed with a probability bordering on certainty that no minutes were kept during the second conversation—if there was one.

65. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 291.

66. The clue is Brezhnev’s statement on the following day in his meeting with the CP leaders of the “fraternal countries”: “We spoke with them twice yesterday.” SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 212–61 (cf. note 63).

67. Prager Schwarzbuch, 80.

68. Walter Ulbricht had left Berlin for Moscow around midnight on 23 August 1968 accompanied by Willi Stoph and Erich Honecker. Priess et al., Die SED und der “Prager Frühling” 1968, 261.

69. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 212–61 (cf. note 63); Pauer, Prag 1968, 308–10.

70. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 212–61 (cf. note 63).

71. On this point, see the minutes of the talks between the Soviet leadership and Svoboda on the previous day referred to by Brezhnev in this context, RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 57, pp. 1–19 (cf. note 51).

72. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 212–61 (cf. note 63). Gomułka used the same argument after his return to Warsaw to explain why Dubček had not been ousted from his post. Pauer conjectures that in Gomułka’s thinking his own experience played an important role. Pauer, Prag 1968, 311.

73. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, 212–61. The talks ended at 11:50 a.m., almost an hour and a half behind schedule.

74. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 58, pp. 1–30, stenographic transcripts of the negotiations in Moscow between the leaders of the USSR, L. I. Brezhnev, A. N. Kosygin, and N. V. Podgornyi, and the leaders of the ČSSR, J. Smrkovský, J. Špaček, and B. Šimon, 24 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #110. On the talks, see also Pauer, Prag 1968, 306; the stenographic transcripts were, however, not accessible to Pauer at the time he wrote his book.

75. A MZV, Tlg. došlé, 7868/1968, telegram of the Czechoslovak ambassador in Moscow, V. Koucký, with a message from L. Svoboda to L. Štrougal, 24 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #111.

76. Prager Schwarzbuch, 84.

77. For details, see Pauer, Prag 1968, 312.

78. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, 314.

79. Indra did not return to Prague until 28 September 1968, in Arbeiter-Zeitung, 29 September 1968, 1; Mlynař, Nachtfrost, 284, 297, 309; Pauer believes that the pro-Soviet side may have engineered Indra’s disappearance for tactical reasons. Pauer, Prag 1968, 306.

80. RGANI, F. 89, op. 38, d. 60, pp. 1–39, 57–58, stenographic transcript of the talks between the delegation of the Politburo CC CPSU and the presidium of the CC KPČ and the president of the ČSSR, L. Svoboda, 26 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #114.

81. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3621, pp. 212–61, minutes of the talks between the CPSU and the “fraternal parties,” 25 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #113. For details see Pauer, Prag 1968, 319–20.

82. Vojtěch Mencl, “Die Unterdrückung des ‘Prager Frühlings,’” Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (1995): 9–31. The so-called Moscow Protocol has been reprinted several times in the literature, for example in Mlynař, Nachtfrost, 342–46.

83. On the “negotiations” from 25 August onward and the differences within the Czechoslovak delegation, see Pauer’s extremely well documented analysis: Pauer, Prag 1968, 312–26.