The distinction that was now drawn between the discredited Stalinism of Novotny’s generation and the renewed idealism of the Dubcek era, was widely accepted—even, indeed especially, by Party members.[187] As Jiri Pelikan asserted, in his preface to yet a third report on the Czech political trials (commissioned in 1968 by Dubcek but suppressed after his fall) ‘the Communist Party had won tremendous popularity and prestige, the people had spontaneously declared themselves for socialism’.[188] That is perhaps a little hyperbolic, but it was not wildly out of line with contemporary opinion. And this, in turn, nourished a second illusion.
If the people believed the Party could save Socialism from its history, so the Party leadership came to suppose that they could manage this without losing control of the country. A new government headed by Oldrich Cernik was installed on April 18th and, encouraged by huge public demonstrations of affection and support (notably in the traditional May Day celebrations), it relaxed virtually all formal controls on public expressions of opinion. On June 26th censorship of press and media was formally abolished. The same day it was announced that Czechoslovakia was to become a genuinely federal state, comprising a Czech Socialist republic and a Slovak Socialist republic (this was the
But having relaxed all controls on opinion, the Communist leadership was now pressed from every side to pursue the logic of its actions. Why wait ten years for free and open elections? Now that censorship had been abolished, why retain formal control and ownership of the media? On June 27th
Dubcek rejected Vaculik’s manifesto and its implication that the Communists should abandon their monopoly of power. As a lifelong Communist he would not countenance this crucial qualitative shift (‘bourgeois pluralism’) and anyway saw no need to do so. For Dubcek the Party itself was the only appropriate vehicle for radical change if the vital attributes of a Socialist system were to be preserved. The more popular the Party, the more changes it could safely institute. But as Vaculik’s manifesto made cruelly clear, the Party’s popularity and its credibility would increasingly rest upon its willingness to pursue changes that might ultimately drive it from power. The fault line between a Communist state and an open society was now fully exposed.
And this, in turn, directed national attention in the summer of 1968 to the third illusion, the most dangerous of all: Dubcek’s conviction that he could keep Moscow at bay, that he would succeed in assuring his Soviet comrades that they had nothing to fear from events in Czechoslovakia—indeed, that they had everything to gain from the newfound popularity of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the renewed faith in a rejuvenated socialist project. If Dubcek made this mortal miscalculation it was above all because the Czech reformers had crucially misinterpreted the lesson of 1956. Imre Nagy’s mistake, they thought, had been his departure from the Warsaw Pact and declaration of Hungarian neutrality. So long as Czechoslovakia stayed firmly in the Pact and unambiguously allied to Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues would surely leave them alone.
But by 1968, the Soviet Union was worried less about military security than the Party’s loss of monopoly control. As early as March 21st, at a meeting of the Soviet Politburo, Ukrainian Party leader Petro Shelest was complaining of contamination from the Czechoslovak example: rumors from Prague were having an adverse impact on the mood among young Ukrainians, he reported. Polish and East German leaders made similar remonstrations to their Soviet colleagues at a meeting in Dresden the same month (Gomulka, with his own troubles at home, was especially angered by public criticism in Prague at Poland’s turn to anti-Semitism). Unbeknownst to Prague, the KGB chief Yuri Andropov was already speaking of a possible need for ‘concrete military measures’; and in April Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko was quietly authorized to draw up a contingent plan for military operations in Czechoslovakia—a first draft of what would become ‘Operation Danube’.
With every liberalizing step in Prague, Moscow grew ever more uneasy. Dubcek must have been aware of this: on May 4th-5th he and other Czech Communists visited Moscow and were presented by Eastern bloc leaders with a menu of complaints about developments in their country. But while Dubcek continued to insist that the Party had everything under control, and that however free Czech speech became there was no question of the country breaking with its fraternal obligations, the reliability of the Czech army was now coming into question, and the uncensored Czech press was publishing Soviet dissidents. Russian students visiting Prague could now read and hear people and opinions long since banned at home. Prague was becoming a window into the West.
By July 1968, Moscow had come to the conclusion that events in Prague were spinning out of the Party’s control—and so, indeed, they may have been. At a meeting in Moscow on July 14th of Party leaders from the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary—but not the Czechs themselves—it was agreed to send a fraternal Letter to the Czechoslovak Party warning it of the risk of counter-revolution and listing measures that needed to be taken: ‘The situation in Czechoslovakia jeopardizes the common vital interests of other socialist countries.’ Two weeks later the Soviet and Czech leaders met on the Czechoslovak-Soviet frontier, at Cierna nad Tisou, and Dubcek tried once again to convince Brezhnev that the Communist Party was not jeopardizing its position by enacting reforms, but was actually strengthening its public support.
The Soviet leader was not merely unconvinced; he came away increasingly skeptical of Dubcek’s prospects. The Warsaw Pact announced forthcoming maneuvers near the Czech border. At a Warsaw Pact meeting in Bratislava on August 3rd (which Romania’s Ceausescu declined to attend), Brezhnev propounded the Doctrine that would henceforth be associated with his name: ‘Each Communist party is free to apply the principles of Marxism- Leninism and socialism in its own country, but it is not free to deviate from these principles if it is to remain a Communist party… The weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, and they cannot look indifferently upon this.’
This pronouncement, a lightly veiled assertion of the Kremlin’s right to act
The Soviet decision to invade Czechoslovakia was not formally taken until August 18th. Brezhnev seems to have been reluctant—intuitively sensing that however easy the victory, its aftershocks might prove troublesome— but it had become all but inevitable well before then. The Soviet leaders anticipated that the forthcoming 14th Czechoslovak Communist Party Congress might see a definitive take-over by the Party’s reformist wing, and they were by now truly frightened of the infectious impact of the Czech example upon its neighbors. As Grechko put it when informing the assembled Soviet military leaders of the decision to invade: ‘The invasion will take place even if it leads to a third world war.’ But the Soviet leaders knew perfectly well that there was no such risk, and not just because Washington had its hands full in Vietnam. Just five weeks earlier, Washington and Moscow had co-signed a Treaty of Nuclear Non-proliferation; the US was not about to jeopardize such gains for the sake of a few million misguided Czechs. And so, on August 21st 1968, 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops from Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the DDR and the Soviet Union marched into Czechoslovakia.[190]
The invasion met some passive resistance and quite a lot of street protests, especially in Prague; but at the urgent behest of the Czech government it was otherwise unopposed. The unfriendly reception was a source of some surprise to the Soviet leadership, who had been led to expect that their tanks would encounter widespread support. Having at first arrested Dubcek and his leading colleagues, flown them to Moscow and obliged them to sign a paper renouncing parts of their program and agreeing to the Soviet occupation of their country, the Kremlin was now perforce obliged to accept that the reformers had the support of the Czech and Slovak people and allow them to retain formal charge of their country, at least for the moment. It was clearly imprudent to do
