Cold War

A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years [and] fought side by side with the Allies . . . must be free and independent.

—Declaration of Independence, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, September 2, 1945

The Great Power game . . . had distorted the social-political development of the Middle East.

Two overfed world powers have converted stupidity into armored divisions and atomic warheads. And we sit in between. . . . At last we have understood the lesson of Prague.

The storied half decade between 1963 and 1968 witnessed a fundamental change in the Cold War. The two main contestants were faced with new actors and new issues unanticipated in 1945, including a revived and restive Europe and a nuclear-armed France and China as well as even more independent Third World leaders. There was also the global impact of the postwar baby boom in which a generation raised in an ideologically divided world began to challenge Cold War ideas and structures.

By the mid-1960s the Superpowers were experiencing the limits of their economic strength. The vast US and Soviet expenditures on their conventional and nuclear forces, ambitious space programs, and growing weaponry deliveries to their allies and overseas clients increasingly diverted capital from civilian investment—particularly from education, social services, public health, and infrastructure projects such as mass transportation—and promoted inflation (which the Soviets were better able to hide), leading to the erosion of the quality of public life in both the West and the East.

The United States too was experiencing economic problems, having lost its postwar dominance of world trade to new rivals. The reduction of tariffs within Europe’s Common Market and the rising productivity of its members contributed to America’s mounting dollar gap with Western Europe. The entry into the US market of the homely and highly popular Volkswagen Beetle signaled a challenge to the powerful automobile industry. Ex-enemy Japan, with its highly organized links between business and government and its freedom from a major defense burden, was becoming Asia’s foremost economic power, which, by the mid-1960s, had also begun to reverse its trade balance with the United States.

The world of the 1960s witnessed fighting on almost every continent. The brutal civil wars in the Congo, Indonesia, and Nigeria and the border wars between India and its neighbors drew in outside powers but were containable. However, the decade’s three major crises—the US war in Vietnam, the June 1967 Middle East war, and the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring—emphasized the dangers of the new multipolar world. All three involved bold local actors and indirect forms of combat that Washington and Moscow strove to keep in bounds.

Political conditions on the other side had also changed significantly as a result of the Sino-Soviet rupture. In the late 1950s Mao, resentful of Moscow’s refusal to support China’s atomic weapons program, condemned Khrushchev’s abandonment of the doctrine of revolutionary warfare and his pursuit of peaceful coexistence. Khrushchev, a critic of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and belligerence toward his neighbors, in 1960 suddenly withdrew Soviet experts and reduced Soviet assistance to China. After the split became public at the Twenty-Second Soviet Party Congress in October 1961, Mao openly mocked Khrushchev’s retreat over the Cuban missile crisis, complained of Moscow’s pro–New Delhi stance during the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict, and denounced the test-ban treaty as a means of preventing China from developing its own nuclear weapons. By the end of 1963 the two communist giants were openly competing for leadership of the revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

North Vietnam, caught between its two rival patrons whose differences it had failed to resolve, chose initially in the summer of 1963 to side with nearby China over the more distant Soviet Union; Beijing responded with promises of full support against US aggression. North Vietnam’s decision coincided with the growing political crisis in the south that climaxed in the November coup and murder of Di

m. Hanoi now had to decide between continuing its cautious infiltration policy aimed at creating a neutral South Vietnam that would eventually unite with the north (which Moscow and Beijing had supported) and an interventionist policy that risked a war with the United States. In early 1964, after deciding to conduct large-scale operations, Hanoi developed plans to send whole regiments of troops and supplies over the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam.

Three months before the presidential election Johnson had already obtained his justification for going to war. From the beginning of 1964 the US military had taken over direction of the CIA/South Vietnamese covert commando attacks against North Vietnam as well as naval intelligence gathering in the coastal areas (known as the DeSoto Program). On August 1, 1964, shortly after a South Vietnamese commando attack on two islands, the US destroyer Maddox entered the Gulf of Tonkin for the purpose of collecting electronic intelligence. The next day, as it approached the island of Hon Me, it encountered three North Vietnamese torpedo boats whose signals had been intercepted. The Maddox fired, damaging only one of them. Two days later, the Maddox, now joined by a second intelligence vessel, C. Turner Joy, again fired on what appeared to be approaching enemy ships, although no evidence has ever been found of a second North Vietnamese interception.

Although neither US ship had been hit and there were no casualties, Johnson immediately ordered a retaliatory bombing raid against North Vietnamese naval bases. Evoking America’s dread of surprise assaults, Johnson appealed for public support against an “unprovoked attack” in international waters. After Defense Secretary Robert McNamara assured Congress that the US Navy had “played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any,” Johnson on August 7, 1964, won near-unanimous Senate approval for a resolution authorizing him to use US armed force to defend the freedom of South Vietnam, a measure his administration had prepared earlier in the spring. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution enabled Johnson to spurn proposals that fall for another Geneva conference to achieve a negotiated settlement over Vietnam.

Map 10. Major sites of the US war in Vietnam, 1964–1973.

Shortly after his overwhelming electoral victory, Johnson moved quickly to rescue South Vietnam from an imminent collapse. In 1965 he launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and by the end of the year he had dispatched 180,000 combat troops as well. Although this dramatic escalation contained several cautious elements,* Johnson had transformed South Vietnam into a Cold War struggle and one of the longest and most divisive wars in US history.

Johnson’s decision was based on several problematic assumptions. The first was that the American people—stirred by Kennedy’s ringing rhetoric but also increasingly sensitive to social and economic injustices in America and around the globe—would sustain a prolonged, distant, and costly war on behalf of an unpopular client regime and against a nationalist movement seeking to unify the country. The second was that Washington’s allies would endorse a struggle that diverted America’s attention and shrinking resources from the defense of Europe. And the third was that the Soviet Union—now in open competition with China, which strongly supported North Vietnam—would remain on the sidelines.

Even more crucial was his fourth assumption: that the North Vietnamese leadership would succumb to US power and abandon their resolve to unify the entire country. Instead North Vietnam, stung by the initial successes of US troops (which by the end of 1967 had reached a half million soldiers) and the installation of the strongman General Nguyn Văn Thiu as South Vietnam’s president, disregarded Beijing’s and Moscow’s advice to conduct guerrilla warfare and aimed at a conventional military victory. On January 30, 1968, the first day of Tet (the lunar New Year festival), the North Vietnamese offensive began, spreading by April to the entire country (including attacks on the US embassy and the presidential palace), and continuing until August. Despite its ultimate military setback, heavy losses—some fifty thousand deaths—and failure to foment an uprising against the Thiu regime, North Vietnam had achieved a major propaganda and political triumph. The searing images of Saigon and Hue and of dozens of seized provincial capitals—widely disseminated in the US press and on television—stunned the American public, belying the Johnson administration’s predictions of a winnable war.*

Facing mounting criticism from America’s Cold War architects and from Congress, the press, and the public—as well as damage to his Great Society program—Johnson now recognized that he could neither send more troops nor bomb North Vietnam into submission and became the first US president to leave office over an unwinnable Third World conflict. On March 31, 1968, Johnson issued the startling announcement of his withdrawal as a candidate for reelection and the discontinuation of the bombing. He also offered unconditional peace negotiations, which an exhausted North Vietnam readily accepted. The Republican candidate Richard Nixon was victorious in November largely because of his offer of a peace plan that would end America’s costly and disruptive war, although under his leadership the United States would remain there for four even more costly and divisive years.

The US military intervention in Vietnam had a major effect on global politics. Antiwar movements developed rapidly in America, with young people burning their draft cards, fleeing the country, or serving jail sentences rather than go to Vietnam. By October 1965 protest demonstrations in forty American cities had spread to Europe and Asia. Critics of the war condemned America’s atrocities against the civilian population—North and South—and its use of chemical weapons, and they called for an immediate US withdrawal. Antiwar activists derided Washington’s claim of battling Chinese communism to save Asians from tyranny, and deplored America’s opposition to the Third World’s struggle for independence. To the generation raised after World War II and the Holocaust, America’s professions of defending freedom through its unbridled use of arms, air power, napalm, and Agent Orange against a tiny, tenacious people and its support of a corrupt and repressive puppet government rang increasingly hollow.

The escalation of the Vietnam War created a major challenge for the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin, who witnessed the US bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in February 1965, drastically increased deliveries of monetary aid, supplies, technical manpower, and missiles. Although by 1968 Soviet and Warsaw Pact members’ aid to North Vietnam exceeded China’s, the USSR had little control over its ally and was locked into a competition with Beijing. Moreover, Moscow’s involvement in the Vietnam War had stifled its overtures for détente and disarmament with the United States.

The Soviet Union’s increasing support of Hanoi (including the pledge that its nuclear arsenal would deter a US invasion and a nuclear attack on North Vietnam) also had several advantages. One was as an investment in a future Soviet presence in Southeast Asia. Second was the bolstering of the USSR’s global image as a champion of national liberation movements. And third were the strategic and diplomatic benefits: a struggle that tied the United States down in Southeast Asia gave the Kremlin more freedom to act in other parts of the world and also to extract diplomatic concessions from Washington. Nonetheless, the Kremlin, concerned that the war might escalate into a larger East-West conflict, began working behind the scenes in 1968 to bring the parties to the negotiating table. But the Soviet Union’s two-pronged policy—continuing to lavishly supply Hanoi while working for a peace settlement—exasperated the Chinese and the United States.

China’s role in the Vietnam War was also a difficult one. Despite the economic ravages of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, China provided substantial manpower and materiel aid, assisted in major infrastructure and defense projects, and pledged to repulse a US/South Vietnamese invasion, only to share the Kremlin’s inability to control North Vietnam’s decision making. Moreover, beneath their comradeship in arms was the long-standing Chinese-Vietnamese rivalry over the future control of Indochina as well as memories of centuries of Chinese occupation made manifest in the strict limits placed on Chinese personnel by the North Vietnamese government. By 1966 Beijing was bristling over the rapprochement between Hanoi and Moscow, which was now providing advanced weaponry and, with its Security Council seat and diplomatic relations with Washington, representing North Vietnam to large parts of the world.

Predictably Mao expressed displeasure with Hanoi’s agreement to commence negotiations with Washington in 1968 and withdrew the bulk of Chinese forces from North Vietnam. Nonetheless Johnson’s startling announcement—coupled with China’s deteriorating situation at home and its worsening relations with Hanoi and Moscow—would pave the way for Mao’s decision a year later to normalize relations with Washington.

JUNE 1967: THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR

The Arab-Israeli War in June 1967 was another local struggle that drew in the Superpowers but eluded their control. Israel’s unexpectedly swift and overwhelming victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, followed by the UN’s failure to repeat its 1956 peacemaking role, changed the Middle East and the Cold War. To be sure, the principal actors who lit the fuse were also unprepared for the momentous consequences.

The antecedents of the 1967 war were several. The Palestinian problem fed the regional hostility to Israel, which had developed into a strong, prosperous, and Western-oriented state that physically divided the Arab world. Eighteen years after Israel’s military triumph in 1948–1949, more than 1.3 million Palestinian refugees remained dispersed throughout the Middle East, 39 percent housed in UN-administered refugee camps. Under Egyptian sponsorship the Palestinian cause was taken up in 1964 during the first summit conference of the Arab League, which called for the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Although the Palestinians remained politically divided, they supported the PLO charter that called for the destruction of Israel.

In 1966 the Ba’ath regime in Syria—the Soviet Union’s newest Middle East client—replaced Egypt as the Palestinians’ principal sponsor and Israel’s foremost antagonist. The Damascus regime armed Palestinian militants for border attacks on Israel, which generally originated across the more porous Jordanian border.* Middle East tensions escalated dramatically in April 1967, when Israeli pilots downed seven Syrian MiGs in an air battle over Damascus. Five weeks later, Syrian defense minister Hafez al-Assad warned Egypt that Israel’s troops were massing on Syria’s border in preparation for an invasion.

Nasser (who was beset with internal difficulties as well as a long, ruinous war in South Yemen and quarrels with Saudi Arabia and Iran) was roused by the alarm, which was reinforced by a similar message from Moscow. The Egyptian leader decided to seize the moment to refute domestic and foreign charges of his apathy toward Israeli aggression and to assert his leadership over the Arab cause. To reassure Syria and deter Israel, Nasser ordered Egyptian troops into the Sinai. When UN secretary general U Thant refused a partial removal of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) that for ten years had separated Egypt from Israel, Nasser ordered UNEF’s complete withdrawal and on May 22, 1967, announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. With these bold actions, accompanied by belligerent speeches to rally the Egyptian population, Nasser crossed the boundary between peace and war.

Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol, an elderly moderate, was now engulfed by his country’s fear and war fever as well as by a serious economic recession. Although Israel was legally entitled to use force to keep the strait open, he recognized the danger of acting alone. He too ordered mobilization on May 16, but he also appealed for Washington’s support against Nasser, who was threatening “to drive Israel into the sea” and return the Palestinians to their homeland.

The Arabs looked to the Soviet Union for support. Kosygin and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, in search of political influence and naval bases in the eastern Mediterranean, had been generously supplying Syria and Egypt with arms and aid and echoing their criticisms of Israel. But although at least one US intelligence source suspected that the Kremlin’s warning to Egypt had been aimed at creating still another trouble spot for Washington, it is doubtful that Moscow’s cautious rulers intended to unleash a Middle East war and risk another confrontation with the United States.

President Johnson, overwhelmed by Vietnam and constrained by congressional opposition to undertaking any further military action, acted promptly to restrain Israel from attacking Egypt or Syria and thereby drawing the United States into the conflict. To sweeten the pill, Johnson sent the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean, approved a substantial military assistance package for Israel on May 23, and also tried to assemble an international flotilla to open the Strait of Tiran. But by the end of May, after King Hussein of Jordan had placed his army under Egyptian control and Nasser refused to back down, Johnson changed the red light to yellow. Although discounting Israeli reports of an imminent Egyptian attack, Johnson recognized that the delay he had imposed on the frightened, fully mobilized country could no longer be prolonged. In a fatalist mood reminiscent of statesmen on the eve of World War I, the US president took no steps to halt the Israeli attack, which he learned of twenty-four hours in advance.

The war was unexpectedly short. Early in the morning on June 5, Israel’s air force attacked Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian airfields, destroying the bulk of their craft, which were still mostly on the ground. The Israeli army then went on to conquer Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt before capturing East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. In just six days Israel had tripled its size, and the Arabs faced the greatest military disaster in their modern history. The Superpowers also faced a setback, having exposed their inability to control their clients. During the brief but bloody conflict Johnson and Kosygin had made energetic use of the hotline between Washington and Moscow in an attempt to achieve a cease-fire, which was delayed until Israel had taken the Golan on June 10.

Map 11. Israeli conquests in the Sinai, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

Once more the scene shifted to the United Nations, but the result was far different than in 1956. This time the United States prevented the Arabs from branding Israel as the aggressor and placed no pressure on Israel to withdraw. The Soviet Union acquiesced. On November 24, 1967, after two weeks of difficult deliberations, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242, a British-drafted compromise that reflected Israel’s lopsided victory, linking any withdrawal from the occupied territories with its neighbors’ willingness to make peace and recognize its 1949 borders (which became known as “land for peace”), affirming the necessity of “freedom of navigation through international waterways,” and, ignoring the Palestinians, simply calling for a “just settlement of the refugee problem.”

Stifled by the Superpowers, the Arabs took matters into their own hands. Egypt and Syria broke off diplomatic relations with Washington, which they accused of colluding in the Israeli attack. In the summer of 1967 Middle Eastern oil producers imposed a second boycott, this time against the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany, which had allegedly provided arms to Israel. And the Arab League summit meeting in Khartoum adopted a resolution on September 1 refusing direct negotiations with a triumphant Israel and insisting on “the rights of the Palestinians in their own country.” Behind the scenes, however, a chastened Nasser, defying the Arab militants, had held out the prospect of indirect peace talks through a UN mediator and an informal acceptance of Israel’s existence. Nonetheless, Israeli leaders, flush with victory, took Khartoum’s “three noes” (no peace treaty, no direct negotiations, no de jure recognition) at face value.

While the Israeli public exulted in its deliverance from Nasser’s threats and the liberation of the holy places in Jerusalem and the West Bank that Jordan had seized during the 1948 war, the Eshkol government was hesitant over the next steps. Israel faced not only the problem of controlling a territory three times its former size and the responsibility for one million more Palestinian Arabs but also the prospect of an unremitting confrontation with its neighbors. A tiny minority advocating withdrawal (among them former prime minister David Ben Gurion) was quickly overpowered by the politicians and generals, who argued the value of strategic depth and of holding on to the territories in exchange for full peace and recognition. In the heady days of 1967 there was also an explosion of national sentiment—secular as well as religious—in favor of a Greater Israel that included East Jerusalem and all the land to the Jordan River. Scarcely noticed at the time was the emergence of the Palestinians as an independent political movement prepared to use violence to assert their disregarded national claims.

Outside the Middle East, Israel’s supporters generally celebrated its survival and its lightning victory. To be sure, some leftist critics in Western Europe deplored Israel’s resort to war in June 1967, its territorial conquests, and the creation of a new wave of Palestinian refugees who had fled the West Bank. Moreover, the June war had rent NATO’s unity. Facing a dangerous eruption on its vulnerable southern flank, the alliance had been badly split, with France condemning Israel, the Netherlands defending it, and West Germany, frightened of a new threat to Berlin, announcing its neutrality.*

The year 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, was a grim one for Moscow. In Asia the Indonesian communists and their sympathizers had been decimated, and the United States was still asserting its military strength in Vietnam; in Europe Romania had essentially severed its ties with the Warsaw Pact; and in the Middle East the Soviet Union had sustained an unexpected blow to its arms and diplomacy, hyperbolically termed by one of its envoys “one of the greatest defeats in our history.”^† Mao lost no time in taunting Khrushchev’s successors for betraying their Arab allies and caving in to US pressure at the United Nations.

The Kremlin wavered between restraint and assertiveness. At great cost, the Soviet Union dispatched replacement military supplies to Egypt and Syria, but it also decided to impose some fetters on its risk-taking clients, limiting the flow of offensive weapons, placing Soviet advisers in control of Arab troops and advanced armaments, and discouraging Arab leaders from provoking another war to regain their lost territories. But Soviet cautiousness had its political limits: the politburo’s ideologues insisted on compensating for the USSR’s military inaction during the June 1967 war by severing diplomatic relations with Israel, thereby freezing Soviet diplomacy in the Middle East and making it hostage to Arab radicalism.*

At home, the USSR launched an anti-Zionist campaign aimed at intimidating Soviet and East European Jews who had rejoiced in Israel’s victory. The KGB operation also led to a wave of Jewish emigration from Poland. But the campaign badly backfired. It not only failed to quench the newfound pride of millions of Jews living under communism but also raised strong disapproval in the West and charges of antisemitism and sparked a global movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Despite Moscow’s vituperation against the Jews, Soviet and East European dissidents were also buoyed by plucky Israel’s challenge to Soviet might.

Ostensibly the United States was a victor in the June 1967 war.^† The huge caches of captured Soviet arms provided NATO with a treasure trove of information. Thanks to America’s actions, the conflict had been brief and localized. The propaganda benefits were also considerable: a small, courageous nation had stood up to a communist-inspired threat, and the Soviet Union, although still in the Middle East and now with access to naval bases in Syria and Egypt, had suffered a major blow to its resources and prestige.

Cooler observers in Washington also recognized that Israel’s overwhelming victory had failed to solve the region’s problems and had only bought time. In the meantime, an important ally was about to retire from the scene. In 1966, the cash-strapped Labour government—without consulting Washington—announced the withdrawal of British forces east of Suez, from Aden and from Persian Gulf bases in 1971, placing the sole burden for protecting the Middle East against Soviet or Chinese-supported movements on the United States. But the Cold Warriors who dominated the Johnson administration, mistaking a military verdict for a long-term solution, were unable to grasp the brief opportunity in the summer and fall of 1967 to exert pressure on both the Arabs and the Israelis to come to the peace table. And while Johnson quickly turned his attention back to Vietnam, the rivals’ positions hardened and festered.

PRAGUE: AUGUST 1968

Even after the building of the Berlin Wall, the West did not cease its efforts to overcome the Iron Curtain. Among the most avid advocates was French president Charles de Gaulle. Although he had stood staunchly behind the United States over Berlin, de Gaulle was fundamentally opposed to Europe’s division into two hostile blocs dominated by the Superpowers. Thus, in March 1966 he suddenly announced France’s withdrawal of its land and air forces from the NATO military command and ordered the removal of the alliance’s headquarters and US and Canadian military bases from French territory. Three months later de Gaulle paid a celebrated state visit to Moscow seeking to resurrect Franco-Russian ties and reduce Cold War tensions in Europe. Soviet leaders, who warmly welcomed their renegade visitor, nonetheless recognized that the French president’s longterm goals—German unification, greater autonomy for their satellites in Eastern Europe, and a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals”—were incompatible with Moscow’s fundamental interest in maintaining the status quo.

West Germany, with seventeen million countrymen behind the Iron Curtain and an isolated outpost in West Berlin, had an even greater stake than France in reducing tensions in Europe. But until Adenauer left the chancellorship in October 1963, Bonn had adhered to an inflexible Cold War line that had alienated Moscow and its allies: refusing to recognize the GDR and ostracizing every country (except the USSR) that had relations with the East German government, which it scathingly termed the “so-called GDR”; refusing to recognize the post–World War II boundaries with Poland and Czechoslovakia; and insisting on German unification as the precondition for any form of European détente. However, once Adenauer departed, his Conservative successors changed the tone, hastening to conclude economic agreements with four of the FRG’s eastern neighbors. Even more pointedly, Willy Brandt, the Social Democrat opposition leader and West Berlin mayor, now openly advocated an Ostpolitik: a new policy that radically changed Bonn’s relationship with the East, replacing confrontation with accommodation and acceptance, and placing European reconciliation before German unification.

Soviet leaders were unreceptive to West Germany’s overtures. Moscow recognized that any steps toward accommodation with Bonn would dismay its East German, Polish, and Czech comrades, who had dutifully imitated the Kremlin’s diatribes against the FRG’s obsession with its lost territories and inclusion of former Nazis in key positions along with its nuclear ambitions, aid to Israel, and subservience to Washington. After Brandt failed to win the chancellorship in 1966, the USSR kept West Germany’s Grand Coalition government (headed by the ex-Nazi Kurt-Georg Kiesinger and with Brandt as foreign minister) at arm’s length.

On entering office US president Lyndon B. Johnson had also endorsed a policy of “building bridges” with Eastern Europe, and in 1966 he called for peaceful engagement to bring about greater freedom for the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Although Brezhnev had lashed out at Washington and Bonn’s ambitions to undermine socialism, the Warsaw Pact took note of these overtures and in July 1966 declared its desire for détente. And that year, NATO in celebration of its twentieth anniversary commissioned a study that would integrate the defense of Western Europe with the prospect of expanding cooperation with the East.*

Behind the Berlin Wall there were societies in ferment, chafing at the economic slowdown and the Communist Party’s heavy hand over the courts, the press, culture, and society. The population of Eastern Europe, which for more than a decade had been mobilized to declare its solidarity with the downtrodden people in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, was still heavily controlled in its freedom of thought, expression, association, and travel, and lived under governments that obediently followed Moscow’s orders. By the mid-1960s the thaw, which had begun but was then halted by Khrushchev, flowed again in Eastern Europe in a remarkable outpouring of film, literature, art, and music.^† In addition, a slight loosening of travel restrictions allowed selected citizens to go abroad for study and tourism that, along with the introduction of television, gradually opened a window to the West. But while Eastern Europe’s writers railed against their governments’ censorship, ordinary people simply longed for Western blue jeans, rock music, and soft drinks and for a beach holiday in a place other than the Black Sea.

Czechoslovakia, with its strong communist tradition, had been the most loyal of satellites. Two years after Stalin’s death it had erected the world’s largest monument to the Soviet dictator only to dismantle it seven years later—the last to do so. Testifying to Czechoslovakia’s reliability, no Soviet troops were stationed on its soil, despite the fact that it bordered on two noncommunist countries, produced the bloc’s most advanced armaments, possessed considerable quantities of uranium, and was a prospective site for Soviet nuclear weapons. Earlier, Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party chief, Antonín Novotny, an old-style Stalinist, had opposed Khrushchev’s reforms and refused to rehabilitate Stalin’s victims. Until the end of 1967 Novotny had also ignored Czechoslovakia’s economic woes and his Slovak comrades’ resentment of Prague’s domination.

Brezhnev, gambling that a party shake-up would strengthen Czechoslovakia, in early 1968 approved the appointment of Alexander Dubček, a forty-six-year-old Slovak who believed deeply in socialism and in friendship with the Soviet Union. But as in Hungary twelve years earlier, events spun out of control. Dubček’s selection of political and economic reformers to head the government, followed immediately by the lifting of censorship, caused an eruption of anticommunist sentiments throughout the country and calls for a free market and democracy.*

Even more menacing to Soviet interests was the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s April Action Program, which envisaged “socialism with a human face”: without relinquishing its leading role, it endorsed freedom of speech, the press, and association; working in partnership with other parties; promoting reforms in the justice system; and handing greater control over the economy to the parliament. In June, during the selection of delegates for the Extraordinary Party Congress that was expected to ratify this radical program in September, the dissident writer Ludvik Vaculík, in his fiery “Two Thousand Words” manifesto, urged the entire nation to rally around Dubček.

An anxious Brezhnev was deeply reluctant to crush the Prague Spring,^† fearing bloodshed as well as a possible NATO intervention and counting on Dubček to restrain his countrymen. But like Khrushchev before him, Brezhnev faced a hard-line Soviet politburo and KGB as well as satellite governments that were appalled by their Czechoslovak comrades’ behavior and frightened of the spillover effect in their countries. When neither the Warsaw Pact’s menacing maneuvers nor Brezhnev’s direct threats halted the swift liberalization of Czechoslovakia, Moscow decided to rescue communism with force. On the night of August 20–21, 480,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. On November 13, 1968, Brezhnev, stating the doctrine that afterward bore his name, stressed the indivisibility of the communist bloc and the Soviet Union’s right to prevent any deviation by its members. More a defensive than an aggressive posture, the general secretary had implicitly acknowledged Moscow’s vulnerability to any weak link in its Cold War barrier against “Western imperialism.”

The suppression of Czechoslovakia was in many ways a hollow triumph for the Kremlin. Ninety percent of the “liberated” population condemned the invasion, and a half year elapsed before the Soviet Union could replace Dubček with leaders willing to ratify the “temporary presence” of its troops on Czechoslovak soil.* Facing a hostile population, the occupation army soon had to be withdrawn from populated centers, and the formerly impressive Czechoslovak army, which had been confined to its barracks during the invasion, lost its soldierly spirit.

The occupation of Czechoslovakia was almost universally castigated.^† Opposition was even expressed in the factories of East Berlin and Budapest, on the streets of Warsaw and Kiev, and in Red Square itself. The invasion worsened Moscow’s already difficult relations with Beijing. Although Mao found Dubček’s reforms repugnant, he also condemned the Kremlin’s “fascist” behavior in August 1968. Beijing’s fears that the Brezhnev doctrine provided a license for Moscow to interfere in China’s affairs were heighted by alleged Soviet intrusions into Chinese air space one month later.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia provided a temporary propaganda boost to the United States, which was beleaguered by Vietnam and the race riots in America’s cities. It created a swarm of protests in Western Europe and around the world. All at once NATO sprang into life: de Gaulle’s overtures toward the Soviet bloc were discredited, and a frightened West Germany increased its military budget.

But the West was unable to capitalize on the Soviets’ predicament. The Johnson administration offered only mild protests, with some administration officials reminding the president of Czech arms deliveries to Hanoi. Despite the talk of bridge building, Washington had never intended to come to the assistance of Czechoslovakia and once more bore the opprobrium of deserting a people seeking freedom. National interests undoubtedly trumped moral sentiments. Waging a war nine thousand miles away in Asia, the United States could ill afford to condemn the USSR’s defense of its borders, especially when Brezhnev had not threatened West Berlin. The personal and political costs fell heavily on Johnson, who had to cancel his trip to Moscow for a summit meeting, thereby abandoning the hope of ending his presidency on a high note and securing peace in Vietnam.

Soviet hard-liners exulted over the West’s restraint in August 1968. Having expanded their supply of bombs and missiles, they were now brimming with confidence that any form of European détente would be on Soviet terms. On October 8, in his first meeting with Brandt during the UN General Assembly in New York, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko made it clear that Moscow’s stiff conditions for improved bilateral relations had not changed: recognition of Europe’s existing borders, recognition of the GDR, renunciation of the 1938 Munich agreement that had carved up Czechoslovakia, and adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Nonetheless, the destruction of the Prague Spring created a lasting moral and intellectual dilemma for Khrushchev’s heirs, dispelling the illusion that the communist system could be reformed and become more popular and efficient by introducing elements of democracy.* For the next two decades Moscow tried to suppress the extraordinary seven-month occurrence in Czechoslovakia, and the West, fearing to provoke another round of repression, also refrained from stirring the hopes of the vanquished in August 1968.

1968: INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS YEAR

The political claims of the East European dissidents echoed a global movement in the 1960s on behalf of human rights. From the American South to South Africa and from Northern Ireland to Australia, minority and indigenous populations were demanding citizenship rights, equality under the law, and freedom of speech, the press, and association. People still living under colonial rule were demanding freedom, and those suffering under repressive governments were seeking outside defenders. Among their champions were a growing number of nongovernmental organizations that protested racial and religious discrimination and advocated rights for women, workers, aliens, refugees, and the incarcerated. In 1967, six years after its founding, Amnesty International was operating in eighteen countries, adopting prisoners of conscience and lobbying the United Nations to abolish the death penalty and later to abolish torture.*

Neither of the Superpowers gave significant support to the internationalist goals of the United Nations nor welcomed any form of outside intrusion in their internal affairs. US leaders, although professing support for international humanitarian standards, had insisted on their nonbinding, aspirational character. America’s political culture contained a paradoxical mixture of concern for individual liberties, respect for law, and generous impulses toward the underprivileged abroad with a strong commitment to laissez-faire capitalism, its federal system of states’ rights, and its assertion of an exceptionalism that made the United States immune from outside intrusion. The Soviet Union championed self-determination and antiracism abroad, if not at home. Guided by Marx’s dicta, it dismissed the “bourgeois” principle of personal rights as a license for exploitation, defined freedom in economic and social terms (among them, the right to work and to free education and social services), and insisted on the duties of its citizens and the primacy of the state in building socialism.

Unsurprisingly, neither side had wished to enlarge the UN competence in the area of human rights, but both had used its machinery to trade barbs in the Commission on Human Rights and in the General Assembly: the West condemning the Soviets’ ban on emigration and its forced labor system, and the East denouncing America’s discriminatory laws and practices against its black population. Under the Eisenhower administration Congress, the American Bar Association, and US business groups had reinforced the president’s refusal to draft or ratify UN human rights conventions, and things changed only slightly under Kennedy and Johnson. The Soviet leadership, while taunting America’s reticence and endorsing Third World demands for decolonization, was equally leery of any instrument that exposed their regime to outside scrutiny.

By 1960, the human rights cause had assumed a new direction, because an overwhelming majority of UN members now represented Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Inevitably, these governments were far less concerned with the barbarous acts committed in World War II than in redeeming the unfulfilled promises in the Atlantic Charter: removing the last remnants of Western imperialism, ending racial injustice in southern Africa, and taking up the cause of the Palestinians. They therefore identified human rights neither with individual freedom nor with the realization of socialism but with the imperatives of national self-determination, economic development, and control over natural resources.

The General Assembly sprang to life. The anti-imperialist bloc, joined by all the communist members, passed declarations calling for Independence for Colonial Peoples (1960) and the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965). In 1966 they also broke the long deadlock over implementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Recognizing the impossibility of bridging the East-West ideological division over human rights, the assembly finally passed two International Human Rights Covenants, one on Civil and Political Rights, the other on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.* The Third World attempted to transform the Cold War into a North-South debate between the white and colored peoples, and the developed and nondeveloped worlds. In 1967 an expanded UN Commission on Human Rights ended its two-decade-long period of inactivity and for the first time conducted investigations of conditions in South Africa and in the Arab lands occupied by Israel. The next year it sought to implant its political goals on the international discourse of human rights.

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration, the United Nations had named 1968 “International Human Rights Year” and convened a global conference to review its progress and set an agenda for the future. The setting, ironically, was Tehran, site of the first Big Three summit in 1943 and also the capital of an absolutist regime installed by a 1953 Western-sponsored coup, which was maintained by a powerful army and secret police and whose victims were mobilizing worldwide protests against the shah.

The first International Conference on Human Rights met between April 22 and May 13, 1968, at a moment of considerable Superpower anxiety: it was the height of the Prague Spring and the Tet offensive and less than three weeks after assassination of the American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Third World had amassed considerable power and experience since the Bandung conference. Echoing their host’s provocative opening speech, the majority of delegates paid lip service to the Universal Declaration of 1948 but also emphasized its “empty promises.” Several speakers denounced the UDHR’s “cosmopolitan” values, insisting on “the special circumstances of developing countries,” the priority of “economic” over “political democracy,” and the precedence of collective entities—nation, people, and state—over the individual.

The Superpowers shrank from confronting the majority over an issue they had long regarded as secondary. In a curious twist, US and Soviet diplomats at the scene quietly linked forces and refrained from attacking the other’s weak points. Only the aged French jurist René Cassin, a veteran of the 1948 deliberations over the Universal Declaration, dissented, insisting that human rights “could not be different for Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Asians” and warning against confusing the achievement of national independence with the necessity of protecting humans from arbitrary power. The only delegate who supported Cassin was the emissary of Dubček’s reformist government. His appeal for “the rights of the individual” did draw warm applause from all except the Soviets.

The year 1968 ended on a high note when on Christmas Eve the US space craft Apollo 8 orbited the moon and transmitted breathtaking photographs of the earth’s satellite and of the earth itself. The United States had won another Cold War contest—the space race—and seven months later three American astronauts walked on the surface of the moon. But below, on a planet filled that year with turmoil and violence, some questioned the huge expense of the US space program. A striking cartoon depicted an urban slum dweller’s impassive reaction to an astronaut’s observation of the earth’s beauty as seen from space.

By the late 1960s a youth revolt had erupted on every continent against social, economic, and political injustice and against war, imperialism, and nuclear arms. Drawing no inspiration from the official ideologies of either the United States or the USSR or even from Dubček’s socialism with a human face or from traditional trade union principles, the demonstrators—dressed in Mao jackets and carrying banners of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh—demanded a world that transcended the Cold War. Paul McCartney’s 1967 lyrics suggested that it was time for Sergeant Pepper’s (twenty-year-old) Lonely Hearts Club Band to leave the scene.

But the Cold War did not end. In response to the popular clamor, the Third World’s assertiveness, and their near-clashes in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—and especially to the economic slowdown that was sapping their power—the United States and the Soviet Union sought new ways to manage their rivalry and reinforce their global hegemony.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Documents

China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969: Not a Dinner Party. Edited by Michael Schoenhals. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.

Cronkite, Walter. “Report from Vietnam (1968).” YouTube video 0:53, from a CBS News Television broadcast, February 27, 1968. Posted by “tpleines,” May 22, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn4w-ud-TyE.

“Final Act of the International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran 22 April to 13 May 1968.” United Nations. http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/pdf/ha/fatchr/Final_Act_of_TehranConf.pdf.

Johnson, Lyndon Baines. “Remarks Made Following the First Meeting with Soviet Premier Kosygin.” Glassboro, NJ, June 1967. Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum. http://glifos.lbjf.org/gsm/index.php/WHCA_594-4.

———. Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes. Edited by Michael R. Beschloss. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Navrátil, Jaromír. The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader. New York: Central European University Press, 1998.

“Palestine National Charter of 1964.” United Nations. http://www.un.int/wcm/content/site/palestine/pid/12363.

The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam. 5 vols. Boston: Beacon, 1971–1972.

United Nations Security Council. “Resolution 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967.” United Nations. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/240/94/IMG/NR024094.pdf?OpenElement.

Memoirs

Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002.

Johnson, Lyndon B. The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night. New York: New American Library, 1968.

McNamara, Robert S., and Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.

Mlynář, Zdeněk. Night Frost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism. Translated by Paul Wilson. London: C. Hurst, 1980.

Trng, Nh , David Chanoff, and Van Toai Doan. A Vietcong Memoir. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

Photographs

Hobsbawm, E. J., and Marc Weitzmann. 1968 Magnum Throughout the World. Paris: Magnum Photos, 1998.

Films

Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. San Francisco: Zoetrope Studios, 1979.

The Bedford Incident. Directed by James B. Harris. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1965.

Commissar. Directed by Aleksandr Askoldov. Moscow: Gorky Film Studio, 1967.

The Deer Hunter. Directed by Michael Cimino. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1978.

The Ditch. Directed by Bing Wang. Hong Kong: Wil Productions, 2010.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964.

Fail-Safe. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1964.

From Russia with Love. Directed by Terence Young. London: Eon Productions, 1963.

I Am Cuba. Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. Moscow: Mosfilm, 1964.

Ice Station Zebra. Directed by John Sturges. Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, 1968.

The Ipcress File. Directed by Sidney J. Furie. London: Lowndes Productions, 1965.

Kolya. Directed by Jan Sverák. Prague: Portobello Pictures, 1996.

The Mouse on the Moon. Directed by Richard Lester. London: Walter Shenson Films, 1963.

The Odessa File. Directed by Ronald Neame. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1974.

Panic in Year Zero. Directed by Ray Milland. Los Angeles: American International Pictures, 1962.

The Quiet American. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Los Angeles: Miramax Films, 2002.

The Red Detachment of Women. Directed by Jie Fu and Wenzhan Pan. Beijing: Beijing Film Studio, 1970.

The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Directed by Norman Jewison. Los Angeles: Mirisch Corporation, 1966.

Seven Days in May. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Los Angeles: Seven Arts Productions, 1964.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Directed by Martin Ritt. London: Salem Films, 1965.

Torn Curtain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1966.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Directed by Philip Kaufman. Los Angeles: Saul Zaentz Company, 1988.

When the Tenth Month Comes [Bao gio cho den thang muoi]. Directed by Nhat Minh Dang. Hanoi: Vietnam Feature Film Studio, 1985.

Fiction

Achebe, Chinua. A Man of the People: A Novel. New York: John Day, 1966.

Gordimer, Nadine. The Late Bourgeois World. New York: Viking, 1966.

Greene, Graham. The Comedians. New York: Viking, 1966.

Solzenitsyn, Aleksander. The Cancer Ward. New York: Dell, 1973.

Vargas Llosa, Mario, and Edith Grossman. The Feast of the Goat. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

Secondary Sources

Barnouin, Barbara, and Changgen Yu. Chinese Foreign Policy During the Cultural Revolution. London: Kegan Paul International, 1998.

Brands, H. W. The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Brigham, Robert K. Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Brocheux, Pierre. Ho Chi Minh: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Burke, Roland. Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Chang, Gordon H. Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Chen, Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Dockrill, Saki. Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice Between Europe and the World? Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Gaiduk, I. V. The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996.

Ginor, Isabella, and Gideon Remez. Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

Kaiser, David E. American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam, a History. New York: Viking, 1983.

Kovrig, Bennett. Of Walls and Bridges: The United States and Eastern Europe. New York: New York University Press, 1991.

LaFeber, Walter. The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Luthi, Lorenz M. The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

McDougall, Walter A. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Moyn, Samuel. “Imperialism, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Human Rights.” In The Human Rights Revolution: An International History, edited by Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, 159–178. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Oren, Michael B. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Radchenko, Sergey. Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2009.

Schwartz, Thomas Alan. Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Segev, Tom. 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Spector, Ronald H. After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1993.

Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Tischler, Barbara L. Sights on the Sixties. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Williams, Kieran. The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Zhai, Qiang. China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

* Made vivid in Rachel Carson’s 1962 book by that name.

* Based on classified CIA reports, a Kennedy aide wrote that “by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers.”

* Following its confrontation with the Soviet Union in 1962, the United States led a regional quarantine of Cuba. Moreover, the Johnson administration quickly abandoned the reformist impulses of the Alliance for Progress, and in 1965 intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic to overthrow an allegedly leftist government and prevent “another Cuba.”

* The most prominent was French president Charles de Gaulle, who had negotiated Algeria’s independence in 1962.

^† Drawing on the American public’s fears during the Cuban missile crisis, Johnson suggested that his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, would recklessly use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. In the notorious daisy ad featuring a young child counting flower petals immediately followed by a countdown before a nuclear explosion, Johnson appealed for voters’ support “because the stakes are too high.”

* In selecting bombing targets, Johnson avoided destroying North Vietnamese dams and ports and provoking a Chinese intervention; although the Ho Chi Minh trail was bombed, Johnson made no moves to invade Laos or attack the Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia; and US forces confined themselves to search and destroy operations against enemy units and largely refrained from involvement in local politics.

* US public support of the war was badly damaged by Eddie Adams’s close-up photograph of the South Vietnamese police chief, Nguyn Ngọc Loan, executing a suspected Viet Cong officer during the Tet offensive, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. In the spring of 1968 the Wall Street Journal opined “no battle and no war are worth any price.”

* One of these operations in November 1966 provoked an Israeli military retaliation against three Jordanian villages that drew censure from Israel’s friends and foes.

* Although leading German politicians, sensitive to the Nazi past, announced that in the face of the Arabs’ threat to Israel’s existence they could not be neutral in spirit.

^† Moreover, the October 1967 death of Che Guevara at the hands of CIA-trained Bolivian rangers gave President Johnson a rare moment of optimism over the prospects of halting communist insurgencies in the Third World.

* In 1970 the KGB recruited Wadi Haddad, the leader of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who had organized the 1968 hijack of an Israeli El Al flight, and for the next eight years the USSR supported PFLP terrorist operations against Israel, its Western allies, and targeted Arab governments.

^† Which the Israelis, evoking Genesis, have named Milhemet Sheshet Hayamim (The Six-Day War), the Arabs, more prosaically, an-Naksah (The Setback), and outsiders have labeled the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

* A seminal document in NATO’s history, the 1967 Report of the Council on the Future Tasks of the Alliance (better known as the Harmel Report), acknowledging changes in the international environment since 1949, committed the alliance to a dual-track policy of maintaining military preparedness and seeking political détente.

^† Among the leading East European cultural figures, the novelists Stefan Heym (GDR), Milan Kundera and Ludvik Vaculík (Czechoslovakia), and György Konrád (Hungary); the playwright Václav Havel (Czechoslovakia); and the filmmakers Miloš Forman (Czechoslovakia) and Andrzej Wajda (Poland) all ran afoul of communist authorities in the 1960s.

* The Czechs and Slovaks were also exultant over their hockey team’s upset victory over the Soviets during the February 1968 Winter Olympics.

^† In Czech pražské jaro, in Slovak pražskâ jar, Prague Spring was originally the name of an annual international music festival, but in 1968 it became linked to Czechoslovakia’s seven months of political liberalization.

* Once more hockey created a provocation: after the Czechs twice defeated the Soviet team in the March 1969 World Ice Hockey Championships in Stockholm, some five hundred thousand joyous fans poured into the streets of Prague. In response to alleged acts of violence—which many suspected were stirred by Soviet provocateurs—the police suppressed the protests, and Moscow used the disorder as a pretext to place Gustáv Husák at the head of the Communist Party.

^† While the governments of Yugoslavia and Romania stood on the sidelines, only North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba applauded the destruction of Czechoslovakia’s “counterrevolutionary forces.”

* A lesson imprinted not only on the anticommunist opposition but also on the thirty-seven-year-old communist official in Stavropol (and future party general secretary) Mikhail Gorbachev.

* In 1977 Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “having contributed to securing the ground for freedom, for justice, and thereby also for peace in the world.”

* Both of which were ratified by the Soviet Union in 1973 but not by the United States.