19

The ‘Prague Spring’

The ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 was in some respects a delayed reaction to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956 and to his further attacks on Stalin at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961. In other ways, it was a precursor of the Soviet perestroika. It had an importance greater than is generally realized today – even by most citizens of the Czech Republic. Its significance has several different strands. One is that what became known as the Prague Spring was the culmination of a reform movement inside the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which got under way five or six years earlier. To a greater extent than in Poland and Hungary in 1956, this was a major reformist current within the Communist Party itself. It demonstrated that intra-party developments could produce change sufficiently fundamental as to lead to military intervention by other Communist states, led by the Soviet Union. This, for some observers, raised the question: what would happen should reform gather momentum within the CPSU itself, for who would intervene to put a stop to a ‘Moscow Spring’? The answer, of course, was that no other country would or could do to the Soviet Union what the Soviet leadership did to Hungary in 1956 and was to do again – in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. This was, however, a question rarely posed. The conventional assumption in the West – and, indeed, overwhelmingly in the USSR itself – was that a ‘Moscow Spring’, analogous to the Prague Spring, was too fanciful a notion to be entertained even as a hypothetical possibility.¹

The relevance of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s for the Soviet Union in the 1980s lay in the fact that there were people of serious reformist disposition in both parties and that a change of top leader – from a conservative Communist to an open-minded moderate in the case of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and from a Communist bureaucrat to an energetic reformer in the case of the Soviet Union in 1985, changed the balance of forces within these ruling parties. So great was the institutional power placed in the hands of a Communist Party leader that the emergence of a general secretary with an open mind also opened doors, including ones which had been firmly closed for decades. An early effect of the reform movement within Czech and Slovak (with more emphasis on democratization in the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia and more emphasis on greater national autonomy in Slovakia), together with its crushing by Soviet military intervention, was to stimulate some of the most important West European Communist parties to embrace a more reformist programme and to cease to follow slavishly Soviet ideological guidance. That movement, which I discuss in a section of Chapter 23, was known as ‘Eurocommunism’. Within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the immediate effect was the opposite. The fact that the Soviet Union, with the participation of the armies of its East European Warsaw Pact partners, put a stop to the Prague Spring set back the progress of reform throughout the entire bloc. The limits of the possible had been defined and it was now clear that the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia had transgressed them. Thus, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, reformers in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s had to be very careful if they were not to be tarred with the Czech ‘revisionist’ or even ‘counterrevolutionary’ brush.

Stimuli to Reform

If we divide states into those in which Communists came to power through their own efforts and those who were essentially put into government by external forces – most commonly those of the Soviet Union – Czechoslovakia is a slightly ambiguous case. There were no Soviet troops in the country when the Communists seized full power in 1948. Stalin took a proprietorial interest in Czechoslovakia, but, as was suggested in Chapter 9, it is unlikely that he would have invaded the country in the late 1940s had Czech politicians, including Czech Communists, resisted the political and psychological pressure from Moscow to create a Soviet-type system. The USSR, in the immediate aftermath of the devastation it suffered during World War Two, was far weaker, militarily and economically, than the United States. A good deal, in this hypothetical case, would have depended also on the resolution of the Western powers. Many Czechs, ever since the Munich Agreement of 1938, had concluded that the West had very limited interest in what kind of regime would be foisted on them.² The evidence gathered by the Czech security police in the immediate post-war years – with the Ministry of the Interior under firm Communist control from 1945–was that the United States, Britain and France would do nothing to prevent the Communists bypassing the ballot-box in order to gain full power.³

At any rate, Gottwald and the Czech Communist leadership did succeed in staging their successful coup. Thereafter, members of the Czechoslovak continued to believe that they had made their own peaceful revolution. Soviet guidance had always been important, however, and in the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses of the CPSU it took a different form. Stimulated into more independent thought by Khrushchev’s revelations at these congresses of 1956 and 1961, party intellectuals in Czechoslovakia began to blame their past and present leaderships for having voluntarily adopted the Stalinist Soviet model. They believed that there had been a choice in the second half of the 1940s and that they had a choice once again in the second half of the 1960s. When, in early 1965, I made the first of five study-visits to Czechoslovakia when it was under Communist rule, many party intellectuals were already going out of their way to emphasize how different their country, with its more democratic traditions, was from the Soviet Union. Copying Soviet institutions had, therefore, been a bad mistake.

There were veteran Communists who were to be found in the ranks of the radical reformers in 1968, among them three who were elevated to the Politburo or Secretariat of the Central Committee, František Kriegel, Josef Smrkovský and Václav Slavík (of whom the boldest was Kriegel). However, the political generation of those who came of age just after the Second World War played an especially active part in promoting change. As one of them put it, with just a little poetic licence: ‘We were all twenty in 1948, so we were all forty in 1968.’⁴ It was not those who had in 1948 jumped on the Communist bandwagon for career reasons, sometimes moving rapidly from another political party to the Communists, but the people who had sincerely believed that they were about to build a new world who were in the vanguard of the Prague Spring. They were not only the most disillusioned with what had been constructed but also the most determined to do something to change matters. With more self-criticism than was strictly merited, the young woman Communist of 1948, cited above, said to me in Prague in 1969: ‘We helped to get the country into this mess. The least we could do was help get it out again.’⁵ Many of those who in their youth in the early post-war years had voluntarily and enthusiastically embraced Communism believed that they were masters of their own destiny. This enabled them to embrace bolder political reform in 1968 than their counterparts in the Communist parties of Poland and Hungary. In August of that same year they were to discover the limitations on their sovereignty which Poles and Hungarians already knew and which Czech non-Communists had long assumed. Perceptions in politics are, however, crucially important, and the fact that Czech Communist intellectuals believed that radical political change was possible made it possible – for eight months.

If it was Khrushchev’s boldness which shook the more reflective members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia into reassessing the post-war years, many of them drew conclusions in the 1960s that were not to be drawn in the Soviet Union until the 1980s. Czech reformist party intellectuals were dissatisfied with the explanation that the state-sponsored terror associated with Stalinism could be attributed simply, or even mainly, to the moral deficiencies of one man, Josif Stalin. By the mid-1960s they were raising questions about the political system which had allowed Stalin to get away with murder (in the most literal sense). Questions also began to be raised, even more widely, about the economic system. Pavel Eisler, a Czech economist who did not live to see the Prague Spring, observed in 1965: ‘The greatest stimulus to change is failure.’⁶ He had in mind specifically the economic failure which Czechoslovakia had recently been experiencing. In 1963 the country had a negative growth rate of 2.2 per cent. To the qualitative deficiencies of Czech and Slovak industry, which the party had learned to live with, was now added failure even in quantitative terms.

An important outcome was that economists were given a greater freedom of debate among themselves. Once this concession had been granted, it became easier for other specialists – including sociologists, historians and academic lawyers – to extend the limits of the possible within their own disciplines. The main arguments among the economists centred on the extent to which market forces could be introduced into a reformed economic mechanism. A large team headed by the Director of the Institute of Economics, Ota Šik, was formed at the beginning of 1964. Even their compromise conclusions were too radical to be welcome to the party leadership and to the first secretary, Antonín Novotný, in particular. But since economic failure had become a fact of life, a modest reform of the economic system was accepted in principle in 1965. It increased material incentives and aimed to introduce a three-tier price system, divided into different categories. Thus, there would be a number of fixed prices determined centrally; prices which were allowed to float between upper and lower limits; and free prices to be determined entirely by market forces.

Šik was a political as well as economic reformer. Alone among the speakers at the Thirteenth Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1966, he had called for greater democratization of the society and for more intra-party democracy, arguing that economic reform would not work unless it were accompanied by political reform.⁷ Although the speech was not fully reported in the mass media at the time, it gave encouragement to reformers. The widespread discontent which already existed within the party ranks was fertile soil for the ideas it expressed. The issue of whether economic reform would work only if it went together with political reform was one which was long debated in Communist countries. After the crushing of the Prague Spring, a realistic answer seemed to be: serious economic reform would be allowed to proceed only if it were not accompanied by political reform. In Hungary, in January 1968, the very month of the launching of the Prague Spring and the year of its crushing, an economic reform was introduced which raised living standards and was allowed to continue and develop throughout the 1970s and 1980s, albeit with some temporary setbacks. Crucially important for its resilience was the fact that it was not being accompanied by any fundamental reform of political institutions. More recently, the case of China, where economic success has been much more conspicuous, is cited by those who argue the case for economic reform without reform of the political system.

The crux of the matter can be boiled down to two points. The first is that reformers in Czechoslovakia and, twenty years later, in the Soviet Union believed that economic reform required political reform if it were to be successfully implemented. If the party and ministerial bureaucracies retained their existing powers, moves towards marketizing reform would be frustrated. The second, and more fundamental, point is that, in the absence of foreign intervention or domestic counterreformation, the end result would not be Communist reformation, but the evolution of the system to something different in kind. ‘Reform Communism’, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968 or the Soviet Union two decades later, was in unstable equilibrium. This was not, it should be added, the perception of Czech or Soviet Communist reformers at the time they embarked on political change. There can, though, be little doubt but that the reforms of the Prague Spring would have developed into a recognizably non-Communist political system, characterized by political pluralism, in the absence of armed intervention. But the reformers would, given the broad public support for a form of socialism at that time, have attempted to make a democratic socialism work. Dubek’s slogan, ‘Socialism with a human face’, had real resonance in the Czechoslovakia of 1968. In contrast, by the time Czechoslovakia (and, after the division of the country into two states, the Czech Republic) did gain independence just over twenty years later, there was widespread disillusionment with any notion of socialism.

While failure (to recall Eisler) can, indeed, be an important stimulus to change, there is nothing automatic about one leading to the other. First of all, failure has to be perceived and acknowledged as failure. Second, even if a party leadership in a highly authoritarian state recognizes that failure has occurred, they can decide that the risks of the proposed remedies outweigh the dangers of muddling through. If the social consequences of the failure are so great that people take to the streets in massive numbers, throwing into question the continuing existence of the regime, the party leadership is forced to do something – either to make concessions or to use force to repress the discontent. No such unrest occurred in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, any more than it did in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. (When people did take to the streets in vast numbers in the USSR at the end of the 1980s, it was as a result of the introduction of political pluralism, not a precursor to it.)

An orthodox Communist leadership, using all the levers of power at its disposal – from control over everyone’s career prospects to the ability to arrest and determine the prison sentence of anyone brave enough to offer opposition – can live with economic failure (as well as other types of failure) for many years. In their quite different ways, Cuba and North Korea are countries which are still doing so. To make concessions to market forces, still more to tolerate the introduction of elements of political pluralism, are policies leading to an erosion of the party’s political hegemony and control. Communist party leaderships, by virtue of the systems within which they operate, are not obliged to give priority either to economic efficiency or to the preferences of a broader public. Had that not been the case, a majority of the states in Eastern Europe would have ceased to be Communist decades before they did. In Czechoslovakia, although Novotný reluctantly acquiesced in the introduction of an economic reform (which was never fully implemented), he was not prepared to take risks with the ‘leading role of the party’, which had become, more precisely, the monopoly of power of the party bureaucracy.

Novotný, a Communist of working-class origin who joined the party in 1921 at the age of seventeen, survived the war years in the Nazi concentration camp, Mauthausen. He truly believed that a Communist system was preferable to capitalist democracy. He was also skilled in the arts of bureaucratic politics and an unscrupulous operator. He showed especial zeal in seeking out enemies within the party in the lead-up to the trial and execution of the general secretary Rudolf Slánský in 1951–52.⁸ In 1953 Novotný himself became first secretary of the party. Zdenk Mlyn, who was one of the most important of the Prague Spring reformers, gives a telling example of Novotný’s moral standards. Having played his part in hounding to their deaths the leading Communists who perished in the Slanský trial, Novotný and his wife then bought the china tea service and the bedclothes of one of those who was hanged, Vladimír Clementis, since the property of the victims was being sold off cheaply to high-ranking officials. When, only a few years earlier, they had visited Clementis (at that time foreign minister) and his family socially, Novotný’s wife, Božena Novotná, had expressed her admiration for the tea service.⁹ Mlyn adds: ‘The thought that the first secretary of the ruling party and the head of state slept between sheets belonging to a man whom he had helped send to the gallows is something quite incredible in twentieth-century Europe.’¹⁰

Ideas for political reform were already in the mid-1960s being aired in small-circulation journals and books, but with Novotný as party leader (and president), there was little chance of implementing them in practice. Even the reformist economists, it should be noted, were not in the 1960s arguing against state or other forms of public ownership, but wished to move in the direction of a socialist market economy. This already existed in Yugoslavia, and that country was a significant influence on a number of Czech and Slovak party intellectuals who were attracted not only to Yugoslav economic reform but also to the extent to which interest groups had been accommodated within the one-party system, and to the state’s federal structure. Polish economists and sociologists also influenced their Czech counterparts, but nothing was more important for giving an impetus to the reformist tendency in Czechoslovak Communism than Khrushchev’s open attack on Stalin at the Twenty-Second Congress of the CPSU in 1961. The last five years of Novotný’s regime were a time of development of ideas which could then be expressed only very cautiously but which were given much fuller expression in 1968, a year which began with the removal of Novotný from the party leadership and his replacement by the Slovak Alexander Dubek.

The prime movers in the changes were from the party intelligentsia, by which is meant simply Communist Party members with a higher education who were employed in the professions or in the party and governmental bureaucracy. In Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere in Communist Europe, some sections of this stratum were more significant than others. Social scientists, writers, academic lawyers and some of the best-educated members of the party and government apparatus were much more important politically than natural scientists and engineers. Those in the party intelligentsia who did exert political influence can be divided into two broad categories – the insiders and the outsiders. There is a distinction, that is to say, between the influence wielded within party committees and party commissions and the influence on a wider audience exercised, for instance, by writers. The two categories were not completely compartmentalized, for some of those who worked for change within party organs also attempted to propagate their views in the mass media insofar as this was possible in the years leading up to 1968.

The broad division of labour between those whose main efforts were concentrated on intra-party change and those who were opinion-makers in a wider social context was not planned, but the roles played by the two categories of intellectuals were mutually reinforcing. So far was it from being part of a carefully worked-out strategy that both before 1968 and during it, people in the two groups frequently failed to appreciate what was being done by those who had adopted a different approach. Reformers who worked cautiously for change within the party machine were often suspected of being timid time-servers, while the insiders, especially in 1968 itself, had little respect for the political judgement of some of the writers and philosophers. Yet their roles in promoting change were complementary, albeit unplanned. The party intellectual insiders played a vital part in creating – in the years between 1963 and 1967 in particular – a greater receptiveness to new ideas within the party apparatus and in initiating some modest changes in party organization. The outsiders, for their part, attempted to rouse public opinion, which had been notable for its quietism, to demand more vigorous, radical action. A ‘new wave’ in the Czech cinema in the 1960s, which produced some brilliant and politically unorthodox films, was an especially important part of the activities of the cultural intelligentsia.¹¹ On the reformist Communists whom I have termed outsiders, Mlyná wrote:

    …the general political orientation of this group of reform Communists was more democratic and radical than that of groups inside the power structure itself. The contrast between Literární noviny [the Writers’ Union weekly newspaper] and the party press in the 1960s is a good example of this. And it often led to conflicts between this more radical group and the political authorities, with the reform Communists inside the power structure caught in the middle. But such differences between the reform Communists were more a matter of style than substance.¹²

Insider-reformers from the party intelligentsia in Czechoslovakia in the years between 1963 and 1968 operated in ways familiar to their counterparts in other Communist states. They engaged in self-censorship and would sometimes write several articles which repeated current party orthodoxy in order to be able to publish the next article, which broke new ground. They became experts at knowing the limits of the possible and when an attempt to expand them might have a chance of success. The self-censorship, Mlyná admitted, extended to what they thought as well as to what they said. If some ideas were clearly unacceptable to those in power, they would set them aside for future resuscitation when the time was ripe.¹³ Mlyná even engaged in criticism of ‘revisionism’, which was a high priority at the time for the Communist Party’s ideologists. He did this ‘for the most part insincerely’, not least in his criticisms of ‘certain Yugoslav conceptions which, in fact, I believed to be somewhat relevant for our own political transformation in Czechoslovakia’.¹⁴ Through compromises of that kind, Mlyná (who wrote his doctoral thesis on Machiavelli) was able to publish articles in the main party newspaper, Rudé právo, was invited to join influential working groups which drafted party documents, and became, from 1964, the secretary of the law commission which had been set up by the Central Committee as an advisory body to them. It was one of several such commissions created in the five years preceding the Prague Spring which brought together members of the apparatus and scholars and helped prepare the ground for reform.

The outsider members of the party intelligentsia included some very prominent writers. Their most important criticism of the status quo, prior to the Prague Spring, came at the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, held in Prague in late June 1967. Seventy-five per cent of members of the Writers’ Union were also members of the Communist Party, but these were people whose influence was not exerted in smoke-filled rooms or the corridors of power but through their publications and, on this occasion, their speeches. What was said at the Congress was initially conveyed by word of mouth and by foreign radio broadcasts. The proceedings of the Writers’ Congress were not published in Prague until 1968. However, they caused great embarrassment to the party leadership, who were especially worried about having blotted their copybook in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which was to be celebrated in Moscow in November. The first speaker at the congress was the novelist Milan Kundera, who set the tone. He contrasted the flourishing of Czech culture over the previous four years with the twenty-six years which had preceded them, thus implicitly lumping together most of the Communist era with the years during the Second World War when the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia were a Nazi protectorate. He quoted Voltaire’s famous ‘I do not agree with what you are saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it’, and added that ‘the truth can only be reached by a dialogue of free opinions enjoying equal rights’. He poured scorn on a deputy in the legislature who had recently called for the banning of ‘two serious and intelligent Czech films’, and added: ‘He inveighed brutally against both films, while positively boasting that he understood neither of them. The contradiction in such an attitude is only on the surface. The two works had chiefly offended by transcending the human horizons of their judges, so that they were felt as an insult.’¹⁵

Among many striking speeches at the congress, none more pertinently addressed the issue of democracy, and its absence in Czechoslovakia, than that by Ludvík Vaculík, himself a member of the Communist Party of working-class origin. In the course of it he said:

    It seems that power has its own inviolable laws of development and behaviour, regardless of who exercises it. Power is a peculiar human phenomenon, due to the fact that even in the jungle someone in the tribe has to give the orders, and even in the most high-minded community someone has to sum up the discussion and draft the priorities…Thousands of years of experience persuaded men to try to lay down rules of procedure. Hence the system of formal democracy with its feedbacks and control switches and limiting values…the rules in themselves are neither capitalist nor socialist; they do not decide what should be done, but how to reach a decision on what to do. They are a human invention which makes the job of ruling considerably harder. They favour the ruled, but when a government falls they also save its ministers from being shot. The maintenance of such a formal system of democracy does not bring strong government, but it brings the conviction that the next government may be better. So the government can fall, but the citizen is renewed.¹⁶

A letter which Alexander Solzhenitsyn had sent to the Fourth Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, where it had been suppressed, in which Solzhenitsyn criticized both the Union and the Soviet censorship, was read out, in Czech translation, at the Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress by Pavel Kohout. It was at this point that the Politburo member in charge of ideology, Jií Hendrych, stormed angrily out of the hall.¹⁷ The Solzhenitsyn letter, and the publicity given to it, was, however, praised by Václav Havel, addressing a Writers’ Union Congress, for the first (and last) time. In a later speech, responding to the insubordination shown by the writers, Hendrych expressed particular outrage at ‘efforts to disparage the revolutionary achievements of our people and the communist party, as well as efforts to negate and vilify 20 years of our socialist achievements and place them virtually on a par with the period of darkness and the Nazi occupation’. He also showed particular sensitivity to the reading out of the Solzhenitsyn letter, saying that this ‘irresponsible move’ had ‘seriously damaged our fraternal ties’.¹⁸

THE SLOVAK QUESTION

When Dubek was chosen by the Slovak Central Committee to be their first secretary in 1963, he was not Novotný’s favoured candidate for the post.¹⁹ The latter’s discontent was reflected in a long delay between the choice of Dubek by his Slovak colleagues and the announcement of his election in the press. Nevertheless, Dubek automatically became the principal spokesman for the grievances felt by the Slovak branch of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Slovaks, dissatisfied with their role in the political system, were part of the coalition which turned against Novotný. Dubek played a significant role in triggering a crisis within the leadership of the Czechoslovak Party when in a speech at a plenary session of the Central Committee in October 1967 he sided with Novotný’s opponents. He did not mention simply Slovak discontents but called, more generally, for different methods of political leadership. The party should not replace state organs and it ‘should not direct society, but lead it’.²⁰ Novotný responded with a personal attack on Dubek and complained that he had yielded too much to ‘narrow national interests’.²¹

The political system of Czechoslovakia up until 1968 remained highly centralized, and what Czech reformers called ‘bureaucratic centralism’ could be interpreted by Slovaks as a violation of their national rights or even as Czech chauvinism. In the person of the tactless Novotný, it was often both. Many Slovaks felt that they were, in the words of the Slovak writer Laco Novomeský, ‘a tolerated race of vice-chairmen and deputy-ministers, a second-class minority generously accorded a one-third quota in everything’.²² When Dubek clashed with Novotný at the October 1967 Central Committee plenum, this was an indication of a crisis within the leadership, for a Communist system could not long tolerate a second centre within the party. It meant that the Slovak question became a catalyst for the change of leadership, and even though it was not the top issue on the agenda of Czech reformers, it raised the standing of Dubek in their eyes.

The Reforms of the Prague Spring

In further Central Committee sessions in December 1967 and January 1968 the Central Committee was again divided. They were given a greater than normal decision-making power because the Presidium of the Central Committee was split down the middle – five–five – for and against Novotný remaining as party leader. Leonid Brezhnev, concerned about the divisions within a Communist Party which had given the Soviet Union little trouble hitherto, came to Prague and attended a meeting of the Presidium on 9 December 1967. He tried to support Novotný without, however, attempting to impose either him or any particular alternative candidate for the first secretaryship on the Czechoslovak party. He was confident enough that any alternative to Novotný, including Dubek, who had lived for years in the Soviet Union, would be a reliable partner. Dubek’s father, a working-class founding member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, had emigrated to the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s when Alexander Dubek was only three. In 1938 they returned to Czechoslovakia, where, during the Second World War, Alexander joined the underground resistance. He was wounded during the Slovak National Rising of 1944. His brother Julius was killed. The future Czechoslovak leader returned to the Soviet Union in the Khrushchev era, spending the years 1955–58 at the Higher Party School in Moscow when he was in his mid-thirties and evidently regarded as someone with future prospects.²³ The Soviet part of his background was doubtless sufficiently reassuring for the Moscow leadership. Brezhnev’s meeting with the fluent-Russian-speaking Dubek in December 1967 passed off cordially. Before leaving Prague, and speaking privately, he told senior Czech and Slovak party members apropos of the party leadership: ‘It’s your business’ – words which were to have a hollow ring less than a year later.²⁴ In fact, Brezhnev, as he later made clear in a message to the Hungarian leader János Kádár, would have preferred Novotný to remain in office. However, by acknowledging that it was ultimately a matter for the leadership of the Czechoslovak party to sort out, he weakened both Novotný’s position and that of his strongest supporters within the Central Committee apparatus, including not only half the Presidium but the hard-line department head, Miroslav Mamula, who was the overseer of the armed forces and the security organs.²⁵

The Central Committee plenum which launched the Prague Spring was held from 3 to 5 January 1968. It ended with Novotný’s removal as first secretary and the election of Dubek in his place. For the time being, Novotný was allowed to retain his state function as President of Czechoslovakia, but following increased pressure on him, he resigned from that post on 22 March. Later in March, on the recommendation of another Central Committee plenum, Ludvík Svoboda was chosen to be Novotný’s successor as president. He was a former army general who had fought alongside the Red Army during World War Two, commanding Czech military units, and who, as minister of defence, had played a part in helping the Communists to seize power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. He had, however, fallen from grace when, under Soviet pressure, the Czech security forces intensified their search for hidden enemies. He was arrested at the beginning of the 1950s and, although soon released, allowed to work only as a bookkeeper on a collective farm. He was rapidly rehabilitated when Nikita Khrushchev, as Soviet leader, visited Czechoslovakia in the mid-1950s and asked to see his old wartime comrade, Svoboda, who had been ‘an outstanding military commander’ on the First Ukrainian Front. When in 1968 Svoboda was brought out of retirement to become President of Czechoslovakia, he was already aged seventy-two.²⁶ The name svoboda means ‘freedom’ in both Czech and Russian. This helped the new president for a time (including the days immediately after the Soviet invasion of August 1968) to become one of the symbols of the Prague Spring. Svoboda went along with most of the reforms of 1968, but was very susceptible to Soviet pressure and lost the widespread respect he had acquired during the Prague Spring by remaining until 1975 as a figurehead president in post-invasion Czechoslovakia.

Following the January 1968 plenum, the political atmosphere in Czechoslovakia changed dramatically. The mass media, some sections more than others, became ever bolder as censorship virtually withered away.²⁷ As early as the beginning of February, the new chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, Eduard Goldstücker, related on television the true story of Novotný’s downfall, exposing the way in which this had been covered up.²⁸ In March, the issue of the political trials of the 1940s and early 1950s was reopened, as was the question of whether Jan Masaryk had committed suicide in 1948 or been murdered. In April, Evžen Löbl, one of only three of those accused in the Slánský trial who suffered long imprisonment rather than execution, published a book in 30,000 copies in Slovakia, parts of which were promptly republished in Czech weeklies, in which he exposed how the confessions were extracted and how these show trials were stage-managed.²⁹ Very early in the year there were calls for a return of Tomáš Masaryk to the place of honour in the history of his country which he enjoyed before the Communists came to power. One Czech writer put the point especially provocatively with a none too veiled reference to the fact that Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible were presented in Soviet historiography as great leaders and ‘progressive for their time’. Writing in an educational newspaper, and complaining that truthfulness had been eliminated from the school curriculum in Czechoslovakia, Jan Procházka wrote:

    To the more intelligent boys and girls, it was hard to understand that, in the history of other nations, it was possible and permitted to pay homage even to tsars and tyrants, while in our own country, there was no place in history for a man who was the founder of our democracy, who was neither a usurper nor the murderer of his own children but an educated, democratic and highly moral man.³⁰

The wide range of opinion and the reformist tendencies within the Communist Party which had struggled for recognition before 1968 were expressed as never before during that year. From the highest party organs to the lowest, there was real debate, and pressure from below played a significant part in influencing higher party appointments. Draft party rules, published shortly before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, were designed to ratify officially the new reality whereby, for instance, individual party members not only had the right to their own opinion but the right to attempt to convert others to their point of view. That was a considerable inroad into the doctrine of democratic centralism. Another was the development of horizontal links between party organizations. Thus, in 1968 links were established between the party organization in the university district of Prague and the organization in the industrial district of Prague 9. In a further glaring contravention of party norms – in this case of the nomenklatura system of appointment – the party organization in Prague 1 went so far as to advertise in the city’s evening newspaper for a secretary responsible for ideology. This last sin was drawn to the attention of Brezhnev, who declared that it showed the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was becoming social democratic. The Prague city party organization played an exceptionally important role in 1968. In the post-invasion period it was to be described by the conservative Communists, who had regained control thanks to the Soviet invasion, as having been a ‘second centre’ within the party. The charge was not without foundation, for the Prague organization set the pace in advocating radical reform. They shared a building with the Central Committee, and through the connecting doors there was regular contact between reformists within the Central Committee apparatus and the Prague City Committee.³¹

For conservative Communist leaders in Eastern Europe, the most alarming document to be produced during the Prague Spring was the Action Programme of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which was published on 5 April. This was not because it was the most radical publication of 1968, for it was far from that, but because it marked a break with the past and with current Communist orthodoxy by the party leadership itself. The main author of the section on the political system was Mlyná. The programme itself was a compromise document and fell far short of advocating fully fledged political pluralism. It still envisaged a ‘leading role’ for the Communist Party, but argued that this should not be understood as a monopolistic concentration of power in party organs. It criticized the ‘unthinking adoption’ in the 1950s of ‘ideas, habits and political concepts which conflicted with our circumstances and traditions’, leading to the gradual development of a ‘bureaucratic system’. The internal life of the country had been plagued by sectarianism, the suppression of liberty, legal violations, dogmatism and misuse of power! The Action Programme did not advocate a separation of powers but called for a ‘system of mutual control’. It demanded an independent judiciary and called for clearer governmental and legislative control over the Ministry of the Interior.³²

A much more radical document which became the subject of Soviet polemics against the developments in Czechoslovakia was the Two Thousand Words, a manifesto issued by a group of scholars and writers, including both party and non-party members, whose author was the writer Ludvík Vaculík. It was published in June 1968–at a sensitive time when Warsaw Pact military manoeuvres were taking place in Czechoslovakia – in the Writers’ Union newspaper (now called Literární listy), which by this time had a circulation as high as 300,000.³³ Unlike the Action Programme, it did not pull its punches. It gave credit to the Communist Party for starting the ‘regenerative process of democratization’, but qualified that praise by saying that there was nowhere else the process could have begun, for only the Communists were in a position to take action. ‘No thanks, therefore’, the document continued, ‘is due to the Communist Party, although it should probably be acknowledged that it is honestly trying to use this last opportunity to save its own and the nation’s honour.’³⁴ One of the major points made by Vaculík was that no institutional change had yet taken place in the political system.³⁵ The liberalization and partial democratization thus depended very much on the goodwill of the Communist Party leadership. The document called on citizens themselves to set up watchdog committees to look at questions which no official organ would examine, and to demand the resignation of people who had misused their power or acted dishonestly. The means of doing so might include strikes and ‘picketing their houses’, although no illegal methods should be employed, ‘since these might be used against Alexander Dubek’.³⁶

The development of civil society, in the sense of the emergence of independent social organizations and pressure groups, quite rapidly followed the changes which had been inaugurated by the January plenum of the party Central Committee. Indeed, the creation of interest groups was endorsed by the Presidium of the Central Committee on 21 March, although in the changed atmosphere it is unlikely that those who formed the groups would have been content to await such official approval.³⁷ Among the more important organizations politically was the Club 231 of former political prisoners (its name deriving from the fact that they had been charged under Article 231 of the criminal code). It was concerned to secure rehabilitation of those who had been unjustly condemned and to promote human rights more generally. At much the same time – in early April – a Slovak Organization for the Defence of Human Rights was established in Bratislava. And an organization which became known as KAN (Klub angažovaných nestraník–Club of Non-Party Activists) was formed. The declared aim of KAN was to share in the construction of a ‘new political system’ which would be one of ‘democratic socialism’.³⁸ Another very important development was the spread, and publication, of professionally conducted opinion polls, even on sensitive political issues. The reformists within the party leadership, in rejecting a high level of coercion, welcomed the survey research, for they had committed themselves to taking serious account of public opinion. Dubek, though more a facilitator of reform than a radical reformer, acquired the reputation of being a good listener. In turn, he became genuinely popular across a broad spectrum of the population.

Although the time was too short for real institutional change to take place, there were many important personnel changes in the leadership between January and August 1968. The highest party organs, however, remained divided. Along with an influx of reformers, hard-liners, as well as people with special links to their Soviet counterparts, remained in post. Apart from the three older Communists already mentioned who joined the leadership – Kriegel, who had served in the Spanish Civil War as a physician attached to the International Brigade; Smrkovsky, who had been a leader of an uprising in Prague in 1945 against the Nazi-imposed regime, but was one of the Communists imprisoned in the 1950s; and Slavík, who had turned from Stalinist editor of the party newspaper, Rudé právo, in the early post-war years into serious reformer – they included Jií Hájek, a former concentration camp prisoner who became foreign minister, and Josef Pavel, a former regimental commander in the Spanish Civil War and a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. Pavel became minister of the interior and began to convert the ministry from a secret police machine into the more limited guardian of national security required in any state. From the political generation of those who had been students in 1948, Zdenk Mlyná moved from being an academic with party insider credentials to becoming a member of the Central Committee Secretariat at the age of thirty-seven.³⁹ In addition to his work on the Central Committee law commission, Mlyná had headed an academic team examining the way the political system should be reformed. Communist reformers Jií Pelikán and Zdenk Hejzlar (the latter a political prisoner in the 1950s) became the directors of television and radio respectively.

Rehabilitation of those falsely imprisoned (or posthumous rehabilitation of those executed) was a major issue in 1968. A commission under the chairmanship of Jan Piller re-examined the major trials, especially the Slánský show trial, and completed a report in 1968. It was not, however, published before the Soviet invasion and had no chance of seeing the light of day in Czechoslovakia after it. Piller himself informed the party leadership in the summer of 1968 that the report (which was subsequently published abroad) ‘contained such alarming facts’ that its publication might damage the party and some of its leaders.⁴⁰ Several members of the Presidium saw it as a threat to themselves. Even in 1968 the main focus of the reformers in the party leadership had been on Communist rather than non-Communist victims. The latter, however, now had people who were both willing and able to speak up for them. A group of non-Communist writers was formed, with Václav Havel elected to be their principal spokesman. Among their pronouncements, they called for the automatic quashing of the verdicts in all political trials held after February 1948, with the onus put on the state authorities to prosecute anew, should there be any legal grounds for this.⁴¹

The process of re-examining the trials of Communists had begun five years earlier. The Barnabitky Commission of 1963 (named after the monastery in which its members met) exonerated, among others, Gustáv Husák, the Communist who had been a leader of the Slovak National Rising of 1944, and who had been imprisoned as a ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalist’. Although the formal membership of the commission included some of the most conservative figures in the party leadership, the detailed investigative and archival work was carried out by scholarly experts – historians, lawyers and economists. Novotný subsequently treated them as a dangerous group. While they came from different backgrounds, they did, indeed, develop close ties in the course of several months of work together. Several of them lost their jobs as a result of their show of independence. For example, Milan Hbl was ousted from the pro-rectorship of the Party High School, although in 1968 he made a comeback, becoming rector of the very institution from which he had been dismissed in 1964. His main offence had been to write more frankly than was customary about the nationality question in Czechoslovakia and to espouse the cause of the so-called Slovak ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and, in particular, that of Husák. In 1968, when he headed the Party High School, Hbl reinforced the reformist current that was already to be found among some of its staff. It briefly became a kind of school of political science, having been, as one party intellectual put it, ‘secularized’. Husák, who succeeded Dubek as Communist Party first secretary in April 1969, in a spectacular case of ingratitude rewarded Hbl, who had fought to clear Husák’s name, by endorsing his removal once again from the Party High School and subsequently overseeing his expulsion from the Communist Party. Hbl, who refused to recant the critical views he had developed, was sentenced in 1971 to six and a half years in prison.⁴²

It was sometimes said of Husák that the only thing he thought was wrong with the unreformed system in Czechoslovakia was that he, Husák, had been imprisoned. There was an element of truth in that, but as early as 12 January 1968 he published an article in the Slovak Writers’ Union weekly, Kultúrny život, calling for democratization. He was much attracted to power, and to gain political promotion he was prepared to adopt the line that seemed most conducive to it both before and after the Soviet invasion.⁴³ One reform which he pursued sincerely was to turn Czechoslovakia into a federation in which Slovaks would enjoy equal rights with Czechs. It was virtually the only reform of 1968 to survive the transition of leadership from Dubek to his fellow Slovak. What remained was a less radical variant of federalism, inasmuch as the Communist Party, as distinct from the government and legislature, was not federalized, as had been planned before the Soviet invasion. Nevertheless, the federation of state institutions enhanced the position of Slovaks within the political system. They now had their own ministries in Bratislava as well as holding many offices in Prague during the years in which Husák headed the party and, subsequently as president, the state.

East European and Soviet Alarm

From very early in 1968, other Communist leaders in Eastern Europe – especially Gomuka in Poland and Ulbricht in East Germany – were alarmed by developments in Czechoslovakia. It was clear to them that the growing freedom of expression, intra-party debate and developing civil society could prove highly infectious. It was, indeed, not long before demonstrating Polish students shouted, ‘We want a Polish Dubek!’ The first sustained pressure put on the Czechoslovak leadership came at a meeting with five member states of the Warsaw Pact at Dresden on 23 March 1968. The Romanian leadership, keen to emphasize national autonomy, remained apart and did not attend these and other meetings convened to cajole the Czechs and Slovaks into reversing their reformist course. ‘The Five’, as they became known, consisted of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. With the transcript of the Dresden meeting now available, the intensity of the pressure put on Dubek is very evident. Gomuka, already in March 1968, raised the spectre of counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and reminded the Czech and Slovak leaders of the experience of Poland and Hungary. The trouble had started in both of those countries with the writers. He went on: ‘We have to come…to decisions which unequivocally state that the counterrevolution will not succeed in Czechoslovakia, that the leadership of the Czechoslovak party and Czechoslovakia’s working class will not permit that, that Czechoslovakia’s allies, that is, those who are gathered here, will not permit it.’⁴⁴

All the leaders present, but especially those from central Europe, were concerned with the spread of the Czech political infection. Kádár explicitly made the point that ‘there is a direct connection between important events which happen in any socialist country, and the domestic situation in other socialist countries’, and added that the process observable in Czechoslovakia was ‘extremely similar to the prologue of the Hungarian counterrevolution at a time when it had not yet become a counterrevolution’.⁴⁵ Ulbricht said that Western influence had been observable in Czechoslovakia already for six or seven years and that no systematic ideological battle against it had been fought for ten years, and ‘Now all this boils over. We see it in black and white.’⁴⁶ Alexey Kosygin, from the Soviet delegation, took an even harder line than Brezhnev. ‘It is currently a fact’, he said, that in Czechoslovakia ‘the organs which convey the thoughts of the leadership and our thoughts to each worker, farmer, student, and intellectual, are in the hands of the enemy. These are the TV, radio and even the newspapers.’⁴⁷ Brezhnev complained about denunciations of the Communist Party – and the use of phrases such as ‘decayed society’ and ‘outdated order’ – even in Rudé právo: ‘And this in the central organ of the party!’⁴⁸ The Czech leaders at Dresden listened respectfully to the criticism, but the prime minister, Oldich erník, gave the most spirited defence of what was happening in Czechoslovakia. He said it was ‘overwhelmingly progressive and pro-socialist in character’ and that thousands of meetings were being held in overcrowded halls, with millions of people enthusiastically participating in these gatherings. Previously, they had ‘a situation in which halls have been empty, passivity was evident and increasing’.⁴⁹ What erník did not realize was that to his Soviet and East European colleagues, empty halls were infinitely preferable to an active and newly emboldened citizenry, excited about politics and eager to join in.

There was nonstop pressure from the Soviet Union, as well as from the other Communist countries, whose leaders had taken part in the Dresden meeting, throughout the eight months of the Prague Spring. It was clearly better from their point of view that the Czechoslovak leaders should incur the odium of instituting the crackdown than that they should bear the political (and economic) costs of military invasion. While the Soviet leaders could be reasonably confident that the United States, embroiled in Vietnam, would not react too strongly to Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia, there might be a political price to pay in Europe, where the Prague Spring was being extensively reported by the mass media and followed with great enthusiasm. In May 1968, Marshal Grechko, the Soviet minister of defence, led a military delegation to Czechoslovakia, and in the same month Alexey Kosygin arrived, ostensibly to ‘take the waters’ at the famous Czech spa, Karlový Vary (Carlsbad). Kosygin’s serious misgivings about what was going on in Czechoslovakia were doubtless reinforced by some of his personal experiences on this visit, as well as by his meetings with different members of the Czechoslovak leadership, when, in the words of Mlyná, his Czech hosts were unable to protect ‘the second most powerful man in the empire…from prying journalists’.⁵⁰

In early May a summit meeting between the Czechoslovak and Soviet leaders was held, at Soviet behest, in Moscow. The leading members of the Soviet Politburo expressed their outrage at what was happening in Czechoslovakia and their astonishment that stronger action was not being taken to put a stop to it. Brezhnev was incensed by the talk ‘about some sort of “new model of socialism” that has not existed until now’.⁵¹ When Dubek was asked what he was going to do about the kind of thing being published in the press, he responded that the only way was to work individually with editors and to win them over, as he had done in Bratislava. He went on: ‘I’ll have to work personally with these people and speak to them. In Prague, I don’t have such a strong position in these circles, and past roots are stronger there than in Slovakia.’⁵² Thus, even in circumstances where he had to try to assuage the concerns of the Soviet leadership, Dubek evinced some of the characteristics noted by people who knew him well, starting with the fact that he was ‘clearly not authoritarian by nature’.⁵³ Dubek had reconciled in his own mind Leninism and a humane socialism, however oddly such a belief sits with a more hard-headed look at Lenin’s words and deeds. At a time, Mlyná observes, when ‘cynicism and formal faith had been dominant for years’, Czechs and Slovaks responded to someone with ‘a sincere, human, humanitarian faith’, doing so almost regardless of the content of that faith. Dubek, for his part, incorrectly assumed that the fact that he was greeted with genuine warmth wherever he went in Czechoslovakia reflected agreement with his political ideas.⁵⁴

Dubek was a very unusual first secretary of a ruling Communist party, not simply because he really believed in ‘the ideals of communism’, but even more because he did not believe in imposing them on society. He had, indeed, a genuine mistrust of the role of force. While he thought of himself as a follower of Lenin, in his democratic temperament and ‘Masarykian rejection of dictatorial violence’, he was closer in character to the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, Tomáš Masaryk, than to the founder of the Soviet state.⁵⁵ These characteristics were not what Brezhnev wanted to see in the leader of a fraternal ruling party. He had begun by liking Dubek, and he continued to place some confidence in his Czechoslovak counterpart after others in the Soviet leadership had given up on him. However, Brezhnev regarded Dubek as indecisive, and he ended the Moscow meeting of May 1968 with what could be regarded as a veiled warning: ‘Now, while we’re still discussing all these matters with you, we hear you and we believe you. But if it becomes necessary, we can begin to speak in such a way that everyone can hear, and then the working class will hear the voice of its friends. But it is better for you to do this now yourselves.’⁵⁶

A few days after the Czechoslovak leaders had left for Prague, ‘the Five’ met in Moscow. Brezhnev reported to Ulbricht, Gomuka, Kádár and the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, on those early May talks and on the situation in Czechoslovakia since they had met at Dresden. The most vehemently concerned of the participants were Ulbricht and Gomuka, for whom the developing freedom of speech and organization in Czechoslovak society could clearly have a dangerous impact in their own countries. Kádár, too, was exercised by the spectre of ‘counterrevolution’, but adopted a tone more in sorrow than in anger, saying of Dubek and his colleagues: ‘They are honest, albeit naïve, people, and we must work with them.’⁵⁷ All of the leaders agreed that they could not publish the Action Programme in their own countries, but in their public propaganda against the Prague Spring they were not yet directly attacking the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and its official documents, but focusing on ‘anti-socialist elements’ and ‘counterrevolutionaries’.⁵⁸ ‘The CPSU’, Brezhnev said at the May 1968 meeting of the Five, ‘believes it is necessary to save scientific socialism in Czechoslovakia and to defend and maintain the communist party in power…As for criticism of the Action Program, that can come in the second stage. For now, it is essential to discover and consolidate the forces that can undertake the struggle against counterrevolution.’⁵⁹

The Soviet Union cultivated a group of politicians in Czechoslovakia who shared their views. Some were essentially Soviet agents, but two who were simply close to the Soviet embassy and to the view from Moscow, Vasil Bilak and Alois Indra, were people in whom the Soviet leadership began to place their hopes. Given Dubek’s popularity in Czechoslovakia, as public opinion polls demonstrated, an optimal solution remained that of Dubek doing the Soviet job for them as, in a different context, Gottwald had done in 1948. A new peak in the crisis of relations among the ruling European Communist parties came in July, when Dubek and the presidium of the Czechoslovak party refused to meet the Five at a meeting to be held in Warsaw. (Not only Romania, but, still more, Yugoslavia remained aloof from these machinations. The Yugoslavs, unlike the Romanians, were not, of course, members of the Warsaw Pact. They were much more actively sympathetic to the growing independence of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. They believed that the party’s leadership in 1968 enjoyed the support of the greater part of the membership and of the population, as Tito had informed Brezhnev personally when he visited the Soviet Union at the end of April.)⁶⁰

The Five went ahead with their meeting in Warsaw to discuss what for them was ‘the crisis’ in Czechoslovakia without the participation of any Czechs or Slovaks. This led to a sharp letter of protest, signed by Dubek and erník, sent to Brezhnev on 14 July, although the Soviet leader received it only after the meeting of the Five had concluded.⁶¹ Gomuka, chairing the opening session since the meeting was being held on his home ground, said that their purpose was ‘to exchange views and reach a common position on a matter of the utmost importance for each of our countries and for the whole socialist commonwealth’. Brezhnev intervened to say that there should be only one item on the agenda: ‘On the situation in Czechoslovakia.’⁶²

Gomuka, presenting the Polish Communist assessment, said that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia ‘is abandoning the precepts of Marxism-Leninism and is being transformed into a social democratic party’, while ‘the country is being peacefully transformed from a socialist state into a bourgeois republic’.⁶³ Kádár, however, perhaps because he was only too well aware of the logical conclusion of an analysis such as Gomuka’s, took a less apocalyptic view. He did not agree that the Czechoslovak party was being transformed into a social democratic party, although there were dangerous tendencies within it. Neither Dubek nor erník, he said, understood ‘the full gravity of the situation’ they appear to be in ‘a stupor’. The situation in Czechoslovakia was, though, steadily deteriorating – already much worse than when the Five had met in Dresden and Moscow.⁶⁴

Ulbricht, nevertheless, launched an attack on Kádár for the relative mildness of his assessment of the situation in Czechoslovakia, saying that he was amazed that he spoke of ‘revisionist forces’ when he should have been talking about ‘counterrevolutionary forces’. He went on:

    The Czechs’ plans for counterrevolution are obvious. There can be no further doubt about this matter. The counterrevolutionaries want to prepare the party congress in such a way that they can crush and eliminate the Marxist-Leninists…

        I don’t know, Comrade Kádár, why you can’t grasp all this. Don’t you realize that the next blow from imperialism will take place in Hungary? We can already detect that imperialist centers are concentrating their work now on the Hungarian intelligentsia.⁶⁵

The Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, also criticized Kádár for continuing to vest some hopes in Dubek and erník. Perhaps following some informal prompting from members of the Soviet delegation, given the weightiness of the issue, Zhivkov was the first person at this meeting to speak explicitly of military intervention (although Gomuka had already done so, in discussion with members of the Soviet Politburo, at the beginning of July),⁶⁶ saying:

    There is only one appropriate way out – through resolute assistance to Czechoslovakia from our parties and the countries of the Warsaw Pact. We cannot currently rely on the internal forces in Czechoslovakia. There are no forces there that could carry out the types of tasks we wrote about in our letter. Only by relying on the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact can we change the situation.⁶⁷

The Soviet political and military leadership had been making contingency plans for months for a possible military intervention in Czechoslovakia, but the leadership had still not taken a definite decision in July to use force. At the beginning of that month a two-day Politburo meeting found Brezhnev and Kosygin still favouring intense pressure on Dubek – to remove the people in high office whom the Soviet leadership most objected to, and to crack down on the mass media – whereas several others already favoured the use of force. They included KGB chairman Yury Andropov and the Central Committee secretary (later to be minister of defence) who supervised the military and military industry, Dmitry Ustinov.⁶⁸ At a meeting at the end of July at ierna nad Tisou in eastern Slovakia, just over the border from the Soviet Union, a tense confrontation took place between almost the entire CPSU Politburo on one side and the whole of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Presidium on the other. The latter had the disadvantage of being far less united than the Soviet Politburo. Some of their number actually agreed with the severe criticism of the Czechoslovak authorities meted out by Brezhnev, Kosygin, the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Petro Shelest, and others.⁶⁹ Dubek was not unduly cowed and, in fact, registered two strong complaints. The Warsaw meeting of the Five and the publication of their letter condemning what was happening in Czechoslovakia had, he insisted, been counterproductive, for it had been ‘perceived by us, the communists, and by our whole society as a means of generating external pressure on our party’.⁷⁰ He also complained about the continuing presence in Czechoslovakia of two Soviet army regiments several weeks after the end of Warsaw Pact military exercises.⁷¹ The meeting ended with the briefest of communiqués, but with an agreement to meet in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, on 3 August, when they would be joined by the Polish, East German, Bulgarian and Hungarian leaders.

The month of August, in the lead-up to the Soviet invasion, was one of extreme pressure on the Czechoslovak leadership, and on Dubek in particular. The absence of any real information as to what went on at ierna led to several thousand young people demonstrating in Prague, demanding to know the truth. They were not helped by the disunited leadership sending out quite different signals about what had been agreed. President Svoboda described the meeting as having symbolized Soviet – Czechoslovak friendship. Josef Smrkovský met the demonstrating students and assured them that no agreements on limiting press freedom had been agreed. Dubek spoke on radio and television and, in attempting to placate both his own people and the Five, did not succeed in reassuring either, in particular the Soviet and East European Communist leaders. For the latter he mentioned that Czechoslovakia would ‘remain faithful to our friends and to proletarian internationalism’ (‘proletarian internationalism’ having long become the accepted phraseology in the international Communist movement for following the Soviet line). For Czechs and Slovaks he promised ‘to stand firmly on the post-January policy’.⁷²

The meeting in Bratislava in early August produced what was in many ways a compromise document, which became known as the Bratislava Declaration. Being themselves internally divided, the Czechoslovak leadership team accepted much of the terminology demanded by the Soviet and East European leaders, including such phrases as ‘unswerving loyalty to Marxism-Leninism’ and the need to educate ‘the masses’ in the ‘spirit of proletarian internationalism’, as well as accepting that further progress was possible ‘only through strict and consistent adherence to the laws of building a socialist society and above all through a consolidation of the leading role of the working class and its vanguard, the communist party’. The Czechoslovak side was able, though, to insert the qualification that ‘each fraternal party decides all questions of further socialist development in a creative way, taking into account specific national features and conditions’. Nevertheless, the document included a passage which was later used to justify the military intervention by the Five – that the task of ‘supporting, consolidating and defending’ the gains of socialism was ‘the common international duty of all the socialist countries’.⁷³

At the very time when the ‘fraternal parties’ were hammering out their declaration, the Soviet leadership were slipped a letter they had been soliciting in order to justify an invasion. It was a request from the hard-line members of the Czechoslovak leadership addressed to Brezhnev and calling for intervention to combat what the letter-writers called ‘an anti-communist and anti-Soviet psychosis’. They wrote: ‘…we are appealing to you, Soviet communists, the leading representatives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with a request for you to lend support and assistance with all the means at your disposal. Only with your assistance can the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic be extricated from the imminent danger of counterrevolution.’⁷⁴ When things did not go in the short run after the invasion as the Soviet and Eastern European leaders had planned, the authors of this document decided to remain anonymous. The letter was kept in the archive of the Soviet Politburo. Brezhnev’s loyal associate, Konstantin Chernenko, the head of the General Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, wrote: ‘Not to be opened without my express permission.’ The signatories to the letter, even its very existence, remained a mystery until 1992, when a copy was given to the Czechoslovak government. The five members of the 1968 party leadership who signed the letter were Alois Indra, Drahomír Kolder, Antonín Kapek, Oldich vestka and Vasil Bilak. By the time it came to light, only Bilak was still alive.⁷⁵

The Invasion and Aftermath

The final decision to launch an invasion was taken in the Soviet Politburo, which met over three days between 15 and 17 August. Brezhnev had telephoned Dubek on 13 August and in a call which lasted almost one and a half hours accused him of deceit. Even at that stage he did not warn Dubek openly that the alternative to compliance with Soviet demands was imminent invasion. Until this actually took place, Dubek had refused to believe that the Soviet Union would take such a step against a country in which, after all, the Communist Party was still in office, albeit not – from a Soviet standpoint – in control. Moreover, the Czechoslovak leadership had never at any point proposed leaving the Warsaw Pact, which some of them believed had been the tipping point, bringing about Soviet invasion of Hungary twelve years earlier. The fact, indeed, that Czechoslovakia had a tradition of good relations with Russia, along with the friendship a number of the Czech and Slovak leaders enjoyed with their counterparts in the Soviet Union, meant that hardly any of them believed that an invasion was at all likely. It is arguable that they did not take the prospect seriously enough, but if they had done so, there could hardly have been a Prague Spring. Given the composition and views of the Soviet leadership at that time, fortified by the agitation of Gomuka and Ulbricht, it seems certain that the only way the Czechoslovak Communist leadership could have avoided a military intervention was by not giving the country eight months of substantial freedom (which were followed by seven months of partial freedom).

Dubek was pressed on many specifics by the Soviet leadership, not least to remove leaders of whom they disapproved, with František Kriegel top of that list. Responding in his long conversation with Brezhnev on 13 August to the latter’s telephone tirade, Dubek told the Soviet leader that personnel changes were issues for a plenary session of the Central Committee, not something he personally could decree. He also refused to agree with Brezhnev that the Fourteenth Party Congress, which the reformers in the Czechoslovak party leadership wished to bring forward and hold in the coming weeks, should be postponed. The imminence of that congress merely confirmed the Soviet view that there was no time to lose in launching their invasion. The political atmosphere in Czechoslovakia was such that the Fourteenth Congress would have consolidated the position of the radical reformers and seen the removal of the hard-line pro-Soviet members of the Presidium and secretariat – the ‘healthy forces’, as they were known to the Soviet leaders and propagandists.⁷⁶

The armed forces of the Soviet Union, with East German, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian contingents as well, crossed the borders of Czechoslovakia late on the night of 20 August. The Czechoslovak Presidium was in session, and a plan had been worked out between the Soviet Union and their collaborators in the Czechoslovak leadership. A majority in the Presidium were to denounce the ‘rightists’ who had allowed a counterrevolutionary situation to develop, and would seek the assistance of their Soviet and East European comrades. That was just the first of the interventionists’ plans to go awry. Dubek had refused to accommodate their preferences on the order of business on the Presidium agenda. Those who had hoped to procure a majority vote against him had not yet had a chance to raise their concerns when the news broke that the armies of the Five had entered Czechoslovakia. Some round the Presidium table had been well aware that the invasion was about to take place, but it came a little earlier than they had expected.

An anonymous telephone caller to a Czech journalist in Budapest at 5 p.m. on 20 August had told him in an agitated voice that the occupation of his country would begin at midnight.⁷⁷ The message was passed on to the Czechoslovak ambassador to Hungary and subsequently to erník as prime minister. (Midnight was also the time those in the Czechoslovak leadership who had colluded with the Soviet leadership expected the military intervention to commence.) erník took the warning seriously enough to have the situation checked on the ground. He left the Presidium meeting to take a telephone call, and when he returned at 11.40 p.m. he announced: ‘The armies of the five parties have crossed the borders of our republic and are occupying us.’⁷⁸ Two Presidium members, whom the collaborators had counted on to join them in a vote of no-confidence in Dubek but for whom the invasion was unexpected, were sufficiently aghast that they defected from the hard-line camp. Almost half a million troops had occupied Czechoslovakia, the great majority of them Soviet, but with thousands also from each of the other four collaborating East European Communist states.

The Soviet leaders knew whom they trusted in the Czechoslovak leadership and knew whom they could not abide, but there was also a group in between. They were prepared to wait and see who was willing to collaborate with them after Soviet troops were in control before making their personnel preferences clear. They had given up on Dubek. At a minimum, they had no intention of allowing him to play the leading role in a post-invasion regime. This was signalled not only in private – as when Brezhnev, in a meeting of the Five on 18 December, told the other leaders that at the Czechoslovak Presidium ‘our friends’ would ‘wage an open struggle with the rightist forces, including Dubek’⁷⁹–but also in their public pronouncements, with Pravda immediately after the invasion describing Dubek as the leader of a ‘minority group’ within the Presidium who had adopted a ‘frankly right-wing opportunist position’.⁸⁰

The Presidium members for whom the invasion had been totally unexpected were in shock when they heard erník’s news. Mlyná compared it to the way he felt when he had been in a car crash years before. He also had ‘the clear feeling that this was the ultimate debacle of my life as a Communist’.⁸¹ His facility as a writer, however, which had involved him in frequently drafting Prague Spring documents, led to his being the main author of a resolution which was approved by the Presidium members by seven votes to four. It included the sentence: ‘The Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPC considers this act not only contrary to all the fundamental principles governing relationships between socialist states, but also as a denial of the basic norms of international law.’⁸² In spite of the invading armies’ occupation of all the major television and radio buildings, those who worked in those places found ways of broadcasting the Presidium’s condemnation of the invasion the next morning. Meantime, the reformist members of the Czechoslovak leadership soon had guns to their heads after Soviet troops entered Dubek’s office in the Central Committee building, where they had remained after the Presidium meeting ended in the early hours of 21 August. The two leading collaborators, Bilak and Indra, had made their way to the Soviet embassy.

Even without the broadcasting of the Presidium resolution, which confirmed that the occupation had been against the will of the country’s top leadership, people would have taken to the streets. Eight months of reform and debate had revitalized the society. In the days following the invasion there was massive unarmed resistance by the Czech and Slovak populations. In Prague, in particular, young soldiers from the occupying forces in Soviet tanks were taken aback to be compared to fascists and to realize just how unpopular their ‘fraternal assistance’ was with the overwhelming majority of the population of Czechoslovakia. Street signs were changed to confuse the invading forces, and on 22 August technicians diverted the jamming of Radio Free Europe broadcasts and jammed instead broadcasts coming from East Germany aimed at giving the occupiers’ view of the situation in Czechoslovakia. On 21 August Soviet troops killed fifteen unarmed Czech demonstrators in the vicinity of the main Prague radio building, and there were other deaths. The Czechs and Slovaks, however, offered only unarmed resistance, and the scale of it was such that the invading forces were soon more bewildered than belligerent. Many of them had arrived in Czechoslovakia without even knowing where they were going. Some thought they were being sent to West Germany.⁸³

The fact that a majority of the Czechoslovak Presidium, including the top leaders, had rejected the ‘fraternal aid’ they had been offered by the Warsaw Pact forces, together with the overwhelming opposition of the civilian population of Czechoslovakia, forced the Soviet leadership to think again about replacing Dubek. He, along with other senior reformist members of the Presidium, had been flown to Moscow under duress for what were later termed ‘negotiations’, although the fact that they took place in the Kremlin, at a time when Soviet forces were occupying Czechoslovakia, made them somewhat one-sided. Unknown to the Czechoslovak leaders being held in the Soviet Union, a clandestine party congress, called at the time the Fourteenth Congress, had been hurriedly convened in a Prague factory in the industrial district of Vysoany. It met on 22 August, and remarkably, 1,290 of the delegates who had been chosen to take part in the scheduled Fourteenth Congress managed to make their way there – more than two-thirds of the elected delegates. They had to get past the patrols of the occupying troops and keep the location of the congress secret from them.⁸⁴ The congress fully supported the reforms of the Prague Spring, condemned unreservedly the invasion, and elected still more reformers to leading positions in the party. Zdenk Mlyná, who had been among the party leaders held at gunpoint on the morning of 21 August, was not one of those involuntarily transported to Moscow. He was, however, now sent to Moscow on the instructions of the Vysoany congress to convey their decisions to those leaders who were in Soviet custody. From Mlyná they learned not only of the decisions of the congress but also of the remarkable passive resistance of the population as a whole.

Two others who joined the ‘negotiations’ in Moscow, President Svoboda and Gustáv Husák – who had emerged as Bilak’s successor as first secretary in Slovakia – played very different roles from that of Mlyná. Svoboda was more accommodating of the Soviet leadership than of Dubek and the reformist wing of the Czechoslovak leadership. Husák refused to recognize the validity of the Vysoany congress because Slovak delegates had been unable to get there. He did, however, say that this would have to be done delicately because it had so much support among Czechs. He also informed the Soviet leaders that Bilak was now regarded at home as a traitor.⁸⁵ The ‘Moscow Agreement’ was signed on 26 August, and notwithstanding the intimidatory atmosphere in which the discussions had been held, the Czechoslovak side were able to remove any references to counterrevolution. The document did not condemn the whole process of reform, but it did include such familiar Soviet points as ‘strengthening the socialist system on the basis of Marxism-Leninism’.⁸⁶ There were very diverse views among the Czechs and Slovaks who had arrived at different times in the Kremlin – they included a number of Brezhnev’s ‘favourite sons’, such as Indra and Bilak – but the only person on the Czechoslovak side who refused to sign the agreement was Kriegel. There were disagreements on the Soviet and East European side as well. Ulbricht, Gomuka and Zhivkov were horrified by the idea of keeping Dubek in the leadership, most of all by allowing him to continue as first secretary. They wanted the formation of a ‘revolutionary’ government in Czechoslovakia, as did Andropov and Ustinov from the Soviet leadership.⁸⁷ Ulbricht asked: ‘If Dubek and erník are going to be in the government, then why did we send the troops?’ Kosygin, although he referred to Dubek as the ‘Number One Scoundrel’, said he failed to see the people who could lead a revolutionary government.⁸⁸

Brezhnev and Kosygin were the most influential of those who were making a tactical retreat from what had been the Soviet position on the eve of the invasion. They had decided by 23 August that the main office-holders in Czechoslovakia could not be replaced for the time being if Czechoslovakia was to be governable by Czechs and Slovaks. That meant that not only Svoboda, to whom the Soviet leaders were quite well disposed, but also Dubek, erník and Smrkovský would temporarily keep their posts. Brezhnev told Svoboda that they were not raising the question of removing Dubek or the other two leaders who had also become symbolic figures of the Prague Spring.⁸⁹ Dubek stood up well to interrogation by Brezhnev, but took very little part in the negotiations on the text of the Moscow Agreement, for the strain of the past week had made him ill. The Czechoslovak side, however, conceded an important point which was not in the published agreement – namely, the removal from significant posts of some of the radical reformers to whom the Soviet side most strongly objected.

In the short term, things did not proceed in Czechoslovakia as the Soviet leadership and their East European governmental allies had hoped. A top-secret document compiled by the KGB was signed off by Andropov on 13 October 1968 and two days later approved by the CPSU leadership for dispatch to Ulbricht and Gomuka, who had asked for more information on what was happening in Czechoslovakia.⁹⁰ The report was a mixture of truth about the defiance of leading members of the party and public in Czechoslovakia (with concrete examples), and untruths. In some respects the KGB were not so well informed as they thought, putting together in a ‘second centre’ people who were not particularly close to one another. The report also, after placing Mlyná in that ‘second centre’, put in brackets after his name ‘Müller’.⁹¹ This was intended to convey that Mlyná was a Jew who had changed his name. In fact, he was not of Jewish descent on either side of his family and possessed the same surname all his life. The anti-semitic card was, however, to be played relentlessly in the Soviet mass media. Not content with listing Czech Communists who were indeed of Jewish origin as dangerous enemies – among them Kriegel, Šik, Pelikán and Goldstücker – Jewish ‘original names’ were invented for other prominent figures in Czechoslovakia, to damn them the more effectively. This had more resonance in Soviet Russia than in Czechoslovakia. It doubtless also went down well with one of the recipients of the KGB document, Gomuka, since his campaign against intellectual reformers in Poland in 1968 had a strongly anti-semitic flavour.

In many ways the compromise agreement which saw almost the same Czechoslovak leadership return to Prague had been a defeat for the Soviet leadership. Alexander Dubek, helped by the enormous and demonstrative support he was enjoying at home in Czechoslovakia, returned still holding the office of First Secretary of the Central Committee. Quite inadvertently, though, the Soviet Politburo had hit on a solution which worked very well, from their narrow point of view, for two decades. The deal struck in Moscow meant that during a period almost as long as the Prague Spring itself, Czechoslovakia’s ‘normalization would have a human face’.⁹² However, the step-by-step retreat by the leaders in whom the people of Czechoslovakia had reposed great trust meant that by the time Dubek was replaced by Husák as party first secretary in April 1969, there was scarcely a murmur from the population, whereas millions would have taken to the streets if anyone other than he had been appointed to that office at the end of August of the previous year. One by one, those who favoured radical reform were demoted or dismissed. The people of Czechoslovakia had been politically and morally disarmed by the time hard-liners came to power and governed the country much more intolerantly. Many interesting – from a Soviet point of view politically objectionable – publications continued to appear in Czechoslovakia between September 1968 and April 1969, but in the changed circumstances brought about by military occupation, the relentless pressure on the country’s leadership to concede positions they had earlier refused to give up took its toll.

After moving from the first secretaryship in Slovakia to becoming the political leader of the Czechoslovak state, Husák became a model Soviet-style ‘normalizer’. He failed to meet even the modest desires of those who hoped he would turn into a Kádár and support economic reform and perhaps cultural liberalization. In the longer run, however, the years in which Czechoslovakia became a ‘normal’ Communist state brought no credit, or positive legacy, either to the leading Czech and Slovak normalizers or to those in the Soviet Union who had placed them in power. Indeed, as will be seen in later chapters, the Prague Spring and its crushing came to have a significance in Western Europe in the 1970s and for the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s quite different from anything that was in the mind of Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues.