Kitabı oxu: «Operation Danube Reconsidered»

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Preface

01 Introduction

02 Reflections on 1968 and its Legacies

03 The Prague Spring and the Evolution of the Position of Leonid Brezhnev

04 Limits of Washington’s Position Towards the Invasion of Czechoslovakia in the Summer of 1968

05 Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia During 1968

06 Towards Military Intervention. Prague Spring and Party Representatives in Hungary

07 The Communist Authorities and Polish Society in the Face of the Prague Spring and the Intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968

08 The Bulgarians and the Prague Spring, 1968

09 Operation “Danube”

10 The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as Reflected in the “Western” Historiography

11 Conclusion

Selected Sources

Preface

My father Ladislav created in August 1968 a set of photographs of the Warsaw Pact troops’ invasion to Czechoslovakia. Among these, the famous Man with bare chest before an occupation tank—a picture that spread around the world and before being almost completely forgotten. Just like the story of the occupation of Czechoslovakia.

The largest military operation after World War Two has been underestimated for a long time as an insignificant part of history and the most recognisable picture of a Slovak author wandered around the world nameless. However, the truth lay somewhere in the memory of Slovaks and Czechs, while justice for that truth awaited its moment. This came in the year 1989.

The exhibitions of my father’s photographs revealed the true face of the occupation. Justice showed itself in the trials in Germany as well as in Slovakia. The pictures of August 1968 became, together with the name of their author, a part of our visual memory and cultural heritage. However, in order to pay the debt to our history and our ancestors, it is necessary to answer also the questions of the causes of the occupation beginning with the word Why …?

Why were the Soviets so scared of the Prague Spring?

Why did they send such an unreasonably large, half-a-million strong army?

Finally, why did they name this military intervention after the river Danube?

The answers to these questions were hidden in the archives belonging both to the countries who were our aggressors and to those who had been our allies. Together, also thanks to the work of our non-profit organization, these answers appear in the pages of the book you are holding in your hands right now. Can you find them in the texts of the writers from Serbia, Russian Federation, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other countries? Will these new pieces of information be an inspiration for you in your search for truth about August 1968 in the future?

I do hope so …

Peter Bielik

Head of Camera Obskura, n.o.

01
Introduction

At 11 o’clock in the evening of 20th August 1968, after the signal “Vltava,” the armies of four Warsaw Pact countries, the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, crossed the borders of Czechoslovakia. While Romania and Albania refused to participate, East German forces, except for a small number of specialists, did not participate in the invasion because they were ordered from Moscow not to do so. By August 25th, there were 27 invasion divisions in full combat status in Czechoslovakia, over 6000 tanks, and almost 1000 military aircrafts. Over a hundred Czechoslovakian civilians were killed and approximately 500 seriously wounded during the occupation. The invasion successfully stopped Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring liberalisation reforms and strengthened the authority of the authoritarian wing within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). Literally overnight the Czechoslovak experiment was transformed from living reality into history.

Apart from distressing domestic reforms, especially the decentralization of administrative authority, the more important reason for the Soviet-led Warsaw pact intervention were the signs of a shift in Czech foreign policy that Soviets feared might weaken the position of the Bloc in the Cold War. In regards to foreign policy, the “new course” of Czechoslovakia foresaw wider cooperation with the world, especially with West Germany. Czechoslovakia also sought to loosen its bonds with Warsaw Pact and Comecon, the organization established to facilitate and coordinate the economic development of the Soviet bloc, and gradually showed less and less enthusiasm for the Soviet assistance to the third world countries in a bid to establish its influence there. There was a fear in Moscow that all this could eventually mean that Czechoslovakia might drift away from the communist bloc towards neutrality. This might be followed by Hungary and Poland, slowly undermining the Soviet position in Germany and possibly even losing its buffer zone in Europe.

A decisive faction of the Soviet leadership felt that what was at stake was nothing less than the power balance in Europe—and by extension, potentially the world. That faction saw no other option than a military intervention. Leonid Brezhnev, who did not regard the choice of Alexander Dubček as the successor of Antonín Novotný as problematic in the beginning was subsequently very disappointed. With every liberalizing step in Prague, Moscow grew ever more uneasy. By July 1968, Moscow had come to the conclusion that events in Prague were spinning out of the Party’s control and something has to be done. However, Brezhnev feared his rivals in the Soviet elite, who could use against him any weakening of the Communist power in Czechoslovakia, more than the inevitable international outrage that would be caused by the occupation. After hesitations which lasted some months, he made a choice in favour of the occupation.

Although the Soviet Union’s action successfully halted the pace of reform in Czechoslovakia, it had unintended consequences for both the unity of the Communist bloc and establishing the new Soviet foreign doctrine. The invasion helped established a so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, that—based on the assumption that a challenge to Socialist rule in one part of the Soviet bloc was a threat to the whole enterprise—justified Moscow’s intervention in any country where it felt Communist rule was under threat.

The Warsaw pact intervention, however, did not spark an important international crisis. The division of Europe between superpowers was confirmed and a new version of east-west “détente,” based on that understanding, could be launched. Given the exhausting American involvement in the Vietnam War, the Soviets assumed (correctly) that the United States would not intervene and would make do with the condemnation of the invasion. Lyndon B. Johnson cancelled a planned summit meeting with Brezhnev, but this was something that Soviets expected and they concluded that maintaining the control over the Eastern Bloc was more important. Thus, the invasion was completed without any direct intervention from the West or NATO. Similarly, attempts in the United Nations to pass a resolution that would condemn Warsaw pact action were vetoed by the USSR and slowly died away.

This book focuses attention on the international context of the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia. Its chief aim has been to bring together experts from within as well without Central Europe and to ignite or—perhaps, better—to re-ignite an international discussion about the Prague spring, its origins, its unfolding, its aftermath and—most importantly—its international context. The debate and historiography regarding the Prague spring is exhaustive, but in a way fragmented, and—besides a few exceptions—with each national historiography giving its soliloquy. Thus, it was high time to start an international dialogue and to investigate and analyse the reactions of the key international players and Warsaw pact member states involved in the invasion, to bring to the debate the newest findings of the respective national historiographies.

Jakub Drábik

02
Reflections on 1968 and its Legacies

Jacques Rupnik

Sciences Po, Paris

“Czechoslovakia in 1968 represented an important moment in human history; it did not represent an important international crisis.”1 The verdict of two eminent British professors of international relations, arrived at instantly after the tanks of August put an end to the Czechoslovak experiment of ‘socialism with human face’, was brutal and painfully accurate. The division of the continent was confirmed and a new version of east-west ‘détente,’ based on that understanding, ready to be launched. The significance of the Prague Spring cannot be measured only by its defeat, however. Its contribution should be understood in the interplay between its Czecho-Slovak and European dimensions. The August ’68 invasion might not have provoked a “major international crisis,” as the two professors stated, but it certainly was the year that shook Europe. Three aspects deserve to be mentioned in this respect. First, the Prague Spring revived the debate about Czechoslovak democratic exceptionalism in the context of (east) European Socialism. Second, it was often interpreted as part of an international, generational revolt against the establishments, east and west. Third, it represented the most far-reaching reform of the system within the Soviet sphere and provided twenty years later a belated (and thus doomed) inspiration for Mikhail Gorbachev’s botched attempt to save it, which indeed paved the way for 1989.

The Prague Spring was not what you read about in school textbooks that start with the election of Alexander Dubček as party leader on January 5, 1968 and conclude with the Soviet-led invasion of August 21. Rather, it should be understood as a process starting in the early 1960s, with converging pressures for economic reforms identified with the name Ota Sik; Slovak resentment of Prague centralism (hence Alexander Dubček and the federalization project); and the gradual emancipation of the cultural sphere from the stranglehold of ideological censorship, which accounts for the golden age of Czech cinema, theater, and literature with a significant and lasting impact throughout Europe. The culmination of the three-pronged process brought about political change, starting with the abolition of censorship and the separation of party and state. In other words, 1968 was not just a parlor game for reform-minded party bureaucrats. It was, in Václav Havel’s words, “above all a civic renewal, a restoration of human dignity, the trust in the capacities and possibilities of citizens to change society.”2

Post-1968 interpretations of the democratization process revived variations on the theme of Czechoslovak exceptionalism in east central Europe. The first could be summed up as the triumph of Czech and Slovak culture over the Communist structure. The emancipation of the cultural sphere from the constraints of censorship without being subjected to market pressures produced a powerful 60s cultural background to the political and societal changes associated with 1968. A related version of the argument concerns the enduring democratic character of Czechoslovak political culture. Authors like Archie Brown and Gordon Skilling are instructive here. Skilling, in his monumental study of the Prague Spring, has argued that the legacies of pre-war democracy, followed between 1945 and 1948 by a “democratic interlude,” have left behind a political culture (both broadly in society and specifically within the Communist Party itself) that were in conflict with the Stalinist regime, and that eventually came to the surface in the 1960s to contribute to a break from Soviet-type Communism.3 Hence, the problematic title of Skilling’s book, The Interrupted Revolution. In contrast to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and in order to avoid a similar outcome, the Prague reformers were eager to stress that they meant change within socialism. Yet abolishing censorship and separating party and state fostered a dynamic that challenged the fundamentals of the Communist system.

One of the most interesting debates about the meaning of 1968 was expressed through the opposition of two leading Czech intellectuals, Milan Kundera and Václav Havel—a debate which is worth re-reading half a century later, although not for a post-invasion assessment.4 Inspired by the formidable, peaceful civic resistance of August 1968, Kundera overstated the case when he said that the reformist project could survive the invasion, and this was mercilessly dismissed by Havel as sheer delusion. It is the meaning of the Spring of 1968, however, which is worth revisiting. Following on H. Gordon Schauer’s provocative nineteenth century question about what ultimately justifies the efforts put into producing a culture in the Czech language, Kundera makes a plea for the contribution of small nations to universal values, ideas, culture:

A small nation, if it has any meaning in the world, has to daily, constantly re-create itself. The moment it ceases to create values, it loses the justification for its existence and then perhaps actually ceases to exist, because it is fragile and vulnerable. The creation of values is connected with its very being.5

For Kundera, the Prague Spring was of significance to Europe as a whole because, beyond eastern Stalinism and western Capitalism, it tried to combine Socialism with democracy. Not a mere remake of the ‘third way’, nor a blueprint for a radiant future, the Czechoslovak heresy was defeated, but its impact on the future of the European Left has been far-reaching and persistent.

Havel’s take, in contrast, was more sober and realistic, far from the ‘provincial messianism’ he attributed to Kundera. Restoring basic freedoms was no doubt a great achievement, but the last time we had them was thirty years ago and indeed this is considered ‘normal’ in most ‘civilized’ countries. Therefore, 1968 was about liberal democratic normality, as opposed to the repressive ‘normalization’ that followed:

… If we are going to imagine that a country has placed itself at the center of world history because it wishes to establish freedom of expression—something taken for granted in most of the civilized world—and to check the tyranny of its secret police, in all seriousness we shall become nothing more than self-complacent hacks, laughable in our provincial messianism! Freedom and the rule of law are the most basic preconditions for a normally and soundly functioning societal organism, and should any state attempt to reestablish them after years of their absence it is doing nothing historically momentous but simply trying to remove its own abnormality.6

For some thirty years the verdict on Kundera’s somewhat messianic vision vs Havel’s lucid realism seemed fairly obvious to most Czechs. Yet today, half a century later, with Communism long dead and western liberal-democratic ‘normalcy’ in crisis, Kundera’s plea for the ‘Czechoslovak possibility’ in 1968 acquires perhaps a new resonance.

A second reading of the Prague Spring highlights its European dimension and calls us to interpret it through the prism of the rebellions that shook the political establishments throughout the continent in ’68. There was May ’68 in France, the Polish events of March ’68, Berlin, Belgrade …

The common denominator of these movements was the search for alternative models of society with contrasting, confusing, and often contradictory references to ‘Socialism’: from self-management in the workplace to the Christian-Marxist dialogue or to discussions about the impact of science and technology on the evolution of modern societies in both east and west. Moreover, there were not insignificant Czech contributions to all of the above. Karel Kosik’s Marxist humanism (influenced by Jan Patocka’s phenomenology) and a civilizational pessimism related precisely to the dehumanizing role of science and technology, or on the contrary, Radovan Richta’s civilizational optimism based on the “scientific and technical revolution.”7 The former proved incompatible with the “normalization” Gleichschaltung of the 1970s, while the latter’s technocratic faith in the progress of sciences rather easily blended in. Both were among the most influential Czech thinkers of the late 1960s in Europe and both were thus part of what Jan Patocka had in mind in attempting to frame the Prague Spring reforms in a European context and calling for a dialogue between intellectuals east and west. Patocka’s contribution was a piece entitled “Inteligence a opozice,” based on a lecture given during the Spring of 1968 in Germany, where he states that “the position of intellectuals in the East is better because ‘they do not consider basic democratic rights as a mere means towards an end but an end in itself’.”8

This proved to be the main contrast between 1968 in Prague (or Warsaw) and Paris (or Berlin). To be sure, there is a whole aspect of 1968 that can be interpreted mainly in terms of generations. There is now even a term for this: “Youthquake,” declared in 2017 as the “Word of the Year” by the experts at the Oxford English Dictionary. It is defined as “significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people.” The most interesting thing about the Prague Spring was that there was indeed youth participation, particularly the student movement as its radical wing, but its driving force was the previous generation, which experienced (supported or was at the receiving end of) state actions in 1945–48 and their aftermath. A.J. Liehm, the editor of Literarni listy in 1968, elaborated on this concept of political generations precisely in 1968 in the introduction to a splendid volume of his interviews with the leading intellectual figures of 1968 (from Ludvik Vaculik to Josef Skvorecky, and from Eduard Goldstücker to Václav Havel, to mention only a few), among the best guides to the cultural politics of the Prague Spring.9 Many—by no means all—of those who turned twenty after World War Two and had backed the communist takeover in 1948 found themselves frustrated and disappointed with the revolution from above, and thus helped in the 1960s to bring about a revolution from below, which culminated in 1968.10

As much as the political context, this generational aspect accounts for the contrasts and misunderstandings of 1968 between east and west, Prague and Paris. The driving force of the Prague Spring was the aspiration to freedom, whereas in Paris the moment of emancipation combined with the myth of revolution. Milan Kundera described the contrast as follows:

Paris’s May ’68 was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague Spring was the explosion of post-revolutionary skepticism … May ’68 was a radical uprising whereas what had, for many a long year, been leading towards the explosion of the Prague Spring was a popular revolt by moderates.11

While western radicals beset by post-colonial guilt looked to the Third World, European identity was part of the Spring of 1968 in Prague. Again, in Kundera’s words:

Paris in May ’68 challenged the basis of what is called European culture and its traditional values. The Prague Spring was a passionate defense of the European cultural tradition in the widest and most tolerant sense of the term (a defense of Christianity just as much as of modern art—both rejected by those in power). We all struggled for the right to maintain that tradition that had been threatened by the anti-western messianism of Russian totalitarianism.”12

The contrast and misunderstandings highlighted here, however, should not make us forget the intellectually and politically important convergence between the western ’68ers who in the following decade abandoned Marxism and became anti-totalitarian liberals of different shades, and the post-’68 Czech dissidents around common issues and concerns: human rights, civil society, and overcoming the partition of Europe.

Finally, there is another dimension to the Spring of 1968 as the “supreme stage” of reformism in the Soviet bloc and its implications for a divided Europe. Zdenek Mlynar, one of the architects of the political reforms and in 1968 the youngest member of the Politburo, has described the way Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership spelled out the reasons for the invasion to Dubček and his colleagues:

Precisely because the territorial results of the last war are untouchable to us we had to intervene in Czechoslovakia. The West will not move, so, what do you think will be done on your behalf? Comrades Tito, Ceausescu, Berlinguer, will make speeches. Well, and what of it? You are counting on the Communist movement in Western Europe? But that has remained insignificant for the last fifty years.13

That part is familiar enough. Indeed Tito and the “Eurocommunists” in the west protested and claimed to continue the legacy of the Prague Spring as a way to enhance their democratic credentials in western Europe.

The real legacy, however, returned with a vengeance twenty years later. Gorbachev, Mlynar’s friend and roommate from their student days in Moscow, became leader of the Soviet Communist Party and sought inspiration for his perestroika in the Prague Spring of 1968. Asked what was the difference between his reforms and those of Dubček, the spokesman for Gorbachev replied simply: “Nineteen years” …

That certainly was not good enough to rehabilitate “socialism with a human face” in the eyes of skeptical Czechs and Slovaks twenty years later. It is not easy to identify with a defeated project that carries the price tag of another twenty years in a post-totalitarian dictatorship. It did matter, however, for what was unfolding in Moscow and its relationship with its most western dependencies. Jiří Dienstbier, a prominent Czech journalist from 1968 and a dissident turned prisoner turned stoker, became Minister of foreign affairs in December 1989. On his first meeting with Gorbachev, he referred to the hopes of 1968 and their crushing by Moscow, to which Gorbachev replied: “We thought that we had strangled the Prague Spring while in reality we had strangled ourselves …”14

Gorbachev and his entourage saw the Prague Spring as a chance to save the system. Its crushing thus prevented reform at the very center of the empire and accounts for its delayed but intractable crisis. In other words, the August 1968 invasion, by preventing structural change in Czechoslovakia, prepared the ground for the unraveling of “actually existing socialism” (Brezhnev dixit). To be sure, there is tough competition for the title of “who contributed most” to the demise of the Soviet empire. The Hungarians point to the revolution of 1956, the Poles see Solidarity (Solidarność) in 1980, the largest social movement in post-war Europe, which, despite being put down by Jaruzelski’s military coup, was the swan song of the communist regime. The contribution of the Prague Spring of 1968, even crushed violently, should not be underestimated.

Appropriately, for a major Czechoslovak crisis in the twentieth century, the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1989 came late. It had initially been planned for 1988. Gorbachev’s procrastination and other circumstances probably account for the minor delay that put the Velvet Revolution among the fateful eights of the country’s history.15 It should be noted, however, that although it was obviously understood as the undoing of the legacy of the 1948 communist takeover, it was not framed as a continuation of the “interrupted revolution” of 1968. To be sure, some sidelined 68ers and a number of western observers were inclined to point to that continuity with the aspirations of the Prague Spring, but the main protagonists of 1989 in Prague were eager to distance themselves from the “illusions of 1968.” The aim was no longer the democratization of socialism but simply democracy. Instead of searching for a ‘third way’ between capitalism and Soviet-style Socialism, the goal was the introduction of markets without adjectives: “the third way leads to the Third World” said Václav Klaus, the promoter of radical free-market economic reforms. Furthermore, the “return to Europe,” translated into foreign policy terms, was no longer about extending the margins of maneuvering in central Europe between east and west, but to join western (“Euro-Atlantic”) institutions as quickly as possible. Václav Havel rather than Alexander Dubček became president and the embodiment of these goals.

The reasons are understandable: it was not easy in 1989 to identify with a project that crashed tragically and was followed by twenty years of relentless ‘normalization.’ In dealing with the divide between ’68ers and ’89ers, it may be useful to distinguish between “illusions” (ideas that you can reform the system from within the Communist Party) and utopias (which entail a future-oriented project known as ‘socialism with a human face’). All one can add is that 1968 was the last Czech attempt to propose not a blueprint but a vision (deemed utopian or inconsistent afterwards), which transcended the country and concerned Europe as a whole. By way of contrast, 1989 was the first revolution not to propose a new social project; a revolution without violence and utopias, but also without a strong new idea. It was indeed, as historian François Furet called it, a “revolution-restoration” or, as Jürgen Habermas called it, “catch-up revolution” (Nachholende Revolution).16 The aim was to restore national and popular sovereignty, the rule of law, private property, and to imitate the western model. For that reason, the Velvet Revolution of 1989 has since the 1990s been considered in Prague as an “anti-1968,” and today the commemorations concern the tragedy of the invasion of August 1968 rather than the hopes and aspirations of the Spring.

Understandable as the distancing from the ideas and illusions of 1968 may be, it has, two potential snags: if your aim is to imitate western economic and political models, you cease to be interesting for the west. In addition, and more importantly, what if you are imitating a model in crisis? In thinking that one through, you may be forgiven for straying and stumbling upon ideas, projects, and utopias associated with the Prague Spring of 1968.

1 Philip Windsor and Adam Roberts, Czechoslovakia, 1968: Reform, Repression, Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).

2 Václav Havel, “La citoyenneté retrouvée,” Introduction to J. Rupnik and F. Fejtö, eds., Le printemps tchécoslovaque 1968 (Bruxelles: Editions Complexes, 1999), 12.

3 Gordon H. Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Archie Brown and Gordon Wightman, “Czechoslovakia: Revival and Retreat,” in Archie Brown and Jack Gray, eds., Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 159–96.

4 Milan Kundera, “Český úděl,” Literarni Listy 7–8, December 19, 1968, (“Czech Destiny”), trans. Tim West; Václav Havel, “Český úděl?” (“Czech Destiny”), Tvar, April 1969. The three articles (with Kundera’s reply to Havel) reprinted in Literarni Noviny, December 27, 2007.

5 Milan Kundera, “Český úděl,” 5.

6 Václav Havel, Český úděl?

7 1968 was the year Karel Kosik’s Dialectic of the Concrete (Dialektika konkrétniho, 1966) and Radovan Richta’s Civilization at the Crossroads (Civilizace na rozcesti, 1967) were translated in western Europe.

8 Jan Patocka, Sebrané Spisy, vol. 12 (Prague: OIKOYMENH, 2016), 241–43.

9 Antonin J. Liehm, “Generace znamena v cestine singular i plural,” Introduction to Generace (Praha, 1969 [banned before distribution] and 1990). The book was translated in several languages with a lengthy afterword by Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Socialism that Came in from the Cold,” Introduction to Antonin J. Liehm, The Politics of Culture (New York: Grove, 1973).

10 Their radicalism in undoing what they had helped to bring about two decades earlier perplexed the non-communists and particularly those belonging to an in-between generational group: see the samizdat volume Zivot je vsude, Almanach roku 1956 (Praha: Paseka, 2005), edited by Josef Hiršal and Jiří Kolář, with contributions of Skvorecky, Hrabal, Julis, Kolar, Hirsal, Zabrana, Kubena and a certain Václav Havel.

11 Milan Kundera, Preface to the French edition of Josef Skvorecky and Claudia Ancelot, Miracle en Bohème [Mirákl: Politická detektivka in original Czech] (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), x.

12 Ibid., x–xi.

13 Zdenek Mlynar, Mraz prichazi z Kremlu (Köln: Index, 1979), 306–7. Translated into English as Nightfrost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism (New York: Karz Publishers, 1980).

14 J. Dienstbier, quoted in G.E. Castellano and D. Jun, “The Awkward Revolution,” The New Presence (Winter 2008): 17.

15 The national independence and formation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, the Munich Agreement of 1938, the seizing of complete power by the Communist Party in 1948, 1968 and the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1988/89.

16 See for example, François Furet, L’Enigme de la désagrégation communiste (Paris: Fondation Saint Simon, 1990); and Jürgen Habermas, Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine Plotisiche Schriften VII (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990): 179–94.