In 1963, Czechoslovakia became the first country in postwar Eastern Europe to record negative growth. The Five-Year Plan was abandoned. Faced with the collapse of its economic policies, an outspoken Czech economist, Professor Ota Sik, proposed far-reaching reforms.
Sik stated that the all-powerful Planning Commission should no longer set targets for the whole economy but concentrate on long-term trends and perspectives. This would free up the microeconomy in which individual enterprises could take genuine initiatives. Sik proposed the centre should listen and respond to popular opinion. There should be consumers’ rights and 'the right and real possibility of various groups of the working people and different social groups to formulate and defend their economic interests in shaping economic policy’. The workforce should also have real power. Employees should be able to replace factory directors.312
Though such reforms gained formal acceptance in 1965, middle-ranking officials started to dilute them. They could not envisage a 'socialist market economy’ in which their own commanding voice was muted and might one day disappear. Faced with their delaying tactics, Sik stated publicly in the summer of 1966 that economic reform could not take place without political reform.
Similar conclusions had been drawn by a commission on the political system, whose chief author was Zdenek Mlynar, a fellow student at Moscow State University in the early 1950s with Mikhail Gorbachev. His report called the political system dictatorial and monopolistic. It was based on the 'false thesis that the Party is the instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat’.
This was tantamount to admitting that Lenin’s concept of the party as a 'proletarian dictatorship’ meant in practice the party’s dictatorship over the proletariat.
Mlynaf urged the party to engage in genuine discussion at all levels. The Central Committee should hold authentic debates rather than simply ratify decisions taken in advance. But it should not decide everything. 'The Party does not want to, and will not, take the place of social organizations.’313 On the contrary, it should introduce a more democratic system allowing 'different social interests and needs to play a real part in the creation and execution of policy’.
How such a transformation could come about was unclear. Mlynar admitted it was a social and political experiment. He later noted: 'this was a development towards political pluralism under conditions in which the economic, social, political and institutional supports of classic bourgeois political pluralism had been destroyed’.314 He hoped that the party could gradually build up new supports from below. Meanwhile, the Soviet reaction to the burgeoning Prague Spring was crucial.
Leonid Brezhnev came to accept that Antonin Novotny, Czechoslovak Party leader since 1953, had lost touch with the popular mood. He was replaced by the Slovak Party leader Alexander Dubcek. On the twentieth anniversary of the 'Prague coup’ that had installed Communism in Czechoslovakia, Dubcek called for 'a true invigoration and unification of all constructive and progressive forces in our Republic’. He called on the Communist Party to make 'a new start to socialism’. Nobody should be shielded from scrutiny: all problems should be looked 'boldly in the face’.315
The Soviet Politburo soon became doubtful about Dubcek’s capacity to control events. The Soviet ambassador in Prague reported in mid-January 1968 that while Dubcek was 'unquestionably an honourable and faithful man and a staunch fTiend of the Soviet Union’, his leadership was weak. Faced with divisions in the party, Dubcek was 'vacillating’.316 The Kremlin resolved to keep a close watch on developments. Alarm bells rang when Dubcfek started to replace orthodox party officials in key ministries, including the Interior and in the armed forces. Their replacements were all reformists and less amenable to Soviet pressure. Worse still for the Soviets, Moscow was not being consulted over their appointments.
As Czechoslovak censorship was lifted and a wide range of opinions began to appear in journals and the press, fears of 'democratic infection’ started to be expressed by East European leaders. Ulbricht complained that Czech writers admired the West and frequently became 'a tool for Bonn’s global strategy against the socialist countries’. Their uncensored writings were being beamed back to East German audiences by West German television. Like Moscow, Ulbricht lacked confidence in Dubcek’s ability to restore control. Gomulka warned Dubcek, 'If your situation gets worse, our hostile elements will rear their head again. We already have trouble with writers and students’.317
The trouble in Poland began with a classical drama staged at Warsaw’s National Theatre about the country’s struggle for freedom under the Russian partition. Audience reactions to the anti-Russian passages steadily grew and alarmed the authorities who banned the play. After the last performance, three hundred spectators marched to the playwright’s statue nearby, festooning it with flowers and banners. This first street manifestation for more than a decade shook the party leadership.
Fliers appeared stating 'Poland awaits her own Dubcek’.318 A mass meeting was held at Warsaw University in defence of democratic freedoms and university autonomy. Speakers pointed out that freedom of speech, press and assembly were guaranteed by the Polish Constitution (Article 71). But as students started to leave, heavily armed police charged them, chasing many across the campus, some down to the river, beating and clubbing indiscriminately all they could reach. There were dozens of arrests.
Academics supporting the student protest were dismissed and the faculties of Economics, Philosophy, Sociology and Psychology were disbanded. Hundreds of students were expelled and the purge was extended to other university cities. A parallel purge took place in the high offices of state when hundreds of senior officials were summarily sacked for alleged 'pro-Zionist’ views, Jewish origin, or both. As a result of the pogrom, Poland lost about 13,000 citizens through emigration.
Whilst Gomulka used repression, Dubcek pressed on with reform. An 'Action Programme’, published on 10 April 1968, outlined a new role for the
Communist Party. Rather than holding a monopoly of power, it would compete for influence. The competition was to be strictly circumscribed: the party would not share power and its 'leading role’ would be retained. But although alternative parties were still forbidden, the Communist Party began to acknowledge the legitimacy of non-party institutions. Organisations under its formal tutelage, such as the Socialist and People’s Parties and trade unions, began to show some signs ofautonomy. New associations were set up outside party auspices. Most prominent were the Club of Non-Committed Party Members (KAN) and Club K-231 (an organisation of former political prisoners). In short, the Prague Spring was becoming pluralistic.
Under pressure from Moscow, the Czechoslovak leaders tried to rein in these developments. Even the reformist Mlynar agreed that the police should investigate the new formation K-231, on the grounds that at least some of those arrested in the Stalinist period had deserved their sentences. Dubcek made clear that all new organisations should come under the rubric of the National Front, a party-controlled body. He also assured Moscow that the Action Programme based foreign policy on the firm alliance and further co-operation with the Soviet Union and other socialist states.
Prague tried to placate its allies in the Warsaw Pact with repeated assurances that the country’s international alignment would not change. In return for loyalty to the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovak reformers hoped that Moscow would accept domestic initiatives. Above all, they wanted a significant expansion of personal freedoms and civil liberties, including equal status for Czechs and Slovaks within a federal state. Their economic priority was to shift from over-concentration on heavy industry to consumer production. They sought to boost living standards through the liberalisation of foreign trade.
Instead of being reassured, Soviet leaders began to plan military intervention. They announced manoeuvres on Czechoslovakia’s borders. In the Kremlin’s view, 'reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries abroad’ were blocking normalisation in Czechoslovakia. If not stopped at once, they would move on to destabilise the other socialist states. Moscow insisted that Dubcek rein in public debate by restoring censorship. He could hardly do so without jettisoning a major vehicle of the Prague Spring. Instead, he simply appealed to the press and journals to rally round the party’s Action Programme.
To this appeal, a prominent writer responded bluntly that after twenty years of unchallenged rule, party leaders had lost the public’s confidence. The only remedy for political stagnation was grass-roots renewal. Officials who acted brutally, embezzled, or were simply incompetent should be removed by popular pressures. Ordinary citizens should use peaceful means such as non-violent strikes and picketing to achieve political and economic change. However, in a clear reference to threats from the country’s allies, the writer’s manifesto declared, 'We can show our Government that we will stand by it, with weapons if need be.’319
Soviet leaders watched with alarm as the Czechoslovak Party moved away from orthodox Leninism towards social democracy. They feared this process would be completed by an Extraordinary Party Congress, summoned for early September. Other Warsaw Pact leaders had concerns about 'contagion’. They knew the spread of political freedoms in Czechoslovakia would ignite similar aspirations among their own population. At their behest, an emergency summit was held in Warsaw. Unlike earlier summits, Dubcek declined to attend.
The Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu was also absent. From the late-1950s, Romania had pioneered a more independent foreign policy. All Soviet troops stationed in the country left by agreement, and Romania skilfully used space opened up by the Sino-Soviet dispute to differentiate itself from Moscow. Ceausescu took the line that since there was no longer a single 'model’ of socialist development, the Warsaw Pact had no right of intervention to end 'deviations’. When Czechoslovakia was invaded, Ceausescu later condemned the action.
But all those attending the summit had lost patience with Prague. Even the Hungarian leader Kadar was no longer supportive. His New Economic Mechanism had launched a fresh era of liberal economic reform at home. But he saw the Czechoslovak Party as endangered by 'revisionist forces’ tending in a social-democratic direction. Though reluctant to call the Prague Spring 'counter-revolutionary’, he thought the next stage would be a 'restoration of the (pre-war) bourgeois order’.320
The Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, had fewer inhibitions. 'We cannot agree with the view offered by Comrade Kadar or with his conclusions,’ said Zhivkov. He thought 'counter-revolutionary centres controlled by the American and West German imperialists’ were seeking to tear Czechoslovakia from the Soviet bloc. Only armed force by the Warsaw Pact could retrieve the situation. In their 'Warsaw Letter’, the summit leaders informed Prague that attempts to remove Czechoslovakia from the 'socialist commonwealth’ would meet a sharp rebuff.
Preparations for an invasion had been honed by extensive Soviet manoeuvres on Czechoslovak soil since early summer. To differentiate it from 1956, when Soviet forces acted alone, some 80,000 soldiers from Poland, Bulgaria,
14. A Soviet tank in Prague, August 1968. Moscow intervened to curb the independence of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
Hungary and East Germany were added to the force. However, the great bulk came from the USSR and the whole operation was under Soviet command.
Leonid Brezhnev called the August 1968 invasion 'an extraordinary step, dictated by necessity’. He explained the unprovoked attack through a convoluted ideological timescale. The historical struggle between socialism and imperialism, foreseen by Marx and Lenin, had reached a 'new stage’. Having been held at bay by the threat of nuclear retaliation by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Western imperialism was still playing its old game. Western leaders were using 'anti-socialist’ elements in senior positions in Prague to subvert the Communist Party. They intended its gradual conversion to a Western orientation, through economic ties, and its eventual secession from the Warsaw Pact. The Kremlin claimed that the Prague Spring would be followed by a change of regime in Poland, assimilation of East into Western Germany and further departures from the Warsaw Pact. Faced with these audacious aspirations, the socialist commonwealth acted in self-defence. Czechoslovakian state sovereignty had to take second place to the 'sacred duty’ of acting on behalf of 'socialist solidarity’.321
Brezhnev’s argument was circular. The Warsaw Pact would invade (itself) wherever socialism was in danger: but the meaning of danger, and of socialism, was defined in Moscow. In 1956, the Hungarians had abandoned the monopoly of their Communist Party and left the Warsaw Pact. The Czechs and Slovaks had done neither, yet the outcome was just the same. Brezhnev’s Doctrine seemed a carte blanche for interventionism.
The invasion did not cause a superpower crisis. NATO members accepted Moscow’s reassurances that the invasion posed no threat to them. There was not even a general alert. US forces in Europe were pulled back some 200 kilometres. Yet for home consumption, the Soviet Union argued that the invasion was to forestall Western 'revanchism’. The Kremlin also informed incredulous Czechs that West German divisions were massing on their borders.
But the invasion was a major crisis for East-West relations in Europe. For the first time, the Soviet Union, in collusion with other powers, acted as a deliberate aggressor without even the pretence of international legality behind it. Czechoslovakia had remained loyal to the Warsaw Pact. A joint Soviet-Czechoslovak document, signed in Bratislava on 4 August 1968, reaffirmed the country’s sovereignty and the inviolability of its borders. Since this had been torn up by the invasion three weeks later, Western leaders wondered whether the Soviet government could be trusted in international relations again.
The invasion also marked a watershed within Eastern Europe. It exposed the hopelessness of attempts since Stalin to revive the Communist Party, planned economy and Marxism from above. It invalidated the assumption of 'revisionist’ Communists that divisions between the party apparatus and wider society could be overcome by party-led reforms. Eastern Europe seemed to be at an impasse with the Yalta division of the continent unchallengeable. However, a surprising new development began to upset the apparently immutable status quo. In movements variously entitled civil society, a parallel polis, and political opposition, citizens started to influence politics from below. Their actions were not easy to suppress.
Unlike Western writers, who had largely discarded the notion of 'totalitarianism’, East European activists began to challenge their 'neototalitarian regimes’. They started to criticise Communist state mechanisms for extinguishing civil society and smothering public life by censorship and political monopoly. They argued that politics had been replaced by an empty pantomime of ritualised claims. But the public realm could nonetheless be recovered through independent movements from below.
The first signs of such resistance came in response to the crushing of the Prague Spring.
World History
