Why were the Prague Spring reforms unacceptable to the Soviet leadership?

It seems strange, almost ‘suicidal’ in hindsight that the Dubcek administration should begin the process of ‘liberalisation’ without prior consultation with Moscow.  However, certain conditions led Dubcek and his ‘party clique’ to believe that what they were doing was entirely approved by their ‘comrades’ in Moscow.  “Czechoslovak liberalisers were still under the impression that the changes wrought by Nikita Khrushchev, despite his downfall, had made the USSR a more tolerant hegemon”. This kind of assumption however, would prove to be fatal to Dubcek and his supporters.

They are afraid of singers, tennis players, Santa Claus, archives, each other…

They are afraid of truth.  They are afraid of freedom.

They are afraid of democracy.  They are afraid of socialism.

So why the hell are we afraid of them?

• ‘The plastic people of the universe’ 

The attempt by the CPC’s ruling elite to create ‘socialism with a human face’ was crushed with a mighty show of force by the Warsaw pact forces.  No battle was fought between the invading army and the Czechoslovakian people which is probably due to the general acceptance by Czechoslovakians that resistance to such an ‘irresistible’ force was completely futile.  “The impossibility of defending ourselves militarily against the intervention was discussed, but it was hardly a debate, more a unanimous affirmation of the fact.” This was coupled with the logistics of the Czechoslovakian army, the organs of which were on the whole under direct and indirect influence from the Soviets according to the terms of the Warsaw pact.   However, why was it that the Soviet forces felt compelled to invade a fellow ‘socialist’ country that was simply trying to improve its own socialist system?  Firstly, A.H Brown points out that the Czechoslovakian reforms may have developed into a successful model of socialism in practice, paving the way for further ‘acts of heresy’ amongst other socialist states.  “If the Czechoslovaks could have combined their democratisation with the economic progress they anticipated, it was not an unreasonable assumption that this would have been a very attractive formula for other communist states”.  Obviously the possibility of this occurring was completely unacceptable to the Soviet leadership, who had witnessed deviation from the Soviet model before, in the form of China under Mao and Tito’s Yugoslavia amongst others.  This deviation challenged the authority of the USSR as the leader in world communism; thus further digression from the soviet model would be totally unacceptable to Moscow.  “They [the Soviet leadership] clearly saw the danger of allowing policies to be dictated from below and the potential challenge that the Prague Spring posed not only to the CPC, but to the Soviet Union’s entire East European Empire.”  It seems that the USSR was more concerned about its ‘imperial’ possessions than maintaining its role as the leader of the world communist movement (i.e. ‘world revolution’ an idea that had taken a ‘back seat’ after the expulsion of Trotsky).

It is also quite clear that the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev was under considerable pressure from the leadership of other Soviet-bloc states, most notably Gomulka’s Poland and Ulbricht’s East Germany as well as conservatives within the politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).  This was provoked in the main by Dubcek’s apparent ‘transgression’ of the agreed policy on establishing relations with West Germany leading the Warsaw Pact countries (GDR and Poland in particular) to believe that their fundamental interests were being undermined.  “Konstantin Katushev, The Soviet Union’s Central Committee Secretary for Socialist Countries in 1968, says… the decision to invade was necessary because of pressures from leaders of other Warsaw pact countries.”.  Jiri Valenta who developed this theory further backs up this view.  “Party leaders in non-Russian Soviet republics, regional party officials, apparatchiki in ideology, the KGB, the political control network in the armed forces and the Warsaw pact command – had gathered enough influence to be able to override a counter-coalition that was sceptical about the use of force and push a vacillating Leonid Brezhnev into action.”  However, this model of explanation has its flaws, and the intervention of Soviet forces cannot be simply explained by pointing towards ‘bureaucratic wrangling’ and dissatisfaction amongst administrations in other Warsaw pact states.  However, there does seem to be a certain amount of truth to this view and must surely have played a part in the eventual decision to invade Czechoslovakia.  “As far as I know, the impression Dubcek gained from this private meeting [with Brezhnev on August 1st 1968] was that Brezhnev was in conflict with the “hawks” in his own politburo… and was genuinely looking for a way out of the predicament that would vindicate his moderation and enable him to stand up to pressure from Ulbricht and Gomulka.”

Much has been made of the influence of certain ‘products’ of the Prague spring on the decision of the Soviet leadership to intervene.  Perhaps the most well known, Ludvik Vaculik’s ‘two-thousand word’ statement that outlined the reformists’ calls for liberalisation whilst also outlining the very real fear of conservative resistance to the liberalisation movement and the possibility of Soviet Intervention.  This document became more than simply ‘a statement’ as it gathered support from Czechoslovakian Citizens.  “The problem was that the letter was in fact an appeal, a manifesto.  It had been signed by many supporters, and they were soliciting others to do the same.  It had been published simultaneously in several newspapers and was intended to stimulate a public debate on the problems of the present situation, and thereby influence important deliberations inside the CPC and preparations for the coming party congress.” This represented a serious challenge to the doctrine of ‘Democratic Centralism’ as it encouraged the growth of ‘faction’ and the idea that socialist states should be ‘polycentric’ i.e. follow their own ‘path to socialism’ without intervention from Moscow.  

One viewpoint is that the Soviets invaded due to fears that Czechoslovakia was about to secede from the Communist bloc and join the Western capitalist powers.  This would have indeed been a disaster for the Soviet Union as Czechoslovakia was seen as strategically very important due to its close proximity to Western European NATO-aligned states.  “The real arguments behind the scenes had little to do with the public attacks against literarni listi [a Czech magazine that published ‘the thousand words’ and other documents accused by the Soviets of being ‘anti-revolutionary’] which were only the propagandistic, ideological guise, but rather were based on the claim that the security of the entire Soviet bloc was threatened, and that the conditions in Czechoslovakia were impairing the defensive capability of the bloc and weakening its political unity under the hegemony of Moscow.” On the face of it this seems to be a perfectly plausible reason for the ‘heavy-handedness’ of the USSR in dealing with Czechoslovakia.  In spite of this, Dubcek’s regime was seen (quite rightly) as loyal to the Soviet bloc by the Soviet leadership.  The reason that the Prague Spring reforms were causing so much concern was because it was held that the reformist movement would inevitably lead to further attempts at deviating from the Soviet-line in the field of foreign policy.  “The Czechoslovak case was argued in the following way: developments inside Czechoslovakia, if given a free reign, would lead, indeed must lead, to Czechoslovakia ‘leaving the socialist camp’… [the reformists] victory and the realisation of reforms in the Czechoslovak social, political and economic structures would then lead to attempts to revise the country’s foreign policy.” Yet at the final conference between the Czechoslovak leadership and the Soviets before the invasion at Cierna nad Tisou (held around the end of July), Brezhnev and his delegation hardly mentioned any discrepancies in Czechoslovakian foreign policy under the terms of the new ‘Action Program’ never mind actually criticising Dubcek’s foreign policy.  This was simply because Dubcek and his administration had no intention of ‘loosening’ relations between Czechoslovakia and the Warsaw Pact countries in foreign policy.  On the contrary, the Action Program’s foreign policy outline was almost non-discernable from the line taken during the Novotny era.  Furthermore, events outside the socialist bloc did not give the Soviets the pretext they probably wanted for invading Czechoslovakia.  The NATO states kept relatively quite about the events during and leading up to the invasion.  “Moscow thus had no excuse for claiming that vicious attempts or preparations by the Atlantic Pact gave her no choice but to defend socialism in Czechoslovakia by force of arms.”  However, a change in NATO’s strategy may have provoked further calls for a ‘tightening’ of European Soviet bloc borders as NATO had called for “contingency plans for a longer period of conventional warfare before any escalation to a nuclear exchange.”  This certainly would have concerned the Warsaw Pact countries as Czechoslovakia was considered to be the weakest of the Socialist blocs’ western frontiers in Europe.

Nevertheless, on the issue of Security to the Soviet bloc, Pavel Tigrid points out that the soviet leadership was unsure as to whether Dubcek had the leadership qualities to prevent further ‘anti-revolutionary’ activities from occurring.  “[The Soviet leadership were concerned] as to whether this new leader [Dubcek] would have enough strength to prevent this ‘dangerous slipping’ into positions which the Soviets viewed as inimical, anti-Soviet, anti-socialist and, finally, counter-revolutionary.” 

One other important factor that must have been unacceptable to the Soviet leadership was the abandoning of Censorship in Czechoslovakia.  Under Khrushchev, censorship laws had been relaxed and then re-imposed under Brezhnev.  The re-imposition of censorship laws in the USSR came at the very time that such political liberties as the freedom of the press were being introduced in Prague.  This must have concerned the Soviet leadership greatly as such a circumstance would have certainly loosened Moscow ‘control on information’.  “The fact that a letter from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the Soviet Writers’ Union attacking official censorship was read out, not in Moscow, but at the June 1967 Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress, created a novel, and from the Soviet standpoint alarming precedent whereby Soviet dissidents might find an official outlet in a friendly socialist country for material censored in the USSR.” 

Former leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, points to the lack of consultation with the Soviet leadership about the ‘Action Program’ on the part of the Dubcek administration.  “Gorbachev says one of Dubcek’s greatest mistakes was not developing better relations with the Soviet leadership to gain prior approval for his reform package.  Gorbachev’s emphasis on approval from Moscow appears to be a reflection of the former Soviet Unions colonial attitude.”  However, Dubcek was by no means a ‘dissenter’ and had spent much of his life in the USSR.  

Ideologically, Moscow was challenged by the Prague reformers as they suggested that Lenin had developed his own system of Marxism to fit Russian conditions.  This was totally unacceptable to Moscow as the self-professed chief ‘ideologue’ in the communist system.  Also, the Soviet leadership was very worried about the position of the ‘leading role of the party’.  As the party in all Leninist systems must have complete control over all branches of government, including the judiciary, Moscow was very concerned about the ‘dismantling’ of party control in Czechoslovakia.  “Party control over the National assembly underwent substantial erosion in Czechoslovakia during 1968.  Votes of no confidence were passed on leading officials, open and free debates marked Assembly sessions, and a system of Assembly committees with rights to subpoena and examine witnesses began to function.”

There are a number of factors involved in explaining why the Soviet leadership could not tolerate the Prague Spring reforms of 1968.  Perhaps the most important one is the most basic, namely ‘imperial ambitions’ on the part of the USSR.  The soviet empire was largely based on total conformity throughout the entire soviet bloc, and the philosophical incompatibility of dissent within a Leninist system must have influenced the Soviet leadership into invading Czechoslovakia due to the reform package of the ‘Action Program’ being largely based on a ‘loosening’ of the CPC’s control over the press and the right to freedom of Speech.  This must surely have been completely intolerable to the Soviet leadership, particularly after the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

Bibliography:

Tigrid, P ‘Why Dubcek Fell’

K.Williams ‘The Prague Spring and its Aftermath’  

Mlynar, Z. ‘Night Frost in Prague’

Pilger, J. ‘Heroes’

Brown, A. H. ‘Political Change in Czechoslovakia’ (Political Opposition in One Party States ed. Schapiro, L.)

Frost, M. Bransten, J. ‘Czech Republic: 1968 Viewed from the Occupiers’ Perspective’

Dawisha, K. ‘Soviet-East European Dilemmas’

Internet Sources:

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