“Moscow crushes the Prague Spring – archive, August 1968”, The Guardian
Compiled by Richard Nelson, London, 10 Aug 2018
How the Guardian reported the Russian and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, 50 years ago.
On the night of August 20 1968 Soviet tanks and troops invaded Czechoslovakia in an effort to stop the so-called Prague Spring. For four months, under the leadership of Alexander Dubček, the country broke free from Soviet rule, with the government allowing freedom of speech and removing state controls over industry.
Dubček claimed he was offering ‘socialism with a human face,’ but the Soviet Union viewed developments as tantamount to counter-revolution. Czechoslovakians did not fight the invading Russians but instead stood in front of the tanks, with some putting flowers in the soldiers’ hair. The reforms were curtailed, hard-line communists retook positions of power and Dubček was deposed in April 1969.
Editorial: Jackboots again over Eastern Europe
22 August 1968
Anger, horror, and contempt – these certainly; but most of all a feeling of deep sadness. After 50 years communism still means, in Soviet eyes, the rule of the tank and the jack-boot. And after a decade in which, all over the world, hopes had risen that civilised relations between nations might at last become the rule, the Russian leadership has retreated into its old imperialism. The aim of the reformist movement in Czechoslovakia was simple. It was to bring elementary civilities and freedoms into the Socialist way of life.
“The Communist Party”, wrote the Czechoslovak Praesidium in one of its historic rejoinders, “depends on the voluntary support of the people. It cannot enforce its line by orders, but by the work of its members and the truth of its ideals. It cannot impel its authority, but must constantly acquire it by its actions.”
But the Russian leaders and their pitiable satraps saw in this idealism a menace to their own positions, which are maintained not by consent but by power. In spite of their agreement, only just over a fortnight ago, to allow the Czechs and Slovaks their own mode of development, they have resorted to the same treachery which, twelve years ago, put down the movement for colonial freedom in Hungary. Hungary at that time had renounced the Warsaw Pact and was on the way to a two-party system. How much less justification is there now for action against a country which has constantly professed its loyalty to the Soviet Union.
Support of the people
The Russians’ excuse for invasion is as contemptible as the deed. It is the excuse first suggested in May by General Yepishev, the political head of the Red Army, who was later taxed with it by the newly freed press in Prague. He proposed that the Army should heed an appeal from a group of “loyal Communists” to go to their aid. Yesterday’s statement by Tass used this formula. “Party and Government leaders,” it said, had requested military assistance. The last act of “Rude Pravo” before it fell once more under Russian censorship was to publish the Praesidium’s denial of this specious excuse. No doubt in time we shall be told who these “leaders” are; but Mr Stewart was quite correct last night to announce that Britain would continue to recognise the Government which existed until yesterday morning. No one can doubt that the Government had the support of the people. The brave, eager, and idealistic young people of Czechoslovakia, who had not yet learned to accept the fatalism of their fathers, and who had so visibly relished their sudden release from the deathly conformism of so many years, are once again today in a police State. It is a tragedy beyond description.
Could West have prevented it?
by Victor Zorza
The Communist world will never recover from yesterday’s self-inflicted injury. This is the beginning of the end. The rape of Czechoslovakia, which was intended to preserve the old order, will only speed up its disintegration.
The frightened men in the Kremlin and their hardline allies in other Communist capitals have wanted to intervene from the start, because they saw the new Czechoslovakia as a challenge to everything they stood for and as a threat to the positions of power they had acquired. They feared that if they did not act, they would go the way Novotny went, for the success of the Czechoslovak experiment would show to their own people that their established rulers belonged, as the Marxist catchphrase has it, on the scrap-heap of history. But there were other signs, too, which showed clearly that more forward-looking leaders in the various Communist countries had at least some sympathy for the new Czechoslovak policies. But the hardliners proved stronger, as they usually do in such situations. The troops marched not because the situation in Czechoslovakia in the past few days has become more dangerous, but because the “liberals” in the Kremlin, represented by Mr Kosygin, were overcome by the conservatives, represented by Mr Brezhnev.
Little risk
Those in the Kremlin who favoured preventive action could have argued, and no doubt did, that the military risks were minimal. The Dubček leadership had made it clear from the start that it would not fight, and there was no alternative leadership centre in the nation to organise military resistance. Every reasonable estimate must have suggested to the Russians that there would be no war with Czechoslovakia – or, for that matter, with the West.
Whether the West could have done something to prevent the move is another matter. What is clear is that it did nothing to try to prevent it – partly because it did not believe it could happen and partly because the United States was too deeply involved in Vietnam to risk even diplomatic action, to say nothing of military intervention. The belief that “it could not happen now” was largely the result of wishful thinking – but it was firmly held in Government quarters both in Washington and in London.
The West’s failure to take a firm stand meant that the hardliners in the Kremlin could argue that the US was prepared to give Russia “carte blanche” in Czechoslovakia, just as Russia had given the US “carte blanche” in Vietnam. This is not to say that there was a deal between Washington and Moscow – only a tacit understanding; not so much a gentlemen’s agreement, more a question of honour among thieves.
The “spring of Prague” and the first serious threats from the Kremlin coincided with the beginning of the moves towards the Paris talks on Vietnam, and Mr Rusk was not going to risk the chances of success, such as they were, by shooting his mouth off on Czechoslovakia – if, that is, anyone can imagine Mr Rusk shooting his mouth off.
Had the West taken a stand on Czechoslovakia the more liberally inclined among the Communist leaders would at least have been able to argue that the hardliners must reckon with the possibility of serious consequences. Neither the West nor they would have needed to specify the nature of the dangers. To keep the Kremlin guessing might have been more effective than to utter firm threats. To make a few carefully thought-out but quite unpublicised changes in the deployment of Western forces could have been equally effective.
Awaiting a chance
For a long time it was touch and go in the Kremlin, as the delay in making the decision to intervene shows, so that diplomatic action by the West, supported by the implication that firmer action was possible, might just conceivably have tipped the scales. Certainly the absence of any such indication from the West must have done a great deal to tip the scales the other way. It was left to the Communist leaders of France, Italy, and Yugoslavia to warn the Kremlin – which would probably ask, as Stalin is supposed to have asked about the Pope, how many divisions they had. What they have, and what the Kremlin chose to ignore, is their own interpretation of what communism is about. It is an interpretation which is shared by the new Czechoslovak leaders, and there are such people in key positions in all the other Communist countries awaiting the opportunity to act.
Need for reform
Now the decision to march into Czechoslovakia will have ranged many European Communist parties against the Kremlin politically as well, and it will thus speed up the process of differentiation within the world Communist movement, a process which is bound to be duplicated within each Communist party. It will give the liberals an infusion of confidence. This by itself will not give them victory in the coming struggle. But the need for reform, as great in the other countries as it was in Czechoslovakia, will be dragging the Communist system, kicking and screaming, into the modern world anyway. The reform movement could be stopped only by reimposing the Stalinist terror.
Victor Zorza was a Polish born journalist who specialised in writing about the Soviet Union. Known as a ‘master of Kremlinology,’ he started freelancing for the Guardian in 1950, before joining the staff in 1956. Zorza died in 1996.
