Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (90 page)

By July 1968, Moscow had come to the conclusion that events in Prague were spinning out of the Party’s control—and so, indeed, they may have been. At a meeting in Moscow on July 14th of Party leaders from the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary—but not the Czechs themselves—it was agreed to send a fraternal Letter to the Czechoslovak Party warning it of the risk of counter-revolution and listing measures that needed to be taken: ‘The situation in Czechoslovakia jeopardizes the common vital interests of other socialist countries.’ Two weeks later the Soviet and Czech leaders met on the Czechoslovak-Soviet frontier, at Čierna nad Tisou, and Dubček tried once again to convince Brezhnev that the Communist Party was not jeopardizing its position by enacting reforms, but was actually strengthening its public support.

The Soviet leader was not merely unconvinced; he came away increasingly skeptical of Dubček’s prospects. The Warsaw Pact announced forthcoming maneuvers near the Czech border. At a Warsaw Pact meeting in Bratislava on August 3rd (which Romania’s Ceauşescu declined to attend), Brezhnev propounded the Doctrine that would henceforth be associated with his name: ‘Each Communist party is free to apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in its own country, but it is not free to deviate from these principles if it is to remain a Communist party . . . The weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, and they cannot look indifferently upon this.’

This pronouncement, a lightly veiled assertion of the Kremlin’s right to act
preventively
to head off a threat to socialism in any socialist country, may well have given Dubček pause. But there was little he could do, and so he continued to insist that his domestic reforms posed no threat to the socialist system. On August 13th, in a telephone conversation with a mistrustful Brezhnev, Dubček painstakingly explained that he was trying to suppress popular criticisms of the Soviet Union but that ‘this issue cannot just be solved by a directive from above.’ Had he known that five of his colleagues on the Czechoslovak Praesidium had secretly handed the Russians a letter on August 3rd, describing an imminent threat to Communist order in Czechoslovakia and requesting military intervention, he might have felt differently.
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The Soviet decision to invade Czechoslovakia was not formally taken until August 18th. Brezhnev seems to have been reluctant—intuitively sensing that however easy the victory, its aftershocks might prove troublesome—but it had become all but inevitable well before then. The Soviet leaders anticipated that the forthcoming 14th Czechoslovak Communist Party Congress might see a definitive take-over by the Party’s reformist wing, and they were by now truly frightened of the infectious impact of the Czech example upon its neighbors. As Grechko put it when informing the assembled Soviet military leaders of the decision to invade: ‘The invasion will take place even if it leads to a third world war.’ But the Soviet leaders knew perfectly well that there was no such risk, and not just because Washington had its hands full in Vietnam. Just five weeks earlier, Washington and Moscow had co-signed a Treaty of Nuclear Non-proliferation; the US was not about to jeopardize such gains for the sake of a few million misguided Czechs. And so, on August 21st 1968, 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops from Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the DDR and the Soviet Union marched into Czechoslovakia.
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The invasion met some passive resistance and quite a lot of street protests, especially in Prague; but at the urgent behest of the Czech government it was otherwise unopposed. The unfriendly reception was a source of some surprise to the Soviet leadership, who had been led to expect that their tanks would encounter widespread support. Having at first arrested Dubček and his leading colleagues, flown them to Moscow and obliged them to sign a paper renouncing parts of their program and agreeing to the Soviet occupation of their country, the Kremlin was now perforce obliged to accept that the reformers had the support of the Czech and Slovak people and allow them to retain formal charge of their country, at least for the moment. It was clearly imprudent to do otherwise.

Nevertheless, the repression of the Prague reforms—‘normalization’, as it became known—began almost immediately. The forthcoming Party Congress was cancelled, censorship was re-introduced and all talk of implementing the Action Program ended. Among the Soviet leaders there was considerable support for the imposition on Prague of a military dictatorship. This was the preference not only of Andropov and Shelest but also—revealingly—of the GDR’s Walter Ulbricht, Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov and Poland’s Gomułka. But Brezhnev chose instead to let Dubček stay in office a few months longer, pursue the federalization of the country (with the aim of splitting Slovaks, their chief demand now conceded, from the more radical Czechs) and see how events unfolded—while retaining a Warsaw Pact presence just in case.

There were occasional student demonstrations in defense of the reforms, and in the industrial towns of Bohemia and Moravia there emerged, briefly, a network of workers’ councils on the model of 1956 in Hungary (at their peak, in January 1969, these councils claimed to represent one in six of the national workforce, though they were very weak in Slovakia). And there was the suicide of Jan Palach, a 20-year-old student at Charles University who set fire to himself on the steps of the National Museum in Prague’s Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet invasion and its aftermath. Palach lived for three days before dying of his burns on January 19th 1969. His funeral, on January 25th, was an occasion for national mourning: for Palach and for Czechoslovakia’s lost democracy.

The next time pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets (following Czechoslovakia’s victory over the USSR in a game of ice hockey), the Kremlin exploited the occasion to remove Dubček and replace him, on April 17th 1969, with one of his erstwhile colleagues, Gustav Husák. As a Slovak and former trial victim (he had been imprisoned in the Stalin years for ‘nationalism’), Husák was the ideal candidate to purge the land of the reformist heresy without prompting accusations of a return to Stalinism. The repression that followed was less obtrusive than in the past, but highly effective. Public trials were eschewed, but in the course of the next two years the Czechoslovak Communist Party was purged of all its ‘unreliable’ elements (nine out of ten of those expelled were Czechs). Men and women who had been active or prominent in the Prague Spring were ‘interviewed’ and asked to sign statements renouncing their actions and rejecting the Dubcek reforms. Most signed. Those who refused lost their jobs and, along with their relatives and children, became social pariahs. By far the largest group of victims was those, whether in or out of the Party, who had played a visible role in recent years: journalists, television announcers, essayists, novelists, playwrights, film directors or student leaders.
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The ‘screening’ and purging of these intellectuals was carried out by lower ranking bureaucrats, policemen and party officials—more often than not the victims’ own colleagues. Their goal was to extract petty confessions—not so much in order to incriminate their victims but rather to humiliate them and thus secure their collaborationin the self-subjugation of a troublesome society. The message went out that the country had passed through a mass psychosis in 1968, that false prophets had exploited the ensuing ‘hysteria’, and that the nation needed to be directed firmly back to the correct path: induced by the carrot of consumer goods and the stick of omnipresent surveillance.

The threat of violence was of course always implicit, but the fact that it was rarely invoked merely added to the collective humiliation. Once again, as in 1938 and again in 1948, Czechoslovakia was being made complicit in its own defeat. By 1972—with poets and playwrights forced to clean boilers and wash windows; university lecturers stacking bricks, and their more troublesome students expelled; the police files full of useful ‘confessions’; and reform Communists cowed or else in exile—‘order’, in the words of a brilliant, bitter essay by one of normalization’s victims, had been ‘restored’.
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There were ripples of protest throughout the Communist bloc. On August 25th 1968 demonstrators in Red Square protesting the occupation of Czechoslovakia included Pavel Litvinov (grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister) and Larissa Daniel (wife of the imprisoned Soviet novelist). East European army units engaged in the invasion of Czechoslovakia had been led to believe that they were defending the country against West German or American invaders, and some of them had later to be quietly withdrawn, their reliability—notably that of Hungarian units occupying Slovakia—seriously in question. In Poland, as we have seen, the repression in Prague both stimulated student protests and strengthened the hand of the authorities in stamping them down. In April 1969 in the Latvian capital Riga, a Jewish student, Ilia Rips, set herself on fire to draw attention to the Soviet treatment of Dubček. The attitude of Czechs and Slovaks themselves, hitherto among the most pro-Russian nations in the Soviet bloc, now shifted irrevocably to a stance of sullen acquiescence.

But all this was easily contained. The Kremlin had made its point—that fraternal socialist states had only limited sovereignty and that any lapse in the Party’s monopoly of power might trigger military intervention. Unpopularity at home or abroad was a small price to pay for the stability that this would henceforth ensure. After 1968, the security of the Soviet zone was firmly underwritten by a renewed appreciation of Moscow’s willingness to resort to force if necessary. But never again—and this was the true lesson of 1968, first for the Czechs but in due course for everyone else—never again would it be possible to maintain that Communism rested on popular consent, or the legitimacy of a reformed Party, or even the lessons of History.

In Prague, the evisceration of the reform movement left an especially bitter taste. Many of the most enthusiastic purgers had been among the loudest enthusiastsfor Dubček just a few months before—‘it was only after the Prague Spring of 1968’, wrote Zdeněk Mlynář, one of the Communist Party’s leading reformers, ‘that one began to see who was who.’ The apparent ease with which first Dubček, then the Party, and finally the whole society seemed to cave before the Soviet overlords and their local hirelings was not merely humiliating (unflattering comparisons were made with Hungary twelve years before); it cast a retroactively skeptical light upon the ideals and hopes of the reform era itself.

Reflecting in later years upon his memories of August 21st 1968, when Red Army troops burst into a meeting of Czech party leaders and a soldier lined up behind each Politburo member, Mlynář recalled that ‘at such a moment one’s concept of socialism moves to last place. But at the same time you know that it has a direct connection of some sort with the automatic weapon pointing at your back.’ It is that connection which marked the definitive turning point in the history of Communism, more even than the Hungarian tragedy of 1956.

The illusion that Communism was reformable, that Stalinism had been a wrong turning, a mistake that could still be corrected, that the core ideals of democratic pluralism might somehow still be compatible with the structures of Marxist collectivism: that illusion was crushed under the tanks on August 21st 1968 and it never recovered. Alexander Dubček and his Action Program were not a beginning but an end. Never again would radicals or reformers look to the ruling Party to carry their aspirations or adopt their projects. Communism in Eastern Europe staggered on, sustained by an unlikely alliance of foreign loans and Russian bayonets: the rotting carcass was finally carried away only in 1989. But the soul of Communism had died twenty years before: in Prague, in August 1968.

The Sixties ended badly everywhere. The closing of the long post-war cycle of growth and prosperity dispelled the rhetoric and the projects of the New Left; the optimistic emphasis on post-industrial alienation and the soulless quality of modern life would soon be displaced by a renewed attention to jobs and wages.
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In the East the message of the Sixties was that you could no longer work within ‘the system’; in the West there appeared no better choice. On both sides of the Iron Curtain illusions were swept aside. Only the truly radical stuck with their determination to remain outside the political consensus—a commitment which in Germany and Italy, as in the US and Latin America, led them into clandestinity, violence and crime.

In the short run, the practical achievements of the Sixties seemed rather thin. Eighteen-year-olds got the vote: first in Britain, then elsewhere. Universities tried, with mixed success, to upgrade their facilities and courses and render themselves more open to student demands. In the course of the next decade access to divorce, abortion and contraception was facilitated almost everywhere, and restrictions upon sexual behavior—whether as depicted or practiced—largely disappeared. In the
Statuto dei Lavoratori
of May 1970, Italian workers won the right to protection against unfair dismissal. Taken all in all, such changes constitute an underlying cultural transformation of European society; but they were hardly the ‘revolution’ envisaged in the slogans and actions of the generation of 1968.
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Indeed, that revolution had from the start been self-defeating. The same movements that purported to despise and abhor ‘consumer culture’ were from the outset an object of cultural consumption, reflecting a widespread disjunction between rhetoric and practice. Those in Paris or Berlin who aggressively declared their intention to ‘change the world’ were often the people most devoted to parochial and even bodily obsessions—anticipating the solipsistic ‘me’ politics of the decade to follow—and absorbed in the contemplation of their own impact. ‘The Sixties’ were a cult object even before the decade had passed.