As transcripts of telephone conversations and meetings between Brezhnev and Dubček testify, the Soviet leaders were much more worried about the media than by any other aspects of the Czech reform. Remarkably, newspapers were the main subject of the Soviet attack on Dubček. ‘We have not got much time,’ Brezhnev told him on 13 August 1968. ‘I once again turn to you with my concern about the media which not only distort our agreements, but spread anti-Soviet and anti-Socialist ideas… We had agreed that all media – print, radio and television – would be brought under the control of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party and all anti-Soviet and anti-socialist publications would stop…’41 Brezhnev accused Dubček of breaking the agreements and used examples supplied to him by the KGB.
The Czech reformers insisted they never intended to break away from the Soviet allegiance and argued that they imposed a threat not to socialism but ‘to bureaucracy which has been slowly and steadily burying socialism on an international scale.’ The Soviet bureaucracy perceived this threat as a serious one and prepared for a military invasion. A few rational heads in the Central Committee, such as Bovin, tried to talk Brezhnev out of it. On 14 August, a day after Brezhnev’s conversation with Dubček, Bovin submitted a memo to Andropov which argued that military action could be justified only if Czechoslovakia tried to move over to the West, which was not the case. A use of force, Bovin wrote, would irreparably damage the Soviet reputation among socialist countries. It would also isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of Europe, pushing Western Europe to form a tighter allegiance with the United States, at Russia’s expense. (The situation would repeat itself more than half a century later in Russia’s actions against Ukraine.)
Bovin even got to present his views to Brezhnev, who told him: ‘The Politburo has already made its decision. We disagree with you. You can disagree [with us] and leave the party, or you can fall in line with the decision. You decide.’42 A few days later, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. On 19 August 1968 Bovin recorded in his diary: ‘Another session of the politburo. The situation is approaching the dénouement. Those who made the decision about sending in the troops have signed their own sentence. When it will be carried out is a matter of time.’43 The ‘sentence’ was deferred but was carried out twenty years later when Gorbachev – with the help of people like Yakovlev, Latsis and Bovin – launched his Perestroika.
In Moscow, among the intelligentsia, the invasion created a sense of mourning, for the Soviet tanks in Prague crushed not only Dubček, they crushed the hopes of the Russian intelligentsia for reforming socialism into something humane and just. It showed that the Soviet system could be held together only by force. It was a breaking point. The Soviet leadership had alienated the smartest and the most creative part of the intelligentsia and lost control over the intellectual life of the country, Alexander Yakovlev reflected. For those who signed up to the idea of ‘socialism with a human face’, as Yakovlev, Bovin and Latsis had done, this was a personal defeat.
Dare You Come to the Square?
The crushing of the Prague Spring had divided the intelligentsia into two groups – those who joined a dissident movement trying to apply pressure on the system from the outside and those who condemned the invasion but stayed inside the system, hoping to push its boundaries from within. The two circles overlapped and complemented each other.
On 25 August – the first Sunday after the invasion – seven dissidents came out onto Red Square. As the clock on the Kremlin tower struck midday, they unveiled the banners they had brought with them. Some were in Czech: ‘Long Live a Free and Independent Czechoslovakia’, others in Russian: ‘Free Dubček’ and ‘Hands off Czechoslovakia’. One slogan read: ‘For Your Freedom and Ours’. They lasted a few minutes before the KGB pounced on the demonstration, beat up the dissidents, banged them into a car and drove them off. (Two of the demonstrators were put in a punitive psychiatric clinic. The rest were exiled or sent to a labour camp.) It was an act of extraordinary individual responsibility and willpower.
Bovin, Yegor Yakovlev and Latsis did not come out on Red Square. They did not leave the party or even resign their jobs in protest. It was not merely a question of self-preservation, although it played a big part. They also believed that they could do more by staying inside than by moving out. They compromised and pretended, they did not speak the truth and took comfort when they managed not to lie. In the end their role in bringing down the system was probably greater than that of the dissidents. ‘It is easy to condemn us. We had to go against our beliefs… but we are not ashamed of what we did. We saw our task in preventing the destruction of the shoots which came through after the 20th Congress. And our generation managed to achieve this. Otherwise Perestroika would not have been possible.’45
The generation of the children of the 20th Party Congress carried the curse of Oedipus: they came to vindicate their fathers’ ideas and avoid the destruction of socialism, but they were the ones who ended up unknowingly slaying it with words rather than tanks.
‘Words are Also Deeds’ was the title of an essay drafted by one of Yegor’s closest friends, Len Karpinsky, whose father had been Lenin’s friend and copy editor, and who was named after Lenin.46 It was read out by its author at a secret meeting held at Yegor’s flat. Karpinsky suggested starting an underground political group and his essay was its manifesto. ‘Our tanks in Prague were, if you will, an anachronism, an “inadequate” weapon,’ he wrote. ‘They “fired” at ideas. With no hope of hitting the target.’47 Conversely, the only weapon which the educated class of Soviet intelligentsia should use against this bureaucracy that monopolized power under the slogans of socialism, Karpinsky argued, was words and ideas. A bureaucratic system would not withstand the spread of facts and ideas, he concluded. Ironically, the ideologues of the Soviet bureaucracy had arrived at precisely the same conclusion, recognizing the risks of opening up the media during the Prague Spring.
As Mikhail Suslov, the shrewd and feared ideologue and guardian of the regime, said in August 1968, ‘It is known that the time gap between the abolition of censorship in Czechoslovakia and the sending of the Soviet tanks [there] was only a few months. I want to know: if we passed [a similar] law, who will send the tanks to us?’48 Instead of abolishing censorship, they introduced jail sentences for spreading thoughts that blackened the Soviet regime. Yet, as Karpinsky wrote, this could barely stop a process that had already begun within the party itself. ‘The new times are percolating into the apparatus and forming a layer of party intellectuals within it. To be sure, this layer is thin and disconnected; it is constantly eroded by co-optation and is thickly interlaced with careerists, flatterers, loudmouths… But this layer could move toward an alliance with the entire social body of the intelligentsia if favourable conditions arose.’49 One day, Karpinsky predicted, ‘our words can become their deeds’. In 1968 nobody knew how long the wait would be.