15
Ulbricht, East Germany, and the Prague Spring
Manfred Wilke
THE POWER QUESTION
In early 1968, the Czechoslovak Communists surprised their sister parties in the Soviet Empire with their plans for reform. Relations with the ruling Communist parties were the job of the respective party leaders. Walter Ulbricht, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED), was full of mistrust toward this “Prague Spring.” The changes interested him above all from a political angle: did they serve the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s (Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ) monopoly on power or not? As the reforms of the KSČ pertained to the political system and the central administrative economy of the country, they did indeed affect core areas of its monopoly on power.
It was already clear to the SED leadership in March 1968 that these reforms were leading to a “counterrevolution.” This keyword was used by Communists to characterize a change of system in a Socialist society. In order to avoid such a change in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR), the SED took an active part in the Soviet politics of intervention to restore the dictatorship.
This chapter focuses on the political decision process in the SED party leadership and their actions in the interventionist coalition against the reformist Communists in Prague. The activities of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) and the National People’s Army (NVA) in connection with preparations for an invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August are handled by other authors in this volume.1
The SED itself acted in close coordination with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza or CPSU). This corresponded to its self-conception and the status of the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or GDR) as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. In 1968, the CPSU pursued first and foremost a political aim regarding the ČSSR: to restore the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s monopoly on power which was being eroded by the reforms. From the Soviet point of view, it was not a question of occupying the country, but only of protecting socialism in a “sister state.” Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev had already articulated this aim to Alexander Dubček at the Dresden meeting in March. In the notorious “letter of invitation” from Vasil Bil’ak and four other members of the Presidium of the KSČ from August to Brezhnev, this aim is precisely and openly formulated: “The very being of socialism in our country is in danger.” With this phrase, the Communist Party’s monopoly on power was rewritten, which the reformers in the Party consciously wanted to renounce. In order to sustain its monopoly on power, the dogmatic wing of the Party required assistance from abroad: “Only with your help can we rescue the ČSSR from the impending counterrevolution.”2
This political aim also explains the procedure of coordination regarding the decisions of the CPSU with four of her “sister parties” and the function of the internal conferences. It was imperative to organize and demonstrate closeness in the Warsaw Pact. For the impartial viewer, this is a contradiction in terms; the policies and the military measures decided on were directed against a member state; one of them, Romania, did not participate in these interventionist politics.
By 1968, Moscow was no longer the undisputed leadership center of all Communist parties. Above all, there was the dispute with the Communist Party of China and the two largest western European parties in France and Italy. The response in the Communist world movement to the attempts at reform in Prague was divided. In April, the SED had already specified the differences between the Communists on this matter.3
The chosen position of the SED regarding the “Czechoslovak events” came about without losing sight of the Moscow line and the internal coordinating conferences. They constituted the breaks during the course of the crisis between the individual phases of its progress.
In Dresden in March, the “Warsaw Five”—the CPSU, the SED, the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP), and the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP) who would intervene in Czechoslovakia—brought to an end the phase of interpreting the reforms in the ČSSR as an impending “counterrevolution.” They confronted the delegation of the KSČ with this result. In Moscow in May, the Warsaw Five were concerned with increasing external pressure on the leadership of the KSČ in order to force the abandonment of the reforms. Then, in Warsaw in July, the basic decision to intervene was up for discussion. In Moscow, a few days before the invasion, Walter Ulbricht, Todor Zhivkov, Władysław Gomułka, and János Kádár signed the commitment to involve their states in the intervention. Following the invasion, the politics of restoration and the stationing of Soviet troops in the ČSSR were negotiated in Moscow between the CPSU and the KSČ and voted on by the CPSU in the context of the Warsaw Five.4
“COUNTERREVOLUTION” IN PRAGUE?
As the year 1968 dawned, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED Walter Ulbricht was at the zenith of his power. The borders of the GDR, closed since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, provided for economic planning security; the mass exodus to the West was eliminated. The SED discussed a reform of the direction of the planned economy and a new constitution. The latter was to emphasize inwardly and outwardly the independence of the SED state. The “leading role” of the SED in the GDR received constitutional status and, thus, had to be respected by all citizens and social institutions. The constitution did not give up on the prospect of a united Germany and identified the GDR as the Socialist core state that was to demonstrate to a united Germany what its future development would look like.
With regard to foreign affairs, the GDR had received support at the 1967 conference of twenty-five European Communist parties in Karlovy Vary/Karlsbad for its demand for international recognition as the second German state. In the West and in the noncommitted states, the Federal Republic had prevented this recognition since its founding in 1949. In Karlsbad, the SED received the assurance that in the future no Socialist state would enter into diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic before the latter had recognized the GDR. This agreement was a direct response to Romania entering into diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic.5
With the support of the CPSU, the SED gained a foreign affairs victory. This support foiled the intention of the new eastern policy of the great coalition in the Federal Republic to isolate the GDR within the Socialist camp.
The change from Antonín Novotný to Dubček at the head of the KSČ in January 1968 did not yet disconcert the SED. The demand made by Ota Šik to introduce a new criterion for legitimating the rule of the Communist Party was presented quietly and did not immediately make it beyond the Czechoslovak border. He demanded in the future “the creation of better living conditions and the solution of the new social contradictions,” and, if the party did not bring this about, the danger existed “that the people would begin to turn their backs on socialism.” In order to prevent this, he demanded that “the Party should give up its monopoly on power” and fundamentally alter the style of party work: “Under current circumstances, it is not possible and also not necessary that the Party directs and controls the entire power and leadership apparatus in detail.”6 With this, he formulated the fundamental idea of the reformers: in the future, the Leninist conception of the party should not legitimate the power of the party; rather, the living conditions of the people under socialism should constitute in the future the yardstick by which its actions would be judged.