The SED leadership did not become alarmed until the developments of the following months: the personnel changes on all levels of the party organization, Novotný’s resignation as state president, the debate on the rehabilitation of the victims of repression at the beginning of the 1950s, and above all the abolition of censorship and, with it, the party’s control over the media.
An important building block for the first chosen positioning of the Central Committee apparatus of the SED in March was the report of the GDR ambassador in Prague. Peter Florin reported the following to East Berlin:7 “The activity of the opposing forces has intensified over recent days and assumes increasingly open counterrevolutionary characteristics.”8 The press, radio, and television were largely in “opposition hands,” and the media were becoming in this way organizers of “counterrevolution.”9
The keyword for the Marxist-Leninist perception of the dangerous character of the Prague reform politics had been spoken. It was a phrase with a meaning that provided direction. The first sentence of the Soviet black book from August 1968, with which the intervention was justified, was: “The counterrevolutionary line amounted to liquidating the leading role of the KSČ.”10 For the SED ideologues, counterrevolutionary processes in Socialist states under the circumstances of systemic confrontation between socialism and imperialism were always an interaction between “imperialist aggression” from the outside and the emergence of “hostile forces” within the Socialist society. The ideological struggle against the ruling Communist Party was among the most important instruments of “counterrevolution.”11 At the meeting in Dresden, Ulbricht delivered a presentation on the causes of the Czechoslovak crisis with the KSČ delegation in mind. Using the example of the current discussion surrounding freedom in the ČSSR, he lectured on the interplay between the internal and external factors of a counterrevolutionary process. He stressed that the administrative errors made by the KSČ in the past had not been corrected in the framework of the politics of a Marxist-Leninist party, but rather
under the slogan of absolute freedom, the transition from dictatorship to freedom, etc. However, dear friends, you are not alone in Europe. On the western border you have German imperialism. Absolute freedom brings with it several difficulties for you. The opponent is waging psychological warfare. At this moment in time, it would be very costly for you to proclaim absolute freedom.12
From this point of view, the main “counterrevolutionary” attack was always directed against the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The GDR ambassador’s report contained a message that was particularly unsettling for the SED leadership: unity within the KSČ leadership no longer existed; an “open” and an “illegal center” were active within it.
The term “center” had a bloody meaning in the party language of the Communists. The accused during the Moscow show trials that took place in Moscow from 1936 onwards were defined according to “centers.” The first show trial against the old Bolsheviks was directed against the “TrotskyZinoviev center”; in January 1937, the “illegal so-called Soviet-hostile Trotskyist parallel center” was condemned.13
The composition of the “illegal center” in Prague in 1968 was unknown to Florin in terms of its personnel. The “open center” consisted of the economic reform planner Šik, the director of television Jiří Pelikán, the chairman of the Writers’ Association Eduard Goldstücker, and the author Pavel Kohout. The differences in the new KSČ leadership were expressed by Florin in the conspiracy constructions of the Stalinist show trials. The victims of the show trials in Prague at the beginning of the 1950s were to be rehabilitated at that precise moment.
On 15 March, Soviet general secretary Brezhnev invited Dubček to Dresden for an economics conference of the ruling Communist parties.14 The Central Committee of the SED met prior and parallel to the Central Committee of the CPSU in order to establish their position.15 The report of the Central Committee apparatus on developments in the ČSSR was regarded internally as prescribed terminology and named critical points of the reform process in the neighboring country: the removal of censorship and the publicly recognizable differences within the party leadership. Josef Smrkovský, Šik, and Goldstücker were characterized as revisionists. According to comments he made in an interview with WDR, Smrkovský’s stated goal was to unite democracy and socialism. For the SED, the demand for “democratization” was the banner under which the antisocialist forces were to be gathered; a tactical concealment of the actual aim, that is, the overthrow of socialism. Prior to Dresden, the SED was already convinced that in Prague the old social democratic revisionism was ideologically and politically stepping out in new clothes.16 Two days before the 5th Central Committee Congress, Rudolf Helmer17 had already communicated to a counselor from the Soviet embassy in East Berlin an event that was important for Moscow, which the counselor noted as follows: “He stressed that they have no secrets from their Soviet comrades and that, as he was aware, the principal judgment and the access to events in the ČSSR on the part of the leaderships of the CPSU and the SED were consistent with each other.”18
Ulbricht used this Central Committee Congress to evaluate the SPD’s new eastern policy and to link it with the changes in Prague. For the SED boss, this new eastern policy was a strategy of ideological “maceration of the socialist countries with new methods and demands and that under the slogan of security in Europe, the slogan of the ‘new eastern policy.’” For Ulbricht, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD) sought with this policy to find “ways of infiltrating the GDR, of unrolling the GDR from within, in order to transfer the West German system of state monopoly capitalism with its Federal Armed Forces to the whole of Germany”; the aim of German unity was for him “the main point of difference with the Social Democrat leadership.”19 Ulbricht mistrustfully recorded all contact between the SPD and KSČ during the spring.
THE DRESDEN TRIBUNAL IN MARCH 1968
The intervention in August began with a confrontation in March in Dresden. The leadership of the CPSU, the PUWP, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, the BCP, and the SED reproached the delegation of the KSČ, led by Dubček, that a counterrevolutionary process had been established in the ČSSR. The Communist Party of Romania was consciously not invited. Dubček accepted the invitation, knowing in advance what the topic would be, but the other KSČ officials traveling with him were under the mistaken impression that the conclave would deal with economic issues.20 Ulbricht as host then announced the real topic of the conference.21 He requested of Dubček information regarding the plans of his Central Committee and the preparation of the KSČ’s Action Program. He stressed the self-evident right of every Communist Party to determine its own policies, but his party was entirely isolated. “Thus, developments in a socialist country and the resolutions of a sister party can have far-reaching consequences for every other party and also the situation in Europe. Our mutual mortal enemy, imperialism, does not sleep.” Before entering into the order of business, Brezhnev declared: “The discussion will be very serious; …I would, therefore, suggest not keeping the minutes.” Dubček agreed, but Ulbricht allowed a record to be made.