1988: A SPIRIT IS ABROAD IN THE SOCIALIST CAMP
The suppression of Communist self-reform in the ČSSR in 1968 was a Pyrrhic victory for the Warsaw Five. They did not succeed in enduringly securing the Communist Party’s monopoly on power in Czechoslovakia and in their own states.
Twenty years after the violent suppression on 21 August 1968 of the democratization of the Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia emanating from the KSČ, the spirit of reformist communism was abroad anew.95 One year before peaceful revolutions in the GDR and Czechoslovakia ended their rule, two protagonists of the restoration of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power in Czechoslovakia from 1968, Bil’ak and Erich Honecker, spoke in East Berlin full of concern for their own power about the new evaluation of the history of Communist rule taking place in the Soviet Union. It concerned the debate on Stalin in the Soviet Union. In 1968, Bil’ak had belonged to the “healthy forces” within the KSČ who had “solicited” the intervention of the “five sister states” for the protection of socialism in the ČSSR. As then Central Committee secretary for security in the SED Politburo, Honecker had unreservedly supported the intervention policy of the SED.
Now, in view of the Soviet policy of reform, they were haunted by the memories of the crimes in the history of communism, to which the suppression of the “Prague Spring” doubtlessly belonged. In 1988, the memories had a name for Honecker and Bil’ak: Mikhail Gorbachev. The general secretary of the CPSU pursued a policy of democratization; Stalin’s victims were rehabilitated and censorship abolished. Soviet historians spoke and wrote openly about the Terror of the 1930s and asked what part Stalin’s politics had in Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power.96
According to the SED’s memorandum on the discussion, Bil’ak complained about the dangerous political consequences that could arise from the Soviet history debate.
The Soviet comrades would rather not admit that nasty developments can take place. He, Comrade Bil’ak, has explained to them: “If one hits a rabbit over the head, it is dead; if that befalls a bear, nothing happens. We, however, are a rabbit.” An enormous pressure developed in the direction of a destabilization of the Socialist countries. For this reason, he, Comrade Bil’ak, also asked the Soviet comrades whether they realize that the attacks against Stalin ultimately—as in 1968 in the ČSSR—target the party? They are supposed to call into question the legitimacy of the Party of the Bolsheviks.97
Bil’ak was dismayed about the presence of the history of the Prague Spring in the Soviet reform debate. He reported “some Soviet representatives demanded that the events of 1968 be re-evaluated. The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Estonia had advised this internally; Comrade Gorbachev also advanced that the events must be re-evaluated, but the Czechoslovakian comrades are not prepared to do that.”98 To Honecker, Bil’ak expressed the feeling of losing his “hinterland.”
These quotations prove that, for the leaders of the ruling Communist parties, the history of their own rule primarily served the historical legitimization of their own power. The question to which historians are bound, namely that of the historical truth regarding the methods with which power was gained and held, always turned from this point of view into an attack on the dictatorial power of the Communist Party. Only from this perspective can the significance of the “Prague Spring” in the history of the Soviet Empire also be explained. It was no coincidence that the Soviet reformers of 1987–1988 contemplated a “reevaluation” of these Czechoslovakian reforms: the Prague reform Communists were their forerunners. Precisely because of its violent ending, the history of the “Prague Spring” remained politically current and was one of the causes of the peaceful revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe and in the GDR in 1989. Robert Havemann predicted this at the end of 1970, in order to encourage himself and others to continue the struggle with this hope in mind: “It is in the long run quite inevitable that the ideas of the KSČ precisely as a result of the intervention will also spread within the countries of the interveners. Freedom is the disease from which Stalinism will die.”99
NOTES
Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.
1. On this, see the texts from Rüdiger Wenzke, “Die Nationale Volksarmee der DDR. Kein Einsatz in Prag,” 673–86, and Thomas Großbölting, “Die Niederschlagung des ‘Prager Frühlings’ und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit der DDR,” 807–22, both in Karner et al., Beiträge.
2. Lutz Prieß, “Der ‘Einladungsbrief’ zur Intervention in der ČSSR 1968,” Deutschland Archiv 12 (1994): 1253; RGANI, F. 3, op. 72, d. 197, pp. 3–14, Politburo resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU P 95 (I), 17 August 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #62.
3. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3616, pp. 182–207, report of the Department for International Ties, “Zur Reaktion in der kommunistischen Weltbewegung auf die Ereignisse in der ČSSR,” to the office of W. Ulbricht, 11 April 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #162.
4. The name originated in July when the CPSU, the BCP, the PUWP, the HSWP, and the SED sent a joint letter to the KSČ following the Warsaw Conference.
5. Hermann Wentker, Außenpolitik in engen Grenzen: Die DDR im internationalen System 1949–1989 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007).
6. Zdenek Hejzlar, Reformkommunismus: Zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Partei der Tschechoslowakei (Cologne: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1976), 146.
7. Peter Florin, born 1921, was of the “Moscow cadre” and son of Wilhelm Florin (KPD). In 1935 he emigrated to the Soviet Union, in 1942 completed an apprenticeship at the School of the Communist International, in 1943/1944 was a partisan in Belarus, in May 1945 returned to Berlin, from 1952 to 1966 served as head of the Department for Foreign Affairs in the Central Committee of the SED, and from 1958 to 1989 was a member of the Central Committee of the SED.
8. SAPMO-BA, DY 30/3616, pp. 52–57, report of the GDR ambassador in the ČSSR, P. Florin, on the situation in the country, 10 March 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #3 (reprinted in appendix 1 of this volume).
9. Rudé pravo, report of the Central Committee of the KSČ regarding the alteration of the authority of the Central Publication Administration, 6 March 1968, reprinted Karner et al., Dokumente, #2.