By early May 1968 Kádár, too, saw the danger of a counterrevolution and the seriousness of the situation and modified his position accordingly. From that point on, he underlined that at least the counterrevolution had not yet been victorious. At the Warsaw meeting of the “Five” in July, Kádár endorsed the plan of a joint invasion in principle and declared Hungary to be prepared to participate, but he continued to do everything to prevent a drastic solution from happening.4 In the end, he bowed to the inevitable, and Hungary took part in the military action on 21 August. Even then Kádár rather curiously refused to give up his theoretical point of view. In midAugust, in the days immediately preceding the intervention, he told Leonid Brezhnev that the Czechoslovak developments had their closest parallels not to the Hungary of 1956, but to Poland. The Soviets nevertheless opted for the “Hungarian solution.”5 Kádár maintained that Czechoslovakia, as opposed to Hungary in 1956, had not yet reached the counterrevolutionary phase in August 1968. He remained true to himself when he felt that the intervention had been premature.
In this case, however, Kádár’s assessment of the situation was mistaken. In 1956, Gomułka had got the measure of Soviet tolerance and its limits and was able to contain developments within boundaries that were acceptable to Moscow. Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, had undergone a process of democratization by August 1968 that could not be arrested without the use of force, either internally or from outside and that, in fact, recalled two developments in Hungary.
First, the process occurring between February and November 1956 brought about, by the time of the second Soviet intervention on 4 November, a situation in which Communist power had ceased to exist;6 the general elections, which were due to be held shortly, would most certainly have resulted in the establishment of a bourgeois democratic system.
At first sight, a comparison of the two crises seems to show up significant differences, the chief one being that there was no armed uprising in Czechoslovakia. Yet a closer look will reveal that such developments as the extraordinarily fast decay of the Communist Party’s self-confidence resulting from the freedom of the press and the societal pressure it generated, the evaporation of its legitimation, its erosion and subsequent dissolution would have taken place within a very short time in Czechoslovakia as well. In Hungary, these developments unfolded step by step in the half year leading up to the revolt and at an accelerated pace during the two weeks of the revolution.7
Secondly, the regime change in Hungary in 1988/1989 highlights in an extremely instructive manner how the Communist Party attempted at that time, in a transitional situation similar to the one in Czechoslovakia in 1968, to take into account society’s changed interests to a larger extent than had previously been the case in order to revitalize its legitimation. From a starting point of accepting pluralism within the party, it was propelled by pressure both from radicals in the party and in society very quickly to the nominal acceptance of a multiparty system, which the party envisaged as coexisting with its dominant role remaining intact within an overall framework of regulated power sharing. This “new model of socialism” evolving from the middle of 1988 was, in fact, very similar to Alexander Dubček’s vision of “socialism with a human face.” By May 1989, however, once the danger of a Soviet intervention had gradually receded into the background, this position swiftly gave way to the party’s voluntarily accepting the idea of genuine free elections. The subsequent Round Table talks resulted in September in an agreement between the party and the opposition on holding free elections the next spring, and in early October, the HSWP itself morphed into a social-democratic party.8
In Soviet, Polish, East German, and Bulgarian prognoses, it was precisely these fears that were expressed in the summer of 1968 with reference to the developments in Czechoslovakia, and for this there was good reason. The free press, the foundation of political clubs (that were clearly protoopposition parties), the preparations for a relaunch of the Social Democratic Party, the “2,000 Words” manifesto and the reception it met with in public opinion, and societal demands of increasing radicalism all concurred in underlining that the Czechoslovak society, which had a powerful streak of nostalgia for the parliamentary democracy of the interwar years, would not have limited its political goals to the acceptance of a reformed Socialist system if it had not been for a military intervention from outside. There is no doubt that the reform movement that was underway in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 gradually but rather quickly progressed from visions of a reformed Socialist model toward a nontotalitarian system and would ultimately have reached the modern variant of such a system, that of parliamentary democracy; this is indeed what happened in 1990 without pressure from outside in a matter of months.
The Dubček leadership, which was at least in nominal control of developments until the military intervention in August, had two options in this situation. The first one was to restrict liberalization to below the Soviet threshold of tolerance (the Gomułka model of 1956). In this scenario, the gradual relaxation since January 1968 and the freedom of the press would have resulted in a serious conflict between the established power of the state and society so that the increasing societal resistance would probably have had to be dealt with domestically by the use of force (Jaruzelski model of 1981). Yet Dubček, like Hungary’s Imre Nagy or Poland’s Stanisław Kania, belonged to the “soft” type of Communist leader who was neither willing nor capable of using brute force against society in a crisis to suppress the process of democratization. In this sense, Kádár, who as leader of Hungary’s “soft” dictator ship was regarded as a liberal Communist in the West, clearly belongs with Communists of the “hard” type. Another notable representative of this type was Josip Tito, whose independent foreign policy line was highly appreciated in the West while the Yugoslav political and economic model was the most serious deviation from the Leninist-Stalinist-type Communist model. Moreover, he was also lucky for not having had to face and handle a serious internal crisis during his reign. Nevertheless, when Nikita Khrushchev and Georgi Malenkov secretly visited him before the Soviet intervention to crush the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, Tito not only agreed that intervention was necessary to save the Communist system there, but also promised to help eliminate his virtual allies—Prime Minister Imre Nagy and his adherents—from political life.9