These calls for a much more vigorous (and presumably bloodier) military crackdown were rejected by Brezhnev, Kosygin, and other officials. Although Brezhnev was prepared, in extremis, to impose direct military rule in Czechoslovakia for as long as necessary, he and most of his colleagues clearly were hoping to come up with a more palatable solution first. The task of finding such a solution was seriously complicated by the collapse of Moscow’s initial political aims, but a sustained period of repression and “normalization” gradually negated the defiant mood of the Czechoslovak population and consolidated the military and political gains of the invasion.56 In April 1969, Dubček was removed from office for good.
THE BREZHNEV DOCTRINE
The implications of the 1968 crisis for Soviet responses to nonviolent political change in East-Central Europe were codified in the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine (a term coined in the West in September 1968 after the Soviet Union published a number of authoritative statements justifying the invasion of Czechoslovakia). The Brezhnev Doctrine laid out strict “rules of the game” for the Communist Bloc by linking the fate of each socialist country with the fate of all others, by stipulating that every socialist country must abide by the norms of Marxism-Leninism as interpreted in Moscow, and by rejecting “abstract sovereignty” in favor of the “laws of class struggle.” Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet Union had both a right and a “sacred duty” to preserve the “socialist gains” of all Warsaw Pact countries.57 The Soviet Politburo therefore would be obliged to use military force not only to respond to violent outbursts—as in the case of Hungary in 1956—but also to preempt “impermissible deviations from socialism,” even if these were carried out through entirely peaceful means. Although a preemptive military option had always existed for the Soviet Union, the Brezhnev Doctrine made it explicit by proclaiming that the Warsaw Pact states would never again risk “waiting until Communists are being shot and hanged,” as in the autumn of 1956, before sending Soviet and allied troops to “help the champions of socialism.”58
The Brezhnev Doctrine thus reflected the Soviet Union’s profound hostility to any meaningful change in the political complexion of EastCentral Europe, regardless of whether such change was achieved through nonviolent civil resistance or violent rebellion. But this engrained attitude did not necessarily mean that Soviet troops would intervene promptly or indiscriminately during future crises in the Soviet Bloc, any more than they had in 1968. Brezhnev went to great lengths in 1968 to pursue an internal solution in Czechoslovakia that would preclude the need for a full-scale invasion. He and other Soviet officials tried for months to pressure Dubček to crack down, and it was only when their repeated efforts failed and when the dates of party congresses in Czechoslovakia were looming (congresses that would have resulted in sweeping replacements of KSČ hardliners) that the Soviet Politburo finally approved the dispatch of Soviet troops. This pattern of trying every option to find an internal solution before resorting to military force was repeated during all subsequent crises in East-Central Europe under Brezhnev.
NET ASSESSMENT
In retrospect, given what the latest evidence reveals about the Soviet Union’s objectives at the time, we can safely conclude that no real opportunity existed in 1968 for truly radical change in Czechoslovakia. Significant reforms would of course have been possible, as had been occurring in Hungary since 1962. But the much more far-reaching transformation envisaged by the boldest reformers in Czechoslovakia was unacceptable to the leaders in Moscow. Because Brezhnev and his Soviet colleagues had sufficient power to determine the political fate of Czechoslovakia, their preferences ultimately prevailed in 1968. Fundamental change in Czechoslovakia and in other Central and East European countries required a fundamental change in Soviet policy, and this did not occur until the end of the 1980s. Only then were the ideals and central elements of the Prague Spring, especially its democratic thrust, allowed to bear full fruit.
Nonetheless, even if radical change could not have taken lasting hold in Central and Eastern Europe under the circumstances that existed in Moscow in 1968, this does not diminish the drama and audacity of the Prague Spring. Soviet leaders rightly sensed that the far-reaching reforms in Czechoslovakia would have a fissiparous effect within the Communist Bloc. To be sure, it is impossible to know whether the reform program in Czechoslovakia would eventually have produced a genuinely democratic polity. Even if the external environment had been more benign, the internal obstacles to radical change were formidable. The well-known Czech writer Antonín Liehm, who was a leading reformer in 1968, recently acknowledged that “skepticism and disillusion” might eventually have ensued in Czechoslovakia, even without the external pressure.59 But Liehm also aptly noted that the boldest of the reformers were “sincere” in wanting to “abandon militarized socialism” and to “push for real political freedom.”
In that respect, it is unfair and misleading for Czech officials nowadays to dismiss the Prague Spring as merely an insignificant exercise in “warmedover communism”—the sort of dismissal voiced often by Václav Klaus and some other Czech politicians who themselves kept their heads down in 1968. (Klaus was a twenty-seven-year-old economist in 1968 and took no part in the reform efforts.) Klaus has been wont to condemn the leaders of the Prague Spring for having “believed in socialism with a human face” rather than genuine democracy, but this sort of criticism is largely ahistorical.60 Given the constraints posed by the Soviet Union’s hegemonic position in the Warsaw Pact, “socialism with a human face” (socialismus s lidskou tváří) was a remarkably bold goal for an East European country to seek. The slogan itself—“socialism with a human face”—not only heralded the sweeping changes that Czechs and Slovaks were hoping to achieve, but also implied that socialism elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc lacked a “human face.” Oldřich Černík, the Czechoslovak prime minister in 1968, later recalled that Brezhnev angrily confronted Dubček over precisely this issue in May 1968: “In one of the Kremlin corridors [Brezhnev] kept asking Alexander Dubček: ‘What’s with this human face? What kind of faces do you think we have in Moscow?’ Dubček sought to mollify him by answering that this, you know, is just some catchy phrase that the people like.”61