The mainstream of this reformist movement did not by any means advocate the abolition of the existing political and economic system. The goals were innovation, rationalization, increased productivity, and undoubtedly also a certain upgrading of the regime in humane terms. It is possible to document with some precision that this applied both to those who chiefly represented the reform movement—in a word, Dubček and his entourage—and to the majority within the KSČ at the time. Mlynář later estimated in his memoirs, which were first published in the West,11 that this group represented roughly 80 percent of the party. It was this reformist majority that emerged victorious in spring 1968 from the KSČ’s district and regional conferences and that would have triumphed at the extraordinary party conference scheduled for September, which never took place. The programmatic key document of the reformist movement, the so-called Action Program, which the KSČ leadership passed on 5 April 1968, displays a disconcerting lack of focus and considerable internal contradictions.12 There is, of course, no disputing that parts of the reformist program aimed for a far-reaching enfranchisement in the areas of culture and the sciences, for the removal of obstacles that hampered the professional careers of nonparty members, for a program of rehabilitation and compensation for the victims of injustice, and so forth. The same applies to the emphasis on the autonomy of the organs of the state (government, parliament, and regional and local authorities). The Communist Party’s task was perceived not to lie in day-to-day administration, but in the definition in political terms of the direction in which society was to move. This was, indeed, a striking innovation: the party was to resign its role of an omnipresent force that dominated everything, reducing all other social organizations and institutions to cogs and levers for the transmission of Communist power. Questions concerning political power and the admissibility of political pluralism were off limits. Should it ever become possible to address them, this would be in a distant future and in a manner that was far from clear in 1968.13 In simple terms, one could say that the reformers within the party leadership were not aiming for the democratization but for the liberalization of the system. It goes without saying that even this political course differed substantially from anything for which the KSČ had stood prior to 1968 and would stand for from 1969 onward. It was also a course that propelled Czechoslovakia, through the unplanned but nevertheless real synergy with the dynamics of an agitated social movement, beyond the confines of “really existing socialism.”
An issue that this program avoided altogether was the restoration of the sovereignty of state and nation; it did not touch on Czechoslovakia’s membership or position within the Soviet Bloc. All questions relating to the country’s foreign policy were deliberately sidelined or excluded altogether. This was done presumably under the naive perspective that unquestioning loyalty on the level of global politics was going to ensure a safe climate for domestic reforms. This was, of course, a cardinal mistake. The intervention was to become reality.
It is obvious that the intervention was not triggered by worries occasioned by the reform agenda of the KSČ. The reason was that the Soviet leadership had lost confidence in Dubček’s ability (and indeed in his willingness) to get a situation under control in which the system was gradually being eroded.14 There were other sponsors of the intervention in addition to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza or CPSU) leadership, notably the orthodox faction in the KSČ leadership and the party leaders in the satellite countries. Among them, the attitude of the Polish and the East German Communists, who explicitly endorsed the invasion, was particularly important.15 It is understandable that the final assessment, arrived at in Moscow not without hesitation or controversy, carried considerable weight. In view of what we know today, one of the interpretations that were once common in Czechoslovakia and in leftist Western circles can hardly be upheld any longer, namely that the Soviet leadership misjudged the situation entirely, meddled when the Communist regime was under no threat, and discredited itself through its aggressive communism with lasting consequences. Let us, for instance, recall the poster that was on display everywhere in the streets of Prague depicting Brezhnev as the grave digger of world communism or the slogan that was making the rounds at the same time: “Wake up, Lenin, Brezhnev has gone nuts.” In fact, the reverse was true. The Soviets remained true to the logic of the system that they represented. Consequently, the intervention stifled the movement that had the potential to bring about the collapse of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and, for all the Soviets knew, was already in the process of doing so. This would have amounted to a serious destabilization of the regimes of the neighboring countries in a manner that was ultimately to materialize in the domino effect of 1989. It may very well have been the case that the intervention extended the lease on life for these regimes by another twenty years.