Czechoslovakia’s Lost Fight for Freedom 1967–1969: An American Embassy Perspective (review)

Kenneth N. Skoug Jr., Czechoslovakia's Lost Fight for Freedom 1967-1969: An American Embassy Perspective . Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999. 273 pp. $65.00.

Kenneth Skoug, a career Foreign Service officer (now retired) who was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Prague in the late 1960s, has relied both on oral history and on new documentary evidence to compile this account of the tumultuous Prague Spring of 1968 and its suppression by Moscow.

The portion of the book devoted to oral history is evocative for those of us who were also working in the Prague embassy at that time, and doubtless for other diplomats and journalists who were in Czechoslovakia during that fateful year. Skoug's references to individual Czechs and Slovaks--courageous, talented, patriotic, or otherwise --remind us of some of the individuals we admired (or despised). The sprinkling of examples of familiar, wry, "Svejkian" Czech humor brings back old times.

More valuable, however, is Skoug's use of recently declassified U.S. documents, including reporting from the embassies in Prague and Moscow, analyses by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and records of conversations and deliberations in the White House and State Department. (This reviewer was surprised and a little embarrassed to see references to his occasionally off-target embassy cables.) Skoug's eyewitness accounts of events, his poignant recollections of the Czechs and Slovaks he got to know, and his own strongly held views, which occasionally shine through the narrative, all serve to spice up Czechoslovakia's Lost Fight for Freedom.

Skoug served in Prague from mid-1967 to mid-1969, and he begins his book with a description of the waning days of the Stalinist dictator, Antonín Novotn_. This section is as gray and uninteresting as the Prague political scene was at the time. Occasional personal vignettes, including some that are rather trivial, do little to liven the narrative. But the book comes to life in describing Alexander Dubcek's rise to power, the beginnings of reform, and the transformation of Dubcek--under the influence of public support for a return to Czechoslovakia's earlier democratic tradition--from a Communist Party hack into that rarest of species, an electable Communist leader. Skoug meticulously recounts the events leading up to and following the Soviet invasion, but this section would have benefitted from the use of Soviet materials that have recently become available, such as the diary of Petro Shelest. (See Mark Kramer's account in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 10, March 1998, pp. 234-247.)

That story is already well known, however. Of greater interest, and more useful for drawing lessons, is the new documentary evidence about U.S. policy both before and after the Soviet invasion. In May 1968 National Security Adviser Walt Rostow proposed giving Moscow a "private signal of concern about troop movements near Czechoslovakia" (p. 99), but this suggestion was opposed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and some other State Department officials. The idea was put on hold until 23 July when Rusk called in the Soviet ambassador, Anatolii Dobrynin, to complain about Soviet press allegations of U.S. interference in Czechoslovakia and, for the first and only time, to warn that Soviet military action against Czechoslovakia would harm U.S.-Soviet bilateral relations. Mild as the warning was, Dobrynin took it seriously and was therefore both surprised and pleased by Lyndon Johnson's appalling behavior on the evening of 20 August when Dobrynin had come to the White House to inform the president that Warsaw Pact troops were moving into Czechoslovakia. According to Walt Rostow's notes of the meeting, Johnson merely expressed appreciation for the notification and promised to be back in touch after discussing the matter with Rusk. Then Johnson pressed Dobrynin to move ahead in extending a formal invitation to him to visit the USSR...