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  • Reassessing the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968
  • A. Ross Johnson (bio), Michael Kraus (bio), and Vojtech Mastny (bio)

Editor's Note: As a follow-up to the review essays by Kieran Williams and Walter Connor in the Spring 2012 issue of the JCWS, we asked three distinguished experts on East European politics and history—A. Ross Johnson, Michael Kraus, and Vojtech Mastny—to assess The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, an anthology recently published in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. Their reviews are presented here as a group.

Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler, eds., The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 510 pp.

Reviewed by A. Ross Johnson

This book is a welcome addition to the huge literature on the "Prague Spring" of 1968, its suppression by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies in August 1968, and the international ramifications.1 The book provides three original chapters in English and translations of some of the 70 contributions in German and the 232 documents in both German and Russian originally published in 2008 and totaling almost 3,000 pages.2 The specialist reader will want to consult the original volumes as well.

The Prague Spring was the second attempt to carry out fundamental reforms in an East European Communist system, and it quickly outpaced the upheavals in Poland and Hungary in 1956. Establishment of organizations outside Communist Party control, abolition of media censorship, diluting party discipline, questioning of party control of the armed forces—all of this constituted a far-reaching challenge to the Communist system and Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. Independent media were a particular thorn in the Soviet side (Prozumenshchikov, pp. 113-114). As Leonid [End Page 216] Brezhnev told Alexander Dubček, "all this propaganda affects us as much as it affects you."3 Dubček and other party reformers thought they could democratize the Communist system piecemeal. They, like many outside observers at the time, wrongly assumed (as Oldřich Tůma reminds us on p. 68) that orthodoxy in foreign and security policy would provide cover for domestic reforms. The Soviet Union and its orthodox East European allies more realistically viewed incrementalism as a slippery slope leading not to "socialism with a human face" but to the dismantling of the Leninist system. They put an end to the experiment by sending several hundred thousand military forces into Czechoslovakia on 20-21 August 1968 (Operation Danube). That act sealed the fate of "revisionism" in Eastern Europe. Thereafter, dissent and opposition developed predominantly on anti-Communist and national platforms. At the end of the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev attempted a reprise of the Prague Spring, but, as Vladislav Zubok notes (p. 97), the easing of censorship, cultural liberalization, and political democratization made Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika—another program of reform Communism—irrelevant and doomed Communist control, as it surely would have done in Czechoslovakia in 1968 had the Soviet Union not intervened.

The contributions in this volume do not challenge the fundamental conclusion of earlier studies that the Prague Spring could not have succeeded given the state of the Soviet Union and its political leaders twelve years after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and twelve years before the Polish Communists crushed Solidarity at Soviet insistence and with considerable Soviet support.

The contributors draw on Soviet and East European archives not accessible to earlier scholars to add considerable detail to our understanding of day-to-day developments in 1968 and leadership dynamics in both Moscow and Prague. For example, as early as 15 March 1968, the Soviet Politburo feared the dismantling of the Communist system in Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact (Prozumenshchikov, p. 105) and therefore authorized planning for a military invasion. Absent the violence, renunciation of one-party rule, and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact that Nikita Khrushchev confronted in Hungary in 1956, Soviet leaders procrastinated, hoping that Dubček "might be induced . . . to impose order in the country of his own accord" (Bischof, p. 13) and thus reverse "creeping counterrevolution" for them, as Władysław Gomułka...

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