Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  As the conflict between the Czechoslovak reformers and the other Warsaw Pact leaders deepened, the whole world communist movement was entering a new period of crisis and turmoil. The Yugoslavs and the Romanians publicly expressed their opposition to the use of foreign forces to arrest the drive toward democracy in Czechoslovakia. Similar warnings were sent to Moscow by a number of nonruling communist parties, including the French, Italian, and Spanish. It was during those months of sharp polemics on the meaning of Marxist internationalism and the right of each communist party to establish sovereignty in it political line that the birth certificate of Eurocommunism, a political platform embraced by several West European communist parties, was written. Eurocommunism challenged the Kremlin’s right to dictate its line to other parties and insisted on the inseparability between socialism and pluralist democracy.6 The Czechoslovaks’ rejection of the Soviet frozen model, with its ultracentralism and suspicious attitude toward any grassroots initiative, was thus shared by a number of Western communist parties, which argued that the Leninist dogma of the dictatorship of the proletariat needed to be abandoned. At the opposite pole where the Stalinist nostalgies in China and Albania, who condemned the Prague Spring as an attempt to restore capitalism and at the same time opposed the Soviet imperial claims to domination over Eastern Europe. Although China’s Chairman Mao Zedong was hostile to the revisionist course adopted by Dubcek, he criticized the Soviets for using imperialist methods in dealing with their allies. He even scornfully referred to Brezhnev and his team as the new czars in the Kremlin.

  In Czechoslovakia the Soviet criticism did nothing but radicalize the reformers. The intelligentsia continued to exert pressure on the wavering leadership to broaden the political pluralism and to establish guarantees against the return to Stalinist command methods. Foreshadowing Gorbachev’s calls for openness (glasnost), the Prague reformers rejected “politics behind the scenes.” The Czechoslovak leaders, primarily First Secretary Dubcek and Chairman of the National Assembly Smrkovsky, engaged in direct dialogue with representatives of public opinion. In the space of a month, the slumbering Czechoslovak society awakened and became a major actor in the decision-making process. As people realized that they could have a role in changing the political course, participation ceased to be an empty slogan. In June 1968 a pathbreaking document entitled “2,000 Words to Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists and Everyone” appeared in the increasingly bold Writers’ Union weekly Literarni Listy. Elaborated mainly by Ludvik Vaculik, the document symbolized a break with the logic of acquiescence and called for a divorce from the communist techniques of political control and manipulation. The manifesto demanded the acceleration of democratization, elimination of the dogmatics from the party leadership, and a rapid transition to a multiparty system. Signed by seventy well-known figures of the liberal intelligentsia and supported by the signatures of some 40,000 people across the country, the document expressed the growing discontent with the slow introduction of reforms and the inconsistencies of the official strategy of renewal. Although the dogmatics hastened to brand the document “an appeal for counterrevolution,” the manifesto by no means expressed an intolerant or fanatical stance. Far from calling for revenge against those who had ruled the country for two decades, the document opposed any use of violence. On the contrary, it voiced the hopes of the overwhelming majority of Czechs and Slovaks that the communist party could convert to a truly democratic force:

  Above all, we will oppose the view, should it arise, that it is possible to conduct some sort of democratic revival without the Communists or possibly against them. This would be both unjust and unreasonable. The Communists have well-structured organizations, and we should support the progressive wing within them …. The Czechoslovak Communist Party is preparing for the Congress which will elect a new Central Committee. Let us demand that it be better than the current one. If the Communist Party now says that in the future it wants to base its leading position on the citizens’ confidence and not on force, let us believe it as long as we can believe in the people whom it is now sending as delegates to the district and regional conferences.7

  The chief bone of contention in the political struggle within the Czechoslovak communist elite was the nature of the future leadership and the fears of the conservatives (and their Soviet protectors) that the Four-teenth Party Congress, set to take place in the summer of 1968, would sanction their elimination and endorse the program of “socialism with a human face.” Increasingly concerned over the Soviet threats, Dubcek rejected the appeal but refused to give in to the neo-Stalinist forces who labeled the document a “counterrevolutionary manifesto.”

  The Soviet displeasure with Dubcek’s delay in taking harsh measures to stop the liberalization was aggravated by the pressure on Brezhnev exerted by Polish and East German communist leaders, who were panicked at the idea that the Czechoslovak virus could infect their countries as well. In July a Warsaw Pact summit took place in the Polish capital in the absence of the Czechoslovak and Romanian leaders. The conference addressed an ominous open letter to the Czechoslovak leaders urging them to weed out the “counterrevolutionary nuclei” and to purge the media of anti-Stalinist forces immediately. The letter—which to all intents and purposes amounted to an ultimatum—made clear that from the Kremlin’s perspective the pledge of noninterference in the internal affairs of other communist countries was not valid when the issue was the future of Soviet-style socialism in one of the bloc’s countries. Echoing the 1956 justification for the military intervention in Hungary, the Soviets and their allies insisted that the “preservation of the people’s revolutionary gains” in Czechoslovakia was not only a domestic issue for that country’s leaders but also a concern for the whole “socialist community”:

  We neither had or have any intention to interfere in [affairs that] are strictly the internal business of your party and your state, to violate the principles of respect, independence and equality in the relations among the communist parties and socialist countries …. At the same time we cannot agree to have hostile forces push your country from the road of socialism and create a threat of severing Czechoslovakia from the socialist community. This is something more than only your concern. It is the common concern of all the communist and workers’ parties and states united by alliance, cooperation and friendship.8

  Brandishing the specter of anticommunist rebellion, the Warsaw Pact leaders tried to force Dubcek and his comrades to halt the reform process and renounce their ambition to construct a different type of socialism. Instead of bowing to the Kremlin’s diktat, Dubcek rejected the Soviet charges and counterattacked in a televised speech on July 18. He defended the choices of his party and protested the accusations of opportunism and revisionism:

  After many years, an atmosphere has been created in our country, in which everyone can publicly and without fear, openly and with dignity, express his opinion and thus test whether the cause of this country and the cause of socialism is the cause of us all. By an open and honest policy, by a sincere and honest elimination of the residue of past years, our party is gradually regaining the badly shaken confidence. Therefore we are saying openly, calmly but determinedly, [that] we realize what is now at stake: there is no other path than for the people of this country to achieve the profound, democratic and socialist changes in our life. We do not want to give up in the least any of the principles we expressed in the “action program.” … The Communist Party is relying on the voluntary support of the people; we do not carry out our guiding role by ruling over society, but by serving their free, progressive and socialist development in the most dedicated way. We cannot assert our authority by giving orders, but by the work of our members, by the justice of our ideas.9

  It was indeed a clash of political visions between the Czechoslovaks, with their focus on the human dimension of socialism, and the bloc’s leaders, who were interested exclusively in the preservation of the status quo and therefore regarded Dubcek’s experimentation with democracy suspiciously
.

  As genuine Stalinists, the Soviet leaders did not treat citizens as autonomous political actors: For them, the party elite had to remain in full and unquestioned possession of its dictatorial attributes. Any attempt to establish a different principle of authority, especially one that recognized the sovereignty of the people, was perceived as subversive. One could hardly find two more different interpretations of the nature of socialism than Dubcek’s neo-Marxist idealism and Brezhnev’s cynical pragmatism. Twenty years after the brutal interruption of the Prague Spring, Antonin Liehm, one of the most active intellectuals involved in the reform movement, summed up the meaning of the Czechoslovak attempt to overhaul the ossified vision of socialism and to propose an alternative model attuned to the requirements of a modern society respectful of the individual rights of its members:

  The Czechoslovak attempt to reform “real socialism” was an attempt at a constructive answer to the collapse of the Stalinist system in its entirety. It was an attempt to create a model of a renewed, permanently self-reforming civil society. This attempt could have eventually amounted to a gradual transformation of the Soviet empire into a commonwealth of nations, one that would have been based on mutual advantages, especially economic, for example a huge market, and not on military and police coercion.10

  The dream of the Czech and Slovak humanist Marxists was, however, the nightmare of the Warsaw Pact bureaucrats. For the Brezhnevites, the very attempt at redefining the goals of socialism and focusing on the issues of human dignity and freedom was an acceptable challenge. They knew that if the reformist temptation were to spread to other countries, the whole edifice of party domination over society would immediately crumble. As for Dubcek and his supporters, they failed to understand the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime and nourished the illusion that they would be able to convince Brezhnev of their genuine communist beliefs.

  The Prague Spring, therefore, was rooted in a set of illusions about the reformability from within of the existing system, the possibility of eliciting Soviet support for such attempts, and the chances for the communists to remain at the helm of the democatization process because of their role in having unleashed it. Even Zdenek Mlynar, who was a Central Committee secretary in charge of ideology under Dubcek, later recognized the limits upon the reformist group’s understanding of the political environment they were operating in:

  There was the illusion of the Party leadership about its own possibilities in the Soviet bloc. You had the idea of reform, but under no conditions was a rift envisaged with the Soviet Union, as had happened in Yugoslavia. And with such assumptions one could only do what Kadar was doing in Hungary. In that case there was hardly any point in starting it all. Illusion number two was that, because twenty years of totalitarianism had freed the way to democratization, the Czechoslovak Party leadership enjoyed enormous support, and that this was likely to continue and to guarantee that people would always be satisfied with what the leadership granted. Finally, there was the population’s illusion about the leadership: that it can transgress certain limits provided there is sufficient push from below.11

  In other words, although Dubcek and his comrades were engaged in actions bound to disrupt the existing hegemonic system and undermine Soviet supremacy in the bloc, they did not realize the amplitude of the threat of a Soviet counterreaction. Because they considered themselves good communists (and from a strictly Marxist point of view they really were), the Dubcekites failed to see the chasm between their uplifting dream of socialist renewal and the cynical Soviet approach to both international relations and ideological affairs. For the Soviets, Marxism-Leninism had long ceased to be anything but camouflage for bureaucratic self-perpetuation. The nomenklatura—the ruling class in Soviet-style societies—had no interest whatsoever in engaging in dangerous experimentation with political and economic reforms. After all, it was precisely in order to curb such “destabilizing” endeavors that Khrushchev had been ousted in October 1964, and there was little doubt that the Soviet leaders would not tolerate the resumption or radicalization of de-Stalinization in one of the satellite countries. What the Soviet nomenklatura expected from local communist elites was to watch over the internal stability and suppress any critical trends. Indeed, as Ivan Svitak, a philosopher who advocated a complete break with the communist system, wrote retrospectively:

  Every bureaucratic dictatorship collapses as a whole whenever any part of the system ceases to function in a repressive way—economics, politics or the media. This is also the reason why in a bureaucratic dictatorship it is impossible just to add constitutional freedoms, human rights or a prosperous economy to the existing dominant function of repression. It is an impossible task to democratize a dictatorship—irrespective of noble motives. The system functions as a whole and collapses as a whole. Since the Czechoslovak communists refused to give in to Soviet diktat and muzzle the country’s independent media, relations between Moscow and Prague became increasingly tense. Brezhnev knew that truth in the media is a ticking bomb, which the elite must deal with or fall victim to. He did not wait. 12

  In July and August new negotiations took place between the Soviet Politburo and the Czechoslovak Communist Presidium, and agreement was reached to put an end to mutual polemics and criticism. The agreements were followed by a Warsaw Pact summit in Bratislava (again Romania did not attend) where a simulacrum of unity appeared to have been reached. The communiqué of the Bratislava meeting incorporated some of the traditional Soviet formulations about “the subversive actions of imperialism” and insisted that all socialist countries must strictly and consistently abide by “the general laws of construction of socialist society and, primarily, by consolidating the leading role of the working class and its vanguard—the Communist party.” 13 In exchange for their perfunctory and certainly hypocritical pledge to respect Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, the Soviets expected Dubcek to behave like a docile communist and immediately engage in a campaign against the democratic groups and media in his country. But in Czechoslovakia the genie of democracy was out of the bottle, and it would have been impossible for the reformist leaders to back down without completely losing their political credibility. Dubcek’s status as a national leader hinged precisely on his capacity to resist Soviet pressures to reintroduce censorship and adopt repressive measures against those forces the Kremlin deemed “subversive.” In the meantime, Moscow tried to mobilize the dogmatic forces in the Czechoslovak Communist Party in the hope that a split would take place in the Presidium and Dubcek would be eliminated.

  But the pro-Soviet forces were weak and disoriented, with very little support within the country. To restore bureaucratic controls, they needed more than symbolic Soviet support. On August 21, 1968, Warsaw Pact troops occupied Czechoslovakia and tried immediately to impose a pro-Soviet government. Party leader Dubcek, Prime Minister Oldrich Cernik, and other reformist leaders were taken hostage and transported to a military unit in the Soviet Union. In order to justify the intervention, Pravda, the Soviet party newspaper, published an editorial accusing Dubcek of having created a right-wing, opportunistic faction whose harmful and irresponsible actions necessitated the “internationalist help” provided by the Warsaw Pact. Confronted with President Ludvik Svoboda’s stubborn refusal to engage in negotiations in the absence of the country’s legal leaders, Brezhnev agreed to bring Dubcek and his comrades to participate in the negotiations. From that moment on, the fate of the Prague Spring was sealed. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops controlled all strategic points in Czechoslovakia. There was very little that Dubcek could have expected to save of the experiment in democratization. With monumental arrogance, Brezhnev accused the Czechoslovak leaders of having betrayed the principles of socialist internationalism. In Prague, an underground Fourteenth Congress of the Czechoslovak Party strongly condemned the Soviet intervention and called for the immediate release of the country’s kidnapped leaders.

  Psychologically crushed and unable to see any way out of the disastrous situation c
reated by the military occupation of their country, Dubcek and his associates (with the exception of the Presidium member and President of the National Front, Dr. Frantisek Kriegel) finally yielded to the Soviet demands. The Moscow talks were conducted by Brezhnev in a most humiliating way: The Soviet leader did not lose any opportunity to disparage Dubcek and make clear that the Kremlin would not permit any further search for socialism with a human face. Although Brezhnev was perfectly aware of the revulsion the intervention provoked among democratic parties and groups worldwide, he made no secret of his contempt for those who dared to criticize the Soviet decision. As for Dubcek, he acted like a political sleepwalker, incapable of taking the measure of the catastrophe and hoping against hope that, once back in Prague, he would be able to preserve some accomplishments. Quickly he realized that there was no role for him in Czechoslovak politics: Challenged by the pro-Soviet faction within the Presidium, Dubcek lost the support of the country’s critical intelligentsia and student movement. Isolated and alienated from any power base, he became a scapegoat for all those opportunists who wanted to reassure the Kremlin of their unlimited support for the Soviet action. One such opportunist was Dr. Gustav Husak, the Slovak communist who had been one of the most active supporters of the Prague Spring, but who conveniently switched sides after the invasion. In April 1969 Husak replaced Dubcek as party leader and unleashed a large-scale purge that led to the expulsion from the party of more than half a million members, including Dubcek, Smrkovsky, Kriegel, and Mlynar.

  Less bloody, of course, than the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, the military intervention in Czechoslovakia was nevertheless extremely traumatic. Thousands of the country’s brightest intellectuals decided to seek asylum abroad, while others who remained in the country suffered the effects of Husak’s policy of “normalization.” The indignation abroad did nothing to allay the fear that they had been abandoned to a resurgence of barbarism. Even the French communist poet Louis Aragon, long known for his slavish support for the Soviets, including his endorsement of the 1956 crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, protested the intervention and called the massacre of Czechoslovak culture by the Soviet-appointed “normalizers” a “Biafra of the spirit.” Less revolted by the Czechoslovak tragedy, the French government deplored the infelicitous solution of a localized conflict “within the Communist family.” In fact, the issue reached far beyond “the family”: The Soviet intervention amounted to the violent suppression of an attempt to reinsert Czechoslovakia in the European cultural and political space. In the bitter words of Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist who was himself forced to leave the country several years later because of political harassment: