Why Did The Russians March?
Hruska, Izak
OUR READERS will have noticed that my comment in the last issue concerning Czechoslovakia was already dated by the time the issue came out. My apprehensions about Russian intervention were,...
...Had the Russians been intent on demonstrating the validity of the central theses proposed by the anti-Stalinist Left on the nature of Communist society, they could not have done so with greater effect: • The system of bureaucratic or totalitarian collectivism which prevails in the Soviet Union and the East European countries can, like capitalism, allow for a variety of political forms, but only for a limited variety: it can rule by terror, by mild authoritarian decree, or by some blend of the two...
...supposed to have done...
...The party dictatorship is a system of social organization incompatible with democracy, and thereby at the opposite pole from socialism...
...Or from their point of view, no workable alternative may have presented itself...
...The Russians saw that, whatever the range of purposes and motives among the Czech Communists, there had begun in Czechoslovakia a socio-political process which imperiled the entire totalitarian system...
...OUR READERS will have noticed that my comment in the last issue concerning Czechoslovakia was already dated by the time the issue came out...
...If anything, the Czech intervention was more ghastly than that of Hungary in 1956, since in Hungary there was at least the pretext that "anti-socialist" forces had arisen as defined political parties and Premier Nagy had declared that Hungary was leaving the Warsaw Pact...
...When Hungary was invaded, indignation roared through Europe, Asia, America...
...The courage with which the Czech people met the invaders is beyond praise...
...The most the New Statesman can suggest is that it should have issued a public statement warning the Russians not to invade Czechoslovakia—which is to forget that before the intervention liberals were praising the U.S...
...Under Russian pressures but probably with the tacit approval of at least some leading Czech Communists, the Dubcek government has introduced into the National Assembly a bill prohibiting any political organization outside the National Front—which is to say, confining political legality to the CP and its front groups and abolishing the liberal and socialist clubs that had begun to spring up...
...but what precisely is the U.S...
...The prospect of a world Communist conference is at an end...
...THE SITUATION, as of mid-September, remains somewhat fluid, with a great deal of inner maneuvering within Czechoslovakia...
...But it cannot tolerate the play of democratic forces...
...for knowing when to keep quiet...
...The Communist bureaucracy fears nothing so much as subjecting itself to a democratic test, that is, allowing opposition candidates to run freely and accepting the electoral verdict peacefully...
...They could find no Quislings, no Kadars...
...Latest dispatches from Prague report that the press is prohibited from calling the Russian action a "military intervention...
...A notable exception to this callousness has been Asoka Mehta, the Indian socialist leader who resigned from Mrs...
...A detente between the Big Powers does carry the considerable possibility of a tacit agreement that each "may play the rogue elephant unopposed within its own sphere...
...But the Russians have paid heavily...
...Yet there was a logic of sorts in what the Russians did...
...It must be described as a gesture of "fraternal cooperation...
...Now, it is taken almost as a matter of course, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, in a political act that seriously marred his campaign, issued a statement minimizing its consequences...
...The world grows used to horrors...
...It is amusing to read, in this connection, an editorial in the September 6 New Statesman: • . . the Americans gave the Russians carte blanche to invade Czechoslovakia . . . there can be no doubt that a cynical understandingbetween the two Great Powers does exist, whereby each may play the rogue elephantunopposed within its own sphere...
...Whether these constitute minorities or majorities of the population there is no way to determine...
...Not Brezhnev's Russia, not Tito's Yugoslavia, not Dubcek's Czechoslovakia has been ready to face this possibility...
...American liberals who like to stress the need for both a detente between the big powers and for autonomy of small nations ought to face the possibility, extremely unpleasant as it is, that these two goals are somewhat in conflict...
...How George Orwell, student of Newspeak, would have appreciated this grotesquerie...
...Against the common enemy, the "liberals" in Prague and those who might be called the "national" Communists—i.e., party leaders who wished for a relaxation of authoritarianism without a venture into democracy—the Soviet leaders felt it necessary to close ranks...
...Themost shameful official offspring of the cold waris the belief that hot war can only be averted by allowing Russia and America to smashanything each chooses to call heretical . . . True enough, in a way...
...What the Russians feared was not so much the steps Dubcek had already taken or allowed...
...Their military technique was impeccable, their political preparation wretched...
...It will destroy, as soon as it can, incipient competing parties...
...the tactics of the Czech Communist leaders cannot yet be evaluated...
...We had better recognize the disturbing reality...
...what they feared was the political con sequences of those steps, consequences that might go further than Dubcek might wish...
...But a logic there certainly was in the intervention...
...The price was heavy, but from their point of view it may well have been worth paying...
...We need not resort to categories of historical "inevitability," since it is conceivable that a slightly different vote in the Politburo would have meant a decision not to intervene militarily but to employ other means for pressuring the Czechs...
...Indeed, there has already been announced an ideological tightening-up in "cultural work...
...One aspect of this situation that ought to be remarked is its effect on U.S.-Russian relations...
...Press censorship has been reinstituted and the most outspoken of the Czech papers—Student, Literarni Listi—have been banned...
...They helped make Dubcek into a national hero—though, in truth, we do not yet know what his real role was...
...And I am sure that if the U.S...
...Relations with the West European Communist parties are badly strained...
...The Russian intellectuals will suffer...
...for exploiting the Czech crisis in behalf of its own cold-war ends...
...It will now be some time before we can learn which of the Czech Communist leaders wanted to halt the Czech developments at the "safe" authoritarian point that we may roughly designate as Gomulka-like and which of them, though still employing the traditional Communist vocabulary, had in effect undergone a moral-intellectual rebirth like that of Djilas and Nagy a decade ago and were now, in effect, democratic socialists...
...In Czechoslovakia, the intervention was simply a decision to prevent another Communist regime from taking its own course...
...My apprehensions about Russian intervention were, alas, not dated...
...And the domestic repercussions within Russia—not yet measured, but certain to be profound—can only lead the Communist autocracy to further repressions...
...After 50 years in office, after having transformed Russia into a major industrial nation and one of the leading world powers, the Russian Communist party-state remains persuaded —and we concur in this judgment—that it does not command the loyalty of large segments of its population, or the loyalty of still larger segments in the other East European countries...
...had taken a more belligerent stand (which, as Hungary showed, proves to be mere noise unless linked with a readiness to risk war), the New Statesman would have raged at the U.S...
...Gandhi's cabinet to protest her failure to speak out candidly against the Russians...
...So the Russians did achieve this much: before it was "too late," they blocked the dynamic of social change by which Czechoslovakia might have moved toward democratic socialism...
...In one sense, the Russians suffered a defeat in Czechoslovakia...
...To a limited extent, the Russians have succeeded in their objectives—which were, first, to bring "democratization" to a halt and, second, to bring Czechoslovakia back to a dependent position within the Warsaw Pact economic system...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
