How Moscow Makes Policy

...There the leading East European interventionists, Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, reluctantly went along...

...While critics have argued whether this "Allison Wonderland" fairly conveys the American decision-making process, Valenta shows that it is a remarkably accurate description of the present workings of the Soviet system...

...Although the alignment of the pro-intervention and anti-intervention forces depended primarily on domestic issues, external considerations shaped the perception of risks—a matter that now assumed paramount importance...

...That was already fully prepared, of course, yet it was simply one of several possible options...

...He demonstrates that in relations among Communists, bargaining and compromise exist...

...Both preferred to underestimate that...

...In pondering the effects of this largest military campaign in Europe since World War II, the author observes that "the intervention did not reverse detente, but only contributed to an alteration of its character...

...professor of history, University of Illinois Especially now, as a response is being sought to the Soviet takeover in Afghanistan, few topics seem more important than how decisions are made in the Kremlin...

...This lack of precision reflected the wide gap separating the two sides, but not necessarily their awareness of how unbridgeable that gap really was...

...In 1956 in Hungary, the deliberations took weeks rather than days...

...In return, they withdrew from Czechoslovak territory the Soviet troops who had been delaying their departure under the guise of Warsaw Pact maneuvers...

...the interventionists merely had to cite a lack of them to maintain theirs...

...Valenta identifies the interventionist pressure groups as those concerned primarily with Soviet domestic issues —regional Party officials from the restive non-Russian areas of the country, and ideological bureaucrats responsible for maintaining conformism among the populace in general and the intelligentsia in particular...

...With all military complications safely dismissed, the invasion finally took place on August 20—having been decided upon, according to Valenta, no more than three or four days earlier...

...Intercessions by Western European Communist parties may have influenced the decision...

...Instead of change through reapprochement, detente became rapprochement without change...

...For this reason alone, Jiri Valenta's meticulously researched, carefully argued and elegantly written study of another case where the USSR intervened—Czechoslovakia in 1968—deserves close attention...

...The "skeptics of intervention" were individuals operating on a larger scale—notably officials involved with foreign affairs, including those in charge of relations with other Communist parties, and the technologically most advanced segments of the military...

...At the end of the month, the Soviet Politburo took the extraordinary step of traveling en bloc to meet with its Czechoslovak counterpart at the border railroad station of Cierna nad Tisou...

...This signaled to Moscow that "the Czechoslovak reformists did not consider military resistance even a hypothetical option...

...Already before the Cierna meeting, Prague had dismissed a top general who advocated preparation of at least contingency plans to meet a Warsaw Pact invasion...

...But more important, because more lasting, has been the damage to the international Communist movement and the Soviet claim to its leadership...

...behavior during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis...

...The story gets more intriguing when we realize that the intervention did not occur because of anything that happened following the agreement, but rather because nothing did...

...Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny Author, "Russia's Road to the Cold War...

...Hard bargaining took place and a compromise ensued —not only between Prague and Moscow but among the Soviet proponents and opponents of intervention...

...Nevertheless, Soviet decisions are not wholly arbitrary...

...Beyond the 1968 Czechoslovak setting, the true significance of Valenta's book is in the conclusions it allows us to draw about the dynamics of Soviet foreign policy...

...In 1953, Moscow deliberated perhaps a few hours, or at most days, before moving in to crush the East German workers' uprising...

...They also agreed to extend credits to help Czechoslovakia's shaky economy...

...Here the "bureaucratic politics" model is indeed useful, but the issues that divide the bureaucratic contestants should not be rated higher than the ones that unite them...

...To explain why the Red Army nevertheless struck within 17 days, Valenta points up the peculiar nature of the compromise...

...Although the ensuing bargaining, cajoling and trad-ing-off are hardly exclusive characteristics of the Soviet system, they run against the grain of the established institutional structure, not to speak of the official public philosophy, creating additional problems for the decisionmakers...

...In 1968, the Central Committee of several hundred men and women —a body normally supposed to merely register the decisions already made by the oligarchic Politburo—emerged temporarily as the vital consensus medianism because the Politburo was split near the middle...

...when he is not certain he does not pretend otherwise...

...This in itself is not cause for rejoicing, because the absence of formal channels for these processes tends to make their outcome unpredictable...

...The Western behavior followed directly from the known Czechoslovak unwillingness to resist militarily under any circumstances, and indirectly from the country's long-standing reputation as a major troublemaker for the West...

...Of those issues, none is potentially more crucial than the superiority of domestic and intrabloc concerns over foreign ones...

...None, however, has delved into the admittedly fragmentary available evidence as deeply as Valenta...

...Moscow's curious conduct in 1968, when the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia after the crisis there had already peaked and an agreement had been reached, has always vexed interpreters...

...The Cierna agreement, while genuine, was verbal and therefore not specific...

...Others have noted a disconcerting unpredictability in the Russian behavior...

...The next step was to sell the compromise to other Warsaw Pact members at a second conference, convened on August 3 in the Slovak capital of Bratislava...

...During the last 30 years, Soviet readiness to apply force to prop up Eastern Europe's status quo has corresponded with a reluctance to use this last resort...

...Since Stalin's times, he reminds us, the Communist Party secretary has possessed probably less decision-making power than the President of the United States: It is harder to generate a consensus among the bureaucratic constituencies in the more loosely structured Soviet system, where the lack of institutional channels to accommodate dissent provides particulary fertile breeding ground for in-fighting...

...In 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia went ahead only after several months of intense maneuvering...

...Having inside information about the Cierna talks, Valenta concludes that they were not merely a smokescreen for the subsequent military action...

...According to that theory, modern governments act not so much from a single rational estimate of national interest as from a variety of calculations by bureaucratic pressure groups, each promoting its special interests...

...Valenta traces this seeming evolution...

...The abortion of "Communism with a human face" lent fresh support to the thesis—soon to be driven home the by France's leftist nouveaux philosophes—that Communism remains "barbarism with a human face...

...The Russians accepted the Czechoslovak leaders' verbal assurances that "anti-Socialist tendencies" would be curbed...

...He portrays the Kremlin power elite as subscribing to "shared images" of the USSR's security requirements, but otherwise concentrating on competitive coalition-building...

...The latter were soon joined by the military, grumbling about the cost in money and morale of keeping hundreds of thousands of men and machines in a state of readiness...

...the Bratislava statement, although written, was even more vague because of its intentionally nebulous ideological formulations...

...In the continuing tug of war among Soviet coalitions, the noninterventionists had to show results to maintain their momentum...

...The consequence was an erosion of the consensus...

...Some have found a simple answer in presuming deliberate deception...

...Refreshingly, too, when the author speculates he frankly says so...

...For the West, this vital linkage, together with Moscow's proven sensitivity to reaction from abroad, calls for coherent policies addressing not only the USSR's foreign adventures, but also its domestic troubles—particularly as Soviet military power keeps growing in inverse ratio to the viability of the Soviet empire...

...After much huffing and puffing about the real or imaginary perils of Czechoslovakia's planned Communism "with a human face," Moscow in July 1968 decided against a'military intervention and in favor of a political solution...

...In 1970, when riots again spread in Poland, the Russians did not move in at all, sacrificing instead an unpopular Party boss to assuage the workers' ire...

...Moreover, as the crisis neared its denouement the United States and West Germany displayed ostentatious aloofness by reducing their military presence along the Czechoslovak frontier...

...Valenta's frame of analysis is the "bureaucratic politics" theory made famous in Graham Allison's controversial examination of U.S...