AUTOPSY for an EMPIRE by DMITRI VOLKOGONOV & HAROLD SHUKMAN

Author:DMITRI VOLKOGONOV & HAROLD SHUKMAN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE FREE PRESS
Published: 1998-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan

The outwardly serene years of Brezhnev’s rule were interrupted by two violent international events, one at the beginning and one at the end of his leadership. The first was the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968, and the second the armed intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. In addition, in August 1980 the Politburo set measures in motion to ‘give military assistance’ to Poland.

Although by virtue of his position Brezhnev was at the very heart of events, he himself did not initiate these actions, but rather carried out the will of the hawks in the Politburo and the almighty KGB. He may have looked like the undisputed ruler of the great empire, but he was in reality more like the chief puppet of the totalitarian system, a role he carried out to perfection.

Against a background of a number of internal and external factors, the atmosphere in Czechoslovakia began to undergo a marked change in 1967. People started talking about the consequences of Stalinism for the country and its future, and the press and television began airing ideas about the need for democracy and political pluralism, and for relations with the USSR to be on an equal footing. Czechoslovak Communist leaders came forward with demands for democratic reform. To their great misfortune, the ‘Prague Spring’ coincided with the upsurge of conservative trends in the USSR. Khrushchev’s departure had meant more than a change of leader: it led to a major alteration in the direction of Communist orthodoxy.

As usual, the Soviet leaders based their judgement of events at home and abroad mainly on information fed to them by the KGB. The Central Committee was receiving constant reports from Prague via the Lubyanka about ‘the activation of revisionist forces’ in Czechoslovakia, the ‘counter-revolutionary tendencies’ of Czech Communist leaders Dubček, Černik, Pelikan, Šik, Smrkovsky and others, ‘the Czech Party’s loss of control over the mass media’, ‘US and NATO interference’, and so on. This was perhaps the only way the Soviet special services could interpret such unfamiliar ideas as liberalization and democratization, the appeal to human values, the demand for liberty and condemnation of the repression of the past. The Chekist spectacles worn by Soviet leaders since the time of Lenin had replaced the need for normal analysis of events and required instead a Comintern approach in assessing any political or ideological phenomenon.

As Zdenek Mlinarž, one of the leaders of the ‘Prague Spring’, has written: ‘Dubček was not thinking of a split with Moscow.’ He was bound to Moscow by too many links, Mlinarž went on, not only because he spent his childhood and youth in the USSR, but also because he genuinely believed in socialist ideals, though he wanted to remove from them the scab of Stalinism. He naïvely believed that one could make Communism democratic. His personal honesty and decency guaranteed him enormous authority in Czechoslovakia: ‘In the period of the “Prague Spring”, the people saw in Dubček a symbol of the great ideals of democratic socialism.’ 30 In Moscow’s eyes,

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