The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 y dark of night on Aug. 20, 1968, armed forces of the Soviet Union and four of its allies entered and occupied Czechoslo- vakia, putting an abrupt end to the seven- month era known as the “Prague Spring.” After months of tergiversation, the Kremlin decided that Alexander Dub- cek’s self-styled “socialism with a human face” posed an intolerable challenge to Moscow’s vital interests and had to be terminated by military force. The action-forcing event was an extraordinary Communist Party congress scheduled to begin Sept. 9, 1968, in Prague, a session the Soviets right- ly feared would lead to an even more progressive Czechoslovak leadership. Dubcek, a Slovak who had grown up in the Soviet Union and received special training there, had been elected first secretary of the central committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on Jan. 5, 1968. An unlikely leader in a state long dominated by Czechs, he was a compromise can- didate to resolve an internal party crisis. Dubcek was select- ed to replace dictator Antonin Novotny, who had ruled the country for nearly 20 years and was on the verge of launch- ing a new and predictably harsh purge to protect himself from his critics. The latter included the country’s brilliant intellectuals, economic reformers, students and, especially, Slovaks angry about the extreme centralism and despotic intolerance with which Novotny had governed the country. Ironically, at the climax of the party struggle — the crit- ical nature of which was known to few outsiders — Leonid Brezhnev, secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, came to Prague at Novotny’s invitation. The dreaded Czechoslovak security service and the military stood ready to rescue Novotny by force if he gave the sig- nal. But Novotny did not get the Soviet imprimatur he needed. Brezhnev could have decided to leave in place a tyrant who had long been a faithful Soviet lackey, but instead he heeded the bilingual Dubcek and another Czechoslovak leader who hoped to replace Novotny. He left the matter to the Czech and Slovak comrades to decide. They prompt- ly ousted Novotny in favor of Dubcek. But in mid-August 1968, Brezhnev and his colleagues in the Kremlin reached a different conclusion. An Explosion of Spontaneity The explosion of spontaneity that began on Jan. 5, 1968, had little to do with anything Dubcek said or wrote. It was touched off by the shock felt within senior Communist Party ranks at how close they had come to a new purge. They vowed at once and publicly to strive for “democracy,” by which they meant greater openness in party ranks, but which was understood in broader terms by the nation. The other primary source was the mass media that had been totally docile in 1967, but that now sensed the lid was off as far as what could be published. By permitting and welcoming the unforeseen and unprecedented expression of public opinion, Dubcek won, S PRING IN P RAGUE — 40 Y EARS A GO A WITNESS TO THE SHORT - LIVED C ZECHOSLOVAK REFORM MOVEMENT ’ S TRAGIC DENOUEMENT IN A UGUST 1968 ASSESSES ITS LEGACY . B B Y K ENNETH N. S KOUG Kenneth N. Skoug, a retired FSO, was the economic/com- mercial officer in Prague from 1967 to 1969. He is the author of Czechoslovakia’s Lost Fight for Freedom: An Embassy Perspective (Greenwood, 1999).