[From Studies in Comparative Communism, An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. I, Nos. 1 and 2, July/October 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Research Institute, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Southern California. Reprinted by permission.]

CZECHOSLOVAKIA: THE SOVIET OUTLOOK

By Robert Conquest

(English author; former Research Fellow in Soviet Affairs, London School of Economics and Political Science and Senior Fellow, Russian Institute, Columbia University)

At no time have the Russians mastered the Czechoslovak question since it began to develop late last year. Brezhnev's visit to Prague in December 1967 found a tense situation, with Novotny at the end of his tether. Brezhnev (according to confidential Czech reports) seems to have wavered, seeing the disadvantages of keeping Novotny on but only assenting reluctantly to his demotion. It is clear that at this stage the Soviet leadership had no more than an inkling of trouble ahead and, though preferring the stand-pat solution, hoped, when that ceased to look feasible, that the next best would turn out to be tolerable from the Soviet point of view-or at least as tolerable as the other makeshifts in their East European sphere.

The original Soviet hope was clearly that Dubcek, Cernik, and the liberal leadership would be Gomulkas. That is, that a nationalist and democratic trend in the party would be taken over by men who were only nationalist, and, even so, prepared in the long run to accept the Soviet lead on major issues. After all, in Poland in 1956, while the drive had been provided by the masses and the intellectuals, the leaders of the new wave were Gomulka, Spychalski, Kliszko, and other victims of the Beirut regime, from the center of the old party. They were men who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and after their victory, they were able in the long run to erode and then destroy the genuine liberal forces and withdraw the concessions to liberty made in the interim. (There were, indeed, more liberal figures even in the party apparatus, but they had not at this time reached positions of adequate power.)

But the Czechoslovak situation was different. It was also different from that of Hungary, where in 1956 the party (unlike the Czechoslovak party now) gradually collapsed. The Soviet Politburo seems to have tried first the Warsaw and then the Budapest solutions-neither of them appropriate.

But a pig-headed and ignorant ruling class always makes terrible mistakes. Novotny's own fall illustrates one of the various fatal patterns which emerge in a crisis. In December 1967 he plotted to regain his position by a military coup. A list of 1200 names for arrest was prepared. But this was given away by security officers favorable to reform, and led to a hardening of the liberal feeling in the Presidium.

And this is an exact repetition of events in Hungary and Poland at the time of their crises in 1956. In both countries a list of several hundred names for arrest was drawn up-by Rakosi in Hungary and by the Natolin group in Poland-and the failure of the schemes threw moderate compromisers into the arms of the enemies of dictatorship, and at the same time further hardened the real liberals themselves in their opposition to the old system.

THE STALINIST CHARACTER OF THE SOVIET LEADERS

A clumsy and insensitive dogmatism still prevails in Russia. It is now ruled by a faceless group, almost all of whom took the first moves in their careers in the great purge of 1936-38. Kosygin went up in four steps, from shop manager in a Leningrad factory to minister, in about two years. This was at a time when the Leningrad communists were being slaughtered on an even larger scale than elsewhere. And so it was with Brezhnev and Kirilenko in the Ukraine, where there were three survivors of the 102-man local Central Committee. And in Rostov where Suslov was rising. And in Byelorussia where Mazurov now got his first political job. And so on.

Nor should we make any mistake about the parts played by these men in the purge. Official instructions were frequent against not merely enemies of the people, but also the "silent, politically spineless ones" who did not denounce them. To have been promoted in those days is a certain sign of active complicity in Stalin's terror. The physicist Weissberg noted, of those who rose in the Ukraine at the time, that "they had not even the normal advantages of youth in their favor, for the choosing had been a very negative one. They were the men who had denounced others on innumerable occasions. They had bowed the knee whenever they had come up against higher authority. They were morally and intellectually crippled." As a result, the degeneration of the Soviet ruling class has been quite extraordinarily rapid. The sequence Lenin-Stalin-Malenkov-Khrushchev-Brezhnev is a dynastic

disaster.

1

The disqualifications of these men in dealing with world problems are obvious. A. Kirilenko, who has risen from a career of petty but bloody intrigue in the provincial party committees, knows nothing of foreign reality except what he has seen in the party handouts. Even the man now actually in charge of relations with the East European communists, Katushev, has till last year been exclusively involved in the industrial politics in the provincial city of Gorky.

The much-bruited idea that it is the Soviet army leaders who have been strongest in pressing for intervention in Czechoslovakia is unsupported by any real evidence. On the other hand the recent reappointment of General Shtemenko plainly points to the contrary. Stalin's former chief of staff, degraded two ranks on his master's death, he is widely regarded in Soviet military circles as an incompetent timeserver. His present power clearly reflects a political decision to reimpose a Stalin line on the generals. And it is significant that Shtemenko has lately (Sovetskaya Rossiia, June 29, 1968) rejected criticism of Stalin's handling of the initial stages of the war, thus

1 Alexander Weissberg, Conspiracy of Silence (London, 1952), p. 364.

contradicting earlier statements by Soviet military men including the defense minister, Marshal Grechko.

It was Shtemenko and Alexander Epishev who were reported circulating around the Warsaw Pact armies in the period preparatory to the invasion. Epishev, a particularly sinister figure, was Stalin's assistant minister of state security in the horrible Doctors' Plot period; he was imposed on the army as head of its political directorate in 1962, and promoted to full membership of the Central Committee immediately after the fall of Khrushchev. He is known to be detested by the officers, and has always been noted for his extremism-manifested, too, in continual attacks on the liberal writers.

THE MAIN SOVIET FEAR-‘IDEOLOGICAL'

The main Soviet fear is clearly "ideological"; though of course it is a matter of a battle not so much against abstract ideas as against specific themes, acceptance of which involves rejecting the divine right of the apparat to rule. Only when a communist country has fallen into this heresy has the Soviet Union acted decisively. The Czechoslovak party's Action Program, published on April 9, 1968, was already a partial repudiation of Soviet-style rule. The leading role of the party was not to mean "a monopoly of power in the hands of the party organs." Preliminary censorship of the press was to be "excluded."

The (quite unofficial) "Two Thousand Words" which was published in several Czechoslovak journals shortly afterwards caused even greater horror. The Soviet objections were specifically directed (as in Pravda, July 11, 1968) against its statements that "the leaders' mistaken policies transformed a political party, an alliance based on ideas, into an organization for exerting power"; that "parliament forgot how to hold proper debates; the government forgot how to govern properly and managers how to manage properly"; that "no organizations, not even communist ones, were really controlled by their own members." Pravda also objected to what it termed the document's call for mass pressure on the public organizations to ensure the removal of "party cadres and leaders, devoted to the socialist cause, who do not suit them [the authors of the appeal and their supporters]." All this was interpreted as "undermining the very foundations of the socialist state."

The letter of the five Warsaw Pact parties to the Czechoslovak Central Committee on July 15, 1968, openly said that "we cannot agree to have hostile forces push your country from the socialist road and create a threat of severing Czechoslovakia from the socialist community. This is something more than your cause. This is the common cause. . . . And we shall never agree to have these historic gains of socialism, independence and security of our peoples being put to threat." It added significantly, "We shared the conviction that you would protect the Leninist principle of democratic centralism as the apple of your eye. . . . Unfortunately events have taken another

course.'

Soviet charges that the Czechoslovak Communist Party was actually converting itself into a social-democratic party arose out of the latter's new draft statutes issued on August 10. This is a remark

able document, and while it is by no means of social-democratic stamp, it certainly represents the first departure by a ruling Communist Party from the rigid principles of organization introduced in 1921. The Czech draft, while still forbidding the activity of organized factions within the party, permitted the minority "to formulate its points of view and to demand that they be recorded," to "hold its views and on the basis of fresh knowledge to demand a reassessment of its points of view," and ruled out "penalties for the expression of different opinions, providing these do not result in activity conflicting with the program and statutes of the party."

Between them, these provisions truly undermined the old principles of the Soviet-style party, with its rigid suppression of minority views, and its submission to the effective rule of the permanent apparat. A genuine "democratic centralism" in which for the first time the "democratic" element would carry some real weight seemed to be proposed: a fatal move, from the point of view of the old machine operators. And the fear is basically of an infection which might spread, once countenanced.

For, of course, the Soviet conduct over the Czechoslovak problem is not an isolated phenomenon. As Radio Prague put it on May 19, "Polemics carried on abroad concerning us are not always polemics with Czechoslovakia, but more with those who would like to apply Czechoslovak experiences at home." Indeed the Czechoslovak case is the greatest, but by no means the only, example of the attitude of the Soviet leadership to liberalization. In his speech of March 29, 1968, Brezhnev said flatly, "It is a grave mistake to think that Lenin's emphasis on the need for iron discipline is valid only for the period of direct revolutionary action and loses its urgency in the course of further socio-economic and democratic transformation." In fact, he registered that the feldwebel view of political leadership in Russia itself, as in the satellites, was as strong as ever in the Kremlin.

The April 9-10 plenum of the Soviet Central Committee was virtually devoted to the issue of dogma and discipline on the international scale, but also internally. In Russia itself the party was called upon to "step up the offensive struggle against bourgeois ideology and actively counter surreptitious attempts to propagate views alien to the socialist ideology of Soviet society in literature, art and other works," and in general to reinforce in the Soviet citizen "ideological steadfastness and ability to withstand any form of bourgeois influence." Viktor Grishin, alternate member of the Politburo, capped this on April 22 by warmly denouncing Western "bridge-building" to Eastern Europe in the revealing phrase "ideological sabotage.'

ACCELERATED PACE OF RE-STALINIZATION

In fact, we have seen in the past year or two an increasingly swift process of re-Stalinization in the U.S.S.R. Even as Brezhnev was first concerning himself with the collapse of the Novotny regime in December 1967, the trial of Ginsburg and Galanskov took place, with the suppression of the protests against it, marking a further stage in the Politburo's war on intellectual independence. And the various similar actions in the Ukraine and elsewhere will be familiar to readers.

But now a more overtly Stalinist campaign is clearly afoot. Even the long-discredited "Short Course" history of the party embodiment of the Stalin myth-has been favorably presented (even though with comments on certain "inaccuracies") in the influential Questions of Philosophy (March 1968). The attacks on the Soviet historian Nekrich for criticisms of Stalin in his book on the origins of World War II, which at the time of its publication in 1965 was well received, have been accompanied by the virtual breakup of the Institute of History in the Academy of Science, which had supported him. Even the Soviet Historical Encyclopedia has been attacked for its not very severe criticism of Stalin, in a recent issue of the key organ of the leadership, Kommunist (No. 4, 1968).

As early as October 1967 it was possible for an isolated poem to appear in the literary journal Moskva, in which it was said of Stalin: We justifiably revered

In his person our own might,

Made of the living man an ikon
And gazing at it we prayed.

During the critical summer of 1968 this trend became general. In June, Oktyabr, the orthodox literary magazine, published an appeal for the rehabilitation of novels long since discredited for their adulation of Stalin-Pavlenko's Happiness, in which a colonel almost faints with happiness at the prospect of a meeting with Stalin; Donbass, by Boris Gorbatov, where a miner is in the same condition; Alexei Tolstoy's notorious Bread, and so on. The magazine has also been serializing a novel in which much attention is given to Stalin's victory over the "opposition swine." At the end of May, this spilled over into a purely aesthetic Zhdanov-style action, when Anatoly Efros' production of Chekhov's Three Sisters was taken off as "directed against not only the lofty aesthetic ideals of the author, but also the entire tradition of the Soviet theatre." And on the other side of the picture, Solzhenitsyn's The Cancer Ward, due to appear in Novy Mir, was banned, while Solzhenitsyn himself is being subjected to a campaign of denunciation of a viciousness and violence which has not been seen since Pasternak's victimization.

In general, the intellectually stagnant Soviet system, precluded from thinking originally, is unable to deal with the problems of the new epoch, either internal or external, in a rational fashion. In Czechoslovakia the solution by force was clearly considered right from the spring of 1968. Epishev was already saying in May that the Soviet army was ready to do its duty and answer any appeal from "faithful" Czechoslovak communists for help in "safeguarding socialism" (Le Monde, May 5-6, 1968), and he denied the report's accuracy only a fortnight later. On a more official level, it seems that a provisional decision to intervene was taken in connection with the Warsaw Pact troop maneuvers in July. The "arms cache" discovered on July 12, the failure to withdraw the troops which had been introduced for maneuvers under the Warsaw Pact, scarcely fit any other hypothesis. But the nettle was not then grasped.

Yet delay, particularly as the September Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party impended, with its threat of voting out the remnants of the pro-Soviet faction, was no answer. By August the