Part iii. the brezhnev doctrine

While the United States was bankrupting itself on the great society, the war in Vietnam, and maintaining nuclear supremacy – the Soviet Union faced a much deeper crisis of confidence. Whereas LBJ attempted to mold JFK’s frontier foreign policy in his favor, Leonid Brezhnev felt a similar determination to distinguish himself from his predecessor Nikita Khrushchev. Though LBJ’s daily briefings included warnings of economic instability and political unrest, Brezhnev’s warning of collapse arrived in the spring of 1968 as the Brezhnev appointed Czechoslovakian Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček proclaimed his message of “socialism with a human face.” The expanded freedoms of speech, press, and expression gave a brief window of opportunity that allowed writers like Ludvik Vaculik and Vaclav Havel to diagnose the poison corroding the lives of all in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Unlike his peers, Vaculik gained little comfort from Dubcek’s promises. Instead, he saw something sinister approaching on the Eastern horizon – the return of repression.

Yet there was good reason for Vaculik to be alone in this fear. When Brezhnev replaced Antonin Novotny with Alexander Dubcek to settle tensions in Czechoslovakia the previous year, even the USSR leader vehemently resisted using force against the small nation. After all, compared with the threats of rebellion in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, “a very different problem arose in 1968, when Czechoslovakia embarked on a dramatic, but entirely peaceful, attempt to change both the internal complexion of Communism and many of the basic structures of Soviet-Eastern European relations.” 

Like the peaceful protests in America demanding changes in civil rights and an end to the War in Vietnam, the Prague Spring marked an entirely peaceful rebuke of the post-war era.

However, like the Tet Offensive laid bare the failures of American foreign policy, Dubcek’s Prague Spring now threatened to expose the communist project altogether. The success of the Prague Spring.

On May 27th, Vaculik published a chilling warning to the Czechoslovakian people titled “The 2,000 Words.” This single essay turned Kremlin unease into paranoia, worrying Brezhnev that the Dubček reforms would soon erase Stalin’s fingerprints from Eastern Europe Brezhnev’s unease into sheer panic. Vaculik’s 2,000 words were a call to action for his fellow dissidents, a demand that the Prague Spring not be taken for granted, an indictment of the lies of Communism, and a diagnosis of the Soviet Union’s failure. As Vaculik wrote, “mistaken policies transformed a political party and an alliance based on ideas into an organization for exerting power, one that proved highly attractive to power-hungry individuals eager to wield authority, to cowards… to people with bad conscience.” Brezhnev stated that Czechoslovakia became a domino that would unleash “open repudiation of Marxism and socialism in general.”

At last, fearing the Prague Spring as the most immediate threat to the USSR’s control of the eastern bloc, Brezhnev initiated “Operation Danube,” deploying 165,000 soldiers and 4,600 tanks onto the streets of Czechoslovakia on August 20th, 1968. In total, 27 divisions of Warsaw Pact Troops invade Czechoslovakia, becoming the largest military operation in Europe since the end of World War II. Dubček was hauled off to Moscow to be punished by the Kremlin and buried in a bureaucracy that monitored his every move.

To quell fear and promote stability in an Eastern Europe that had yet again been covered in Russian tank tracks, Brezhnev announced his new doctrine. “Self-determination, in other words, Czechoslovakia’s detachment from the socialist community,” Brezhnev warned, “would have come into conflict with its own vital interests and would have been detrimental to the other socialist states.” Recognizing the threat of democracy to the communist plan, Brezhnev admitted a deep terror that individualism, free expression, and democracy would reveal the great lie.

The inability to maintain domestic obedience for the first-time end of World War II provoked different reactions in the US and USSR that restructured Cold War foreign policy for a new era. LBJ retired from office, accepting the fair election of conservative ideologue Richard Nixon who was determined to change the frontier foreign policy that had collapsed in the 1960s. Brezhnev, however, displayed a determination to retain Soviet Control of Eastern Europe with force, forever staining his domestic legitimacy and sparking condemnations of the Brezhnev doctrine from Communist countries stretching from Soviet Controlled Yugoslavia to China. The events of 1968 revealed a threat these leaders never anticipated – an internal renunciation of their leadership. The great powers would thus embark on a new era of Cold War politics, determined to reassert their authority at home and prevent the disruption of 1968 from occurring ever again. 

As Vaculik proclaimed in his 2,000 words, adherence to a higher ideology mattered little in Washington and Moscow, “honesty was a useless virtue.” The Prague Spring was over and would never return, by winter, Czechoslovakia knew all.