Czechoslovakia on Hold: The Period of 'Normalization'

Abstract

Two years after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Janos Kadar, the leader installed by the Soviets was already proclaiming that 'anyone who is not against us is for us.' Two years after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, only the highest levels of party and government had been effectively 'normalized.' The real purges were yet to come, and they continued for many years. In the 1980s, when the East European communist states were compared with regard to degree of reform, Hungary usually headed the list, while Czechoslovakia was usually ranked near the bottom, along with Rumania. Because of the massive rollback of reforms and extensive purges of reformists it is easy to see this as evidence that the Soviets simply wanted to crush the Prague Spring, and that they eventually achieved what they had wanted from the start. Largely overlooked is how difficult it was for the Soviet leadership to make up its collective mind as to whether the Czechoslovak reform movement represented salvation for the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, or whether it represented a mortal danger to that regime. Evidence of both attitudes abounds throughout the pre-intervention period, and this profound ambivalence in Soviet attitudes toward the reform movement goes a long way toward accounting for the oscillations in Soviet policy toward Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring.