Warsaw Pact Invasion Research Articles

Prague Spring: Workers' Control in a State‐Owned Economy

A subtle contradiction arises for a worker in a collectively controlled enterprise because such a worker is simultaneously employee and manager. This duality is particularly noticeable when the enterprise is state‐owned. The workers' control movement during Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring sought to reconcile this duality by creating workers' assemblies that would include all enterprise members except for the director, and also organizing independent unions that would represent workers as individuals in disputes with the collective or with higher administrative bodies. Thus, each half of the duality would be represented through separate institutions. Considerable progress had been made in developing these ideas, culminating in a conference at which 190 enterprises were represented that sought to codify a system of workers' control. This article argues that the crushing of this effort was a tragedy because it eliminated what would have been a highly valuable experiment in workers' control organized on a countrywide basis. Although forty‐five years have elapsed since the Warsaw Pact invasion, the problems of reconciling the tensions between individuality and collectivity, and integrating community needs with national coordination, within a functioning economy that fulfills individual, community, regional, and national requirements, remain acute.

The (Restored) Practice of DEFA Co-productions with the “Normalized” Czechoslovak Film Studio in the 1970s

After four co-productions which the East German and Czech studios made from 1957 to 1965, a five-year hiatus in DEFA-Barrandov co-productions took place. During the Czechoslovak New Wave era, the Czech filmmakers gave DEFA the cold shoulder. But the process of “normalisation” that took place after the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia put both the regimes and the film industry structures back in sync. While the end of independent production groups at DEFA and Barrandov damaged the creative environment and the quality of productions as a whole, it also had an unforeseeable effect: the revival of DEFA-Barrandov co-productions. On the German side, DEFA was interested in help from experienced practitioners, especially scriptwriters. On the Czech side, Barrandov´s filmmakers—now isolated from previous contact with western partners and under strict ideological control—strove to shape the DEFA projects they were offered according to their own criteria. There was thus a harmonization of goals and tools, which worked especially well in the sphere of children movies. This was not only because this type of production rarely crashed against divergent interpretations of the past by the two partners. There were two more important reasons as well: namely, that the dramaturge group for children’s movies was under looser ideological control by Barrandov management; and that the personal continuity with the pre-normalization era was stronger in this group than was the case for other groups. In the 1970s, both studios were motivated to find an effective mode of co-operation.

Paulina Bren . The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 250. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

Paulina Bren's book is a groundbreaking cultural analysis of everyday life under communism in Czechoslovakia after 1968. It is a compact, cohesive, and entertaining account of domestic TV soap operas' role as mediator between a firm but concerned regime and an obedient but wary population. Based on communist party and TV archives, communist newspapers, and secondary literature, Bren's study offers a new narrative of “normalized” (post-1968) Czechoslovakia after Prague Spring's “socialism with a human face” was irreversibly crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion. She challenges the political tale of dissent and repression that is commonplace in the historiography despite its evident discrepancy with everyday life in all its banality. She rejects the victimization complex prompted by the armed intervention and instead casts post-1968 history along new lines. Bren introduces ordinary people as fully legitimate social actors, redefines Czech politics as an interaction between regime elites and the people (TV viewers),...

The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

The essays of a dozen leading European and American Cold War historians analyze the 'Prague Spring' and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in light of new documentary evidence from the archives of two dozen countries and explain what happened behind the scenes. They also reassess the weak response of the United States and consider whether Washington might have given a 'green light,' if only inadvertently, to the Soviet Union prior to the invasion.

An ANZAC1-Indo-Russian Alliance?

Since the implosion of the Soviet bloc, a ‘unipolar’ world has emerged around the USA, challenged by an Islamic bloc. The USA takes advantage of this Islamic opposition to vigorously pursue its world policies in the name of ‘the war on terrorism’ this being the guise by which President George H.W. Bush announced the intention of leading the United Nations into a ‘new world order’. Russia and China have attempted to confront this mono-polar post-Cold War situation by forming a pact between each other and bordering states, the Central Asia and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. This holds out the prospect of a Eurasian bloc to confront the world hegemony of the USA, which seeks to draw to it the European Union and return Europe to the subordinate role she played vis-é-vis the USA during the Cold War, pushed into coming under the US orbit by the fear of Warsaw Pact invasion. It is by no means clear that the USA has a long-range commitment to containing China, despite its anti-China lobby. There has for decades existed a pro-China lobby, including some of the USA’s leading political and business figures, one of whose public manifestations is the Trilateral Commission created by David Rockefeller. These ‘Trilateralists’, et al. see the creation of regional blocs as the prelude to a ‘new world order’, and one such bloc is envisaged as being that of an Asian economic community along similar lines to that of the European Union. The expanding economic, military and diplomatic influence of China and the recent emergence of India as a rival power in Asia have wide geopolitical implications that involve Russia. Between these powers and the possibility of military confrontation over water resources, the traditionally ‘Western’ societies of Australia and New Zealand have placed their futures in a China-dominated Asian bloc, in the belief that their export-driven economies can only thrive in such a vast market. This article proposes a radical new alliance away from a China-dominated Asia and towards an Indo-Russian orientation. The methodology, including points of difference, is inspired by Professor Alexander Dugin’s ‘Eurasian’ geopolitical paradigm.

Gray Zone Theatre Dissidence: Rethinking Revolution through the Enactment of Civil Society

While the impetus for change in the late-communist Soviet Union came from above, its source in East-Central Europe, as Barbara Falk notes in Dilemmas of Dissidence, lay elsewhere.1 That elsewhere was below, from civil society. Falk credits East-Central Europe’s dissident writer intellectuals after 1968 for theorizing in the (post)totalitarian context the formation, function, and possibilities of what they called the parallel polis, second society, or counter-public sphere.2 Nevertheless, isolated from the broader population and barred from publishing, the writer-dissidents’ influence on the population, particularly in Czechoslovakia, was limited. A small group of Czech theatre artists, however, functioning as organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, developed ideas that paralleled and often preceded those of the writers, from whom they were effectively isolated for a decade by their suspect position in official, state-supported theatres. They not only developed the framework for what civil society could accomplish but, moving beyond the writers, explored in a detailed, practical, and dramaturgical way how it could be engaged, influenced, and finally imagined as having a national identity in contrast and opposition to the state. Their means of doing so despite official status and the public nature of their art constitutes a poetics and “antipolitical” politics of authorial theatre. Civil society, argues Michael Walzer, designates “the space of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”3 Unlike Hungary, where elements of a free market and semi-independent organizations effectively depoliticized society and demobilized intellectuals, or Poland, where Solidarity and the Catholic Church created organizational space for independent initiatives to develop, Czechoslovakia lacked the kind of organizational, institutional, and semi-independent terrain that afforded traditionally defined civil society space to grow. The 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia brought with it a new, neo-Stalinist government that sought to “normalize” society through Party purges,

‘Taunting the Bear’: Romania and the Warsaw Pact, 1963–89

Recently released documents from the Romanian military archives relating to Romania's stance within the Warsaw Pact permit a more refined view of Romania's autonomy within the Pact than has hitherto been possible. They show that the conventional assertion that Nicolae Ceauşescu refused to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 is misleading since he was not invited by the Soviet Union to participate in it. They reveal details of the pressure put on Romania by the Soviet Union after 1968 to toe the Warsaw Pact line, ranging from the imperious comments of General Shtemenko in February 1970 to a senior Romanian officer, to Brezhnev's accusation, levelled at Ceauşescu in person, that the latter intended to leave the Pact. Yet it was the direct challenge to Communist domination by Solidarity in Poland in 1981 that, as these documents show, led Ceauşescu to see the value of the Pact. By the summer of 1989, he had become the advocate of intervention in Poland in order to preserve Socialist solidarity and the cohesion of the Pact.

The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia (review)

Reviewed by: The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia. Jessica Munns Zdenĕk Stříbrný. The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia. Ed. Lois Potter. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 258. $52.00. Every culture gets the Shakespeare it deserves and needs, and from at least Pushkin onwards, Slavic cultures have displayed strong affinities with Shakespeare's plays. Jan Kott gave us Shakespeare Our Contemporaryin 1964 (English translation; Polish edition 1962), a work that strongly influenced dramatic productions for a Cold War decade, presenting a world where sudden midnight arrests and overnight changes of regime were not the stuff of poeticized history but of lived experience. In The Whirligig of Time, the distinguished Czech scholar Zdeněk Stříbrný brings us another interpretation of Shakespeare in tune, as his headnote indicates, with "the rough torrent of occasion" (2 Henry IV, 4.1.72) in European politics. However, unlike Kott, whose work Stříbrný felt was "as one-sided as the completely opposite interpretations of dogmatic Marxists," Stříbrný's approach is informed by a deep and compassionate humanism. He writes, almost apologetically, "I could not help seeing in King Learnot only cruelty but also Lear's self-discovery … and Cordelia's forgiveness" (29). The Whirligig of Timeis divided into three sections: an opening autobiographical essay, a series of essays previously published in journals such as the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, and a final section, "Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic," also drawn from public lectures and mostly published elsewhere. It is a great pleasure to see these works gathered together here in elegant translation. Time is a consistent theme in all these sections. Stříbrný has lived through "interesting" times: the brief life of the Czechoslovak Republic under Tomá√ Masaryk; Hitler's annexation of the "Sudetenland," the Communist takeover after World War II; the brief Prague Spring followed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, and finally the "Velvet Revolution" in 1989. Amidst these upheavals and often with great difficulty, Stříbrný pursued his scholarly studies of Shakespeare, clearly warmed and inspired to continue by his sense of Shakespeare's "all-embracing humanism, serenely gentle yet stoutly defending [End Page 377]men's dignity and integrity" (77). Stříbrný's Shakespeare is a compassionate genius who understood how Time's whirligig tosses humanity from quiet courses, leads them to betray and forswear themselves, but may also bring them forgiveness and peace. The group of essays on Shakespeare's use of time traces an increasingly sophisticated manipulation of time; "double time" is Stříbrný's term. Indeed, it is almost treble time: actual play time, and then different rates of time taking place inside various plots, which allow for scenes of "feverish speed" to coexist alongside "events of heavy moment and long duration" (92). This perception is developed interestingly in relation to the history plays, countering E. M. W. Tillyard's classic view of a static world of order and immutable degree with a much more dynamic and dialectical model of contrasting modes of time. There is the fast time of the new men such as Bolingbroke and the slower, but constantly challenged, time of a Richard II. While many of these perceptions are not "new"—and are, indeed, found in essays dating from the 1970s—they remain valid, and one can wish that current theater directors would read these essays and think about them. Michael Boyd's recent production of the first tetralogy at Stratford-on-Avon, for instance, (a revival of his earlier prize-winning production) was an astonishing kinetic event with all-encompassing action on all possible theatrical levels and a great deal of noise, but no sense of any time other than that of fast and furious action. The poetic sequence in 1 Henry VI, 2.4 in which York and Somerset enact their future broils in a rose garden, which Stříbrný describes as a "haunting symbol of the whole English state" (100), turns in Boyd's production into a rapid sequence with paper flowers lowered on a rack. The final section of the book begins with "Shakespeare in Czechoslovakia," an essay that traces the long connections between...

British policy towards Eastern Europe and the impact of the ‘Prague Spring’, 1964–68

This article analyzes Britain's role in East–West diplomacy during the mid-to-late 1960s, with particular reference to London's response to the Czechoslovak communist regime's abortive efforts at internal liberalization in 1968. British officials presumed that the USSR's East European clients were undergoing a process of internal ‘evolution’, and were adopting more autonomous domestic policies. Like other Western countries, Britain responded to the ‘Prague Spring’ with caution, avoiding any action which could provoke Soviet hostility and jeopardize détente. London also failed to predict the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. After briefly expressing outrage at the suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’, Britain and other Western powers soon reverted to a ‘business as usual’ approach to East–West relations, and continued to pursue policies intended to develop détente.

Czechs, Sex, Spies and Torture: Slovak Identity as Translation in Vilikovsky's Ever Green is. ..

In 1963, the editors of the Prague publishing house Czechoslovak Writer launched a new series of short prose pieces called "Zivot kolem nás" ("Life Around Us"). The series began with an auspicious choice: a slim volume entitled Laughable Loves, the first work of fiction by the well-known Communist poet Milan Kundera. The series grew steadily over the next several years, and eventually included works by such Czech writers as Josef Skvorecky, Bohumil Hrabal and Ivan Klíma, as well as by a considerable number of Slovak writers. During the eventful "Prague Spring" of 1968, as Czechoslovakia was undergoing widespread reforms, the series published the short-story collection Citova vychova v breznu(Sentimental Education in March), by the Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovsky. The work was praised by a Czech critic for displaying qualities "which we in Bohemia have often valued in Slovak prose—a strong and vital sense of the epic." 1 After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, most of the leading writers in Prague were driven out of the official cultural scene, and like so much of the 1960s literary scene, the series "Life Around Us" soon came to an end. During the years of Soviet occupation, officially known in Czechoslovakia as "normalization," Vilikovsky was only permitted to publish one book—a detective novel—in Slovakia over the next twenty years. He remained active in the Slovak literary scene as an editor of the literary journal Romboid, and as a translator of some of the most innovative English and American writers, including Woolf and Faulkner, but he withheld his own unorthodox fiction from publication, aware that it would never pass the censors.

Planning for emergency security measures in Slovakia, 1969–1989

On the basis of archival research the author reconstructs the genesis of the planned violent intervention of the Czechoslovak armed forces against the population of the country. He outlines the preparation of plans for extraordinary security measures made after the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, which remained valid until the collapse of the communist regime. The study analyzes the problem of the role of the armed forces in the consolidation of the totalitarian regime. The author evaluates the participation of the army in the violent repression of the demonstrations against Soviet occupation in August 1969. With this, the army confirmed that after a wave of purges it became one of the pillars of the communist regime, which it remained until November 1989.

In search of faith, part 2: Charter 77 and the return to spiritual values in the Czech republic

When Czechoslovakia was formally divided into two separate republics on 1 January 1993, the momentous gesture of separation occurred, ironically, exactly 16 years after another key event, whose purpose had been one of reconciliation and agreement. The release of Charter 77 came as a reward for the efforts of isolated but determined dissidents who had kept the cause of human rights alive since the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. Even when Czech dissident activities were at their height in the 1980s the declaration was destined to gain no more than 1000 signatures; but from the vantage-point of today, when attitudes to politics, ethics and religious belief have become bitterly polarised, it is worth recalling the unity of beliefs and values which Charter 77 embodied, as well as the process of mutual discovery heralded by its appearance. The 5000-word document, launched on 1 January 1977 for the start of Political Prisoners' Year, focused on discrimination in the areas of education, public expression of opinion, access to information and religious conviction. It also called on Czechoslovakia's communist government to honour its human rights pledges under the 1968 international covenants of the United Nations, which had been reaffirmed in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and entered in the country's Register of Laws the following year.

The intermediate nuclear force missiles: An analysis of coupling and reassurance

The main official purposes for installing American intermediate nuclear force (INF) missiles in Europe were to deter a Warsaw Pact invasion by linking a European war to a global one, and to show NATO's cohesion and resolve. These two rationales are investigated using two game‐theoretical models. The analysis of coupling, which involves partially credible threats, indicates that the optimal level of INF is positive, but is impossible to calculate in practice, and that a deployment of the wrong size may lessen deterrence. The second notion, showing resolve, has a coherent justification that fits various details of the episode, but implies the politcally unacceptable conclusion that INF is nothing more than a public destruction of NATO's resources.