21 Aug 1968 Jahr - The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia

Beschreibung:

The invasion of Czechoslovakia sought to secure support for the Czechoslovakian communist party and end the Prague Spring protests against the communist state. However, many Warsaw allies and communist nations including Albania, Romania, Yugoslavia and China did not approve of the invasion.

"The suppression of the Prague-spring had a powerful psychological effect: it led a growing number of people in the Soviet union and Eastern Europe to continue to defer in public to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, while privately ceasing to believe in it. There developed what the historian Timothy Garton Ash has called “a double life”: “The split between the public and the private self, official and unofficial language, outward conformity and inward dissent…I applaud conduct by the state that I would never endorse in private life”…the opposite of what was happening in the US" (Gaddis 2006, p. 187)

"The Soviet leadership appeared to have become less tolerant of dissent at home and in Eastern Europe than it had been during the last years of Khrushchev era. The invasion of Czechoslovakia and its subsequent justification, the Brezhnev Doctrine, set the stage for a tightening of ideological discipline, a rejection of experimentation in the media and the arts, and the increasingly hash repression of even mid political protest. However much détente might have improved relations with the West, Brezhnev and his colleagues seemed determined to control everything – even ideas – within their sphere of influence. They justified this…through an appeal to…ideology: to claim that, in Marxism-Leninism, they had discovered the mechanisms by which history worked, and thus the means by which to improve the lives people lived." (Gaddis 2006, p. 185)

"As late as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Johnson administration saw little it could do beyond protesting the offense, warning against repeating it elsewhere and cancelling the summit at which the outgoing president and the new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev were to have begun negotiations on limiting strategic arms." (Gaddis 2006, p. 181)

"It has since long been clear – and should have been clearer at the time – that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw pact allies were on the path to decline, and that détente was concealing their difficulties" (Gaddis 2006, p. 213)

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