How To Overrun Czechoslovakia: A Manual

IT was July 18, 1969, and people in Czechoslovakia were still feeling shaky. Not quite a year earlier, on the night of August 20-21, 1968, 200,000 Russian and Warsaw Pact troops had thundered across the border, put most of the leaders of the government and the Communist Party in handcuffs, and brought the country’s experiment in liberalized Communism to a halt. Then there had been universal outrage; now World Opinion had largely forgotten the Soviet Union’s armed intervention in the affairs of a supposedly sovereign nation.

But the events of August 1968 were still making waves in the Communist world. They had led to the formulation of the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” according to which “fraternal socialist countries” must intervene if Communist rule is threatened in any one of them. The independent-lining regimes in Yugoslavia and Rumania were tiptoeing, afraid that at any moment the doctrine might be applied to them and troops be sent in. At the international conference of Communist parties in Moscow earlier that month, the situation in Czechoslovakia had been uppermost in everyone’s mind (even though the Russians strove manfully to keep the matter off the agenda—aided by the Czechoslovakians, who insisted that the invasion of their country was purely an “internal question”).

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Alex Martin

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IT was July 18, 1969, and people in Czechoslovakia were still feeling shaky. Not quite a year earlier, on the night of August 20-21, 1968, 200,000 Russian and Warsaw Pact troops had thundered across the border, put most of the leaders of the government and the Communist Party in handcuffs, and brought the country’s experiment in liberalized Communism to a halt. Then there had been universal outrage; now World Opinion had largely forgotten the Soviet Union’s armed intervention in the affairs of a supposedly sovereign nation.

But the events of August 1968 were still making waves in the Communist world. They had led to the formulation of the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” according to which “fraternal socialist countries” must intervene if Communist rule is threatened in any one of them. The independent-lining regimes in Yugoslavia and Rumania were tiptoeing, afraid that at any moment the doctrine might be applied to them and troops be sent in. At the international conference of Communist parties in Moscow earlier that month, the situation in Czechoslovakia had been uppermost in everyone’s mind (even though the Russians strove manfully to keep the matter off the agenda—aided by the Czechoslovakians, who insisted that the invasion of their country was purely an “internal question”).