On the day after the invasion of Czechoslovakia the Soviet press explained that imperialists, working with revanchist elements in West Germany, had been planning aggression against the socialist nations. The deteriorating situation in Czechoslovakia, caused by counter-revolutionary forces abetted by the imperialists, opened a breach that endangered all socialist countries. It became their common task to close that breach.
Within a few days, Pravda, official organ of the Soviet Communist Party, elaborated the apologia. The invasion cannot be judged by bourgeois conceptions of international law or bourgeois interpretations of “sovereignty” and “independence,” but only by the requirements of the international class struggle and the proletarian revolution. So viewed, it was a socialist duty.
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