Dynamics of Soviet Crisis Management and Interventionism

in Eastern Europe

What Differed Yugoslavia and Romania from Hungary and

Czechoslovakia

During the communist era, three East European countries were able to extricate themselves from Soviet domination, namely Yugoslavia, Albania and Romania. Three others, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, intended the same but did not succeed; instead the popular uprisings were mercilessly crushed. What, then, were the differences between the two groups of nations?

It is obvious that the physical locations of the countries were vital for the Pact's intrabloc crisis management methods selected by the Soviets. The group of the three former was located in the Balkans, which in regard of Soviet security concerns did not occupy such a pivotal position as East Central Europe. Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland all possessed immediate borders common with the USSR. An analysis of the crises in the abovementioned countries however also reveals certain additional features that the states in each group have in common. I will next examine the cases of the Soviet-Yugoslavian and Soviet-Romanian rifts and compare them to the interventions of 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

The Dispute between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia

The controversy between the USSR and Yugoslavia started in 1948, well before the establishment of the WTO. If we, however, accept the thesis that the Pact mainly was a promoter of Soviet interests, the date for the rift does not impact the general applicability of the case.

The peoples of Yugoslavia had in World War Two liberated their country from the Nazi yoke largely by themselves. This meant that there were no Soviet troops present on Yugoslav soil. The war of liberation also fomented feelings of nationalism. In 1948 Stalin, with the eager support of the Cominform, accused Tito and his compatriots of anti-sovietism, premature collectivization and bourgeois nationalism (Bass-Marbury, p. 6-13). The intention was to provoke a split within the Yugoslav party; this however failed and Tito was to remain in power through a ruthless suppression of the pro-soviet faction of his party. The controversy became a war of nerves. Between 1950 and 1952 the Yugoslavs reported more than 5000 military incidents at their borders and the country's intelligence agency claimed in 1949 and 1950 that the Soviets were preparing an invasion of Yugoslavia.(Christopher Jones, p. 65,79-81). Why, then, was there not to be any invasion?

Tito had in 1949 a standing army of 33 divisions which had experience from fighting a successful war of national liberation in extremely difficult terrain conditions.(ibid.). This experience was summed up in the fifties in the declaring of the national doctrine of "General People's Defense". Also, Yugoslavia became gradually aligned with the West during this period: in 1951 Tito asserted the will of his people to defend the West if Stalin was to assault NATO; in 1954 Yugoslavia signed the "Balkan Pact" with Turkey and Greece, a collective security alliance overtly aligned with NATO. Szalowski (1976, p. 6) and to some extent Fodor (1990, p. 29) have pointed to the deterring effect of this treaty. One should also bear in mind the gradual character of the Yuogo-Soviet rift: after the Second World War and until 1953 it became only little by little more aggravated. There was in other words no definite point break in the relations between the two socialist states. Tito had fostered the spirit of nationalism in a manner that secured him the backing of his people during the controversy. The Soviets never found a fifth column strong enough to oust Tito from power. Chruchev himself in 1956 acknowledged that the Stalinist policies had been unsuccessful because Tito enjoyed the support of a united people and state apparatus.

Jones (e. g 1981, p79-83) has in various papers presented potential reasons for the Soviet abstinence from intervention into Yugoslavia. I have extended the list with a few others that might be useful for understanding Soviet logic of crisis behavior. Thus the possible reasons for the peaceful solution of the controversy could be summed up as follows:

1) The Soviets had to take into account the strong patriotic appeals of the Yugoslav leaders to mobilize the entire people and the prospects of facing powerful armed resistance. Virtually all scholars of East European relations have noted that the Soviets seem to have avoided violence in cases where the chances for armed opposition have abounded.

2) The Yugoslavs tried willfully to generate Western sympathies in the hope of more substantial support through defense treaties to be signed.

3) By purging the pro-soviet elements of the communist party the Yugoslavs essentially denied the USSR the opportunity to recruit collaborators who could legitimately apply for Soviet military assistance. The Yugoslav leaders retained the support of the people throughout the crisis.

4) The relations between the two countries were worsened only gradually, which gave Tito the chance to prepare a national defense of his country. The Soviet leaders, on the other hand, would have had serious problems in putting their finger on any specific point when their opponents had "gone too far".

5) The primacy of geopolitical location has been mentioned above. It does in my opinion however not go far enough in explaining the Soviet abstinence from military measures, since naval bases on the Adriatic should have been very desirable for the USSR. In 1961 the Soviets lost their only base on that sea, as they were dispelled from the Albanian port of Vlore. Why this in the minds of the Russians did not call for an intervention, remains essentially a mystery to me. The Albanian case is perhaps a little too exotic in its isolation to be drawn generalizations upon.

The Romanian Case of Obstinacy

Romania was a founding member of the Warsaw Pact, and it never formally abandoned the alliance. Soviet troops nevertheless withdrew from Romania in 1958 never to return again; from 1963 onwards the country did not allow any joint exercises of Pact forces on its own national territory and sent only Staff and token forces to exercise on others'.(Gati, p. 149). Other dissident activities could also be perceived in the early sixties. A capacity to produce heavy weapons was built out, albeit the chronic lack of currency severely circumscribed such plans; and in 1961 the Romanians ceased sending officers for schooling at Soviet military academies.(Remington, 66-67)

In the early 60's, the Romanian leader Georgi Georgiu-Dej very effectively purged the party leadership from his opponents. At some point between 1959 and 1964 he made the decision to begin the deployment of a system of defense of national territory by national military means. By 1968 the capability to mobilize for territorial defense had been acquired, as was demonstrated the day after the WTO invasion of Czechoslovakia when Georgiu-Dej's successor, First Party Secretary Nicolae Ceaucescu mobilized the elements of the system, more than 1 200 000 men in defensive posture against a possible Soviet invasion. (Jeanne Kirk Laux in Adomeit, p. 58-62) In the seventies the Romanians continued their unwelcome obstinacy to Soviet proposals in the WTO, and publicly denounced the principles of socialist internationalism. The country refused pertinaciously to take any part in Soviet plans concerning the international division of labour of the socialist commonwealth and instead showed a willingness for closer economic cooperation with the West. The rapprochement was visible not least in purchases of Western weapons technology. This seems to have been a fully cognizant means of substantiating West European interests in Romania and of thus taking distance to the Kremlin. (Edwina Moreton in Dawisha, p. 181-183)

The factors at work in the Bucharest-Moscow relations as pertaining to the desirability of a military solution seem to be remarkably resemblent of the ones in Yugoslavia. First, Ceaucescu appeared to be able to offer a strong armed resistance to Soviet intervention by means of mobilizing the entire people along anti-Soviet lines. Second, his policies of alignment with the West through arms acquisitions seemed to be at least partly successful. Third, in Romania, as in Yugoslavia, the communist party never lost any of its power. Ceaucescu quite on the contrary imposed even more serious strains of party discipline on domestic policies than his more €liberal' WTO neighbors. The strict discipline never allowed any pro-soviet opposition to be generated. Fourth, The Romanian criticism of the USSR began as a discrete denouncement of Stalinism in the fifties but gradually gained impetus and in the end grew into a firm defiance on many questions of essential Soviet interest. The gradual character of the dispute is more than obvious. Fifth, and the fourth argument notwithstanding, the Romanians perhaps never quite reached the point of no return. As much as they wanted to show their sovereignty in face of the international community, they still fell short of defying the Soviets in concrete terms regarding the most perilous questions. The Romanians for instance never made any hints at a possible NATO-membership. Rather, theirs was the language of abstraction. Sixth and last, the geographical location of the country was, from Soviet security point-of- view, safe. It was surrounded by communist powers and it is utterly doubtful whether any capitalist country would ever have given any thought to issuing security guarantees to her.

The Hungarian Uprising of 1956

In Hungary the processes of destalinization of the communist camp and the simultaneous refusal by the domestic Stalinist leadership to give up power led to wide unrest in the first half of the fifties. After a prolonged intra-party struggle the Stalinists under Matyas Rakosì succeeded in gaining the upper hand and expelled the reformist leader Imre Nagy from the party. Nagy, in his theorizing on communist international relations, had endorsed the principles of sovereignty, equality and non-interference in internal matters, and recommended that Hungary avoid membership in any power bloc.(Robert Jones, p. 118- 119).The WTO had only just been delivered, so these obviously were dangerous advocations.

In October 1956 general insurrection broke out in Budapest as a result of the police firing on pro-Nagy demonstrators. The massive explosion of popular hatred that followed demolished the communist party apparatus in the whole country, and the army refused to take up arms against the rebels. Soviet troops were called in and Nagy appointed Premier on October 24 in order to quell the unrest. The Soviets proclaimed their willingness to accept Nagy's premiership, but he decided instead to join sides with those voicing demands for freedom from the Soviet patronage and formed a coalition government with non-communist majority (Remington, p. 34-35). The Party Central Committee made a pledge calling for an international affirmation of Hungarian sovereignty, for a new relationship with the USSR based on equality, and demanded the Soviet troops immediately to be withdrawn (Steele(1974), p 56) The Soviet tanks actually retreated from Budapest, but formed a ring around the city together with fresh troops entering from the USSR.

Meanwhile the communist party found it impossible to reorganize its shattered fragments into a unified organization. In the new cabinet of November 3. the communists held only four out of thirteen ministries, of which two were Nagy's in his capacity of being Prime- and Foreign Minister (Christopher Jones, p. 74-75). On November 1. Nagy decided to withdraw from the WTO and proclaim Hungary neutral. Before Moscow could intervene militarily it had to conjure a "new" communist party that would request fraternal military assistance and be prepared to restore one-party dictatorship. Janos Kádàr was found for this purpose, and he appealed on November 4. For a crushing of the counterrevolutionaries, the appeal actually being made from the town of Uzhgorod in the USSR. Still the same day the Soviet troops went into action. The uprising was swiftly suppressed; isolated groups of rebels lasted for a couple of weeks. (ibid. p. 75-76)

Some characteristics on the Soviet intervention in Hungary that made it fundamentally different from the cases of Yugoslavia and Romania have to be noted. First, the Soviets did not intervene against an indigenous communist party, as they would have done in the other two countries. On the contrary, they intervened to restore a severely battered communist party into power. Second, in Hungary they were able to align themselves with a truly pro-Soviet faction, from whom they could extract an appeal for €fraternal assistance', thus giving a veil of legitimacy, though thin, to the action. Third, it is obvious that the thought of the Hungarians leaving the WTO and subsequently perhaps joining NATO was a frightening prospect. The Hungarians however did not in succeed in time to get any international recognition for these plans and did in effect not have any military means of their own for the defense of their newly-proclaimed neutrality. The Hungarian army had no doctrine nor any concept of national territorial defense, and it was vital for the Soviets to charge before they gained one. Fourth, the Soviet invasion was eased substantially by the fact that the troops were already stationed on Hungarian soil. Last, the Hungarian uprising had the violent dynamics of its own, it was no gradual process with the predestined goal or clear intention of severing the ties to the Soviet camp.

The 1968 WTO Intervention in Czechoslovakia

The first serious threat to Soviet hegemony in East Central Europe since Hungary 1956 arose in the shape of the "Prague Spring" of 1968. The origins of what started as a process of mental liberalization and ended in bloody Soviet reprisals, were manifold: political (dissatisfaction with the conservative party stranglehold on the basic freedoms of people), regional (demands of greater autonomy for the Slovaks), and economic (the sixties being a period of increasing economic stagnation for the country).(Edmonds, p. 69)

In January 1968 Alexander Dubcek was appointed Party First Secretary with Soviet approval. During the ensuing spring the €progressive' faction of the party purged it from €conservative' elements. The Soviets at first did not react to these developments, but turned a blind eye to the Czech intraparty struggle. In March the progressives succeeded in abolishing press censorship, which in the free media resulted in sharp attacks aimed at the conservatives intent on curbing freedom of speech anew (Steele(1974), p. 161). In April the Soviets became worried at the pace of events, and the Soviet Party Central Committee warned against anti-communist attempts to weaken the socialist camp. The Soviet leaders were beginning to abandon their impartial stand in the struggle in favor of the conservatives. On the last days of May the WTO began a series of huge multilateral exercises in Bohemia without giving the Czech leadership previous notice. One Soviet officer participating was reported as having said that the "honest communists" only had to call and they would have at their disposal "the might of the entire Soviet army". (Jones, p. 49)

On June 27. the so-called "2000 Words Manifesto", signed by a number of prominent nonparty Czech, was published in several papers in the country. The Manifesto rigidly condemned the communist rule in Czechoslovakia ever since its start in 1948. The proclamation had an immense effect on public opinion and helped the progressives win a clear victory at the regional party conference elections in early July. It also had the more negative effect of drawing Pravda's attention to the Czech events; the paper felt compelled to draw an ominous comparison between Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary a dozen years earlier.(Ludvik Vakulic: The 2000 Words Manifesto, publ. in Steele(1974), see also Edmonds, p. 69).

In late June and early July Brezhnev repeatedly pressed Dubcek for a bilateral meeting between the two fraternal parties' leaders, but due to Dubceks disinterest failed in his attempts. Instead the five WTO allies of Czechoslovakia were convened in the Polish capital. The outcome of this meeting was the "Warsaw letter" - in effect an ultimatum to the Czech nomenklatura outlining the rationale for a forthcoming intervention. The letter accused Dubcek and his fellow progressives for undermining socialist internationalism making clear that the vanguard role of the communist party could never be repudiated without posing a threat to the country and thereby to the security of the whole socialist commonwealth.(Robert Jones, p. 149)

The Soviets eventually got their meeting with the Czechs, but only to find out that the party leadership was by now firmly in the hands of the reformists. Brezhnev then agreed in a conciliatory gesture to withdraw the Soviet troops conducting exercises in the woods of Bohemia, as he did in early August. Almost immediately after that the leaders of the six WTO partners however issued a new joint declaration stating that proletarian internationalism included not only the right, but also the positive duty of all socialist states to defend their common ideology wherever it was threatened (Dawisha, p.21). The crucial elements of what was to become known as the Brezhnev Doctrine were thus in place.

Simultaneously with the political events the Czech military had conducted a profound reevaluation of the security policies of its Fatherland. In early May several high-ranking officers of the Gottwald Military Academy attempted to formulate guidelines on which to base an independent Czechoslovak military doctrine. The ideas were briefed in the so- called "Gottwald Memorandum", which questioned the future validity of the WTO as an option for the Czechs and proposed either an entente comprising both communist and non- communist countries in Central Europe, or else the neutralizing of Czech territory and the defense of it by reliance on own means (Holden, p. 86). In mid-June the Central Committee Chief of Military Agencies advocated plans along the lines set up by the Memorandum. The Czechoslovak leaders failed to explore the possibilities of such mobilization of the population for national defense, and would have to pay dearly for that omission. The Soviets were namely probably well aware of the proposals.(Remington, p. 101)

On the evening of August 20. 1968 the armed forces of the five fraternal Warsaw Pact members entered Czechoslovakia. The contingent was made up of some half a million Soviet troops; with largely symbolical attachments of 50 000 soldiers from Poland, 20 000 from East Germany, another 20 000 from Hungary and perhaps 10 000 from Bulgaria (Christopher Jones, p. 103). The troops seized the Czechoslovak leaders and all military objectives, but were unable to install a cabinet of communists with the legitimacy to rule. It required eight months for a clique of Moscow-based communists to get a firm hold of power. What was it, then, that prompted the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968?

First, for the Kremlin the predictability of any given regime was of vital importance. The ultimate guarantee for the predictability was, of course, adherence to common ideological commitments; that is, communism. In 1968 the Czechoslovak communist party appeared ready to surrender its leading role in society. The loss of party control over society would have brought along the loss of Soviet control over Czechoslovakia. This is what had happened in Hungary twelve years earlier. Second, the freedom of speech and the lifting of press censorship had serious implications for the other allies of the USSR in East Europe. The Prague intelligentsia was developing links to likemindeds and nationalists throughout the socialist commonwealth from the very onset of the reform movement.(Dawisha, p. 12) Third, the Dubcek administration had specifically declared that it was not about to denounce its obligations as stipulated by the Warsaw Treaty. However, other signals were also perceptible. The Gottwald Memorandum had endorsed a territorial defense doctrine, and the 2000 Words Manifesto had proclaimed the devotion of the people to defend the reforms with arms, if need be. It was urgent that the USSR made its move before the Czechs would follow the path chosen by Yugoslavia and Romania. Fourth, while it was obvious that the Czech reformists enjoyed strong sympathies in the West, they did not obtain neither sought to obtain any security guarantees from the NATO camp. In fact, the U.S statements on the Czech question had been so meek that the Russians could be almost certain of the Americans not risking the emerging détente over Czechoslovakia (Edmonds, p 68). The Yugoslavs had sought to deter an invasion by getting American guarantees for the inviolability of their borders, and even by enthusiastically declaring that an assault upon them would deteriorate into a Third World War. Romania had followed a similar policy, albeit more cautiously. Fifth, although there were no Soviet troops deployed on Czech soil, any WTO forces seemed to be free to move in and out of the country at will, as the incidents with Pact exercises in Czechoslovakia during early summer showed. It is not very far-fetched to assume that the actual intervention in August was made pretty easy by training offensive action outside Prague during June and July. Sixth and last; on account of the geopolitical position of the country as linking the Northern and the Southern tiers of the WTO, any prospects of the Czechs adopting a territorial defense doctrine, or, worse still, relying in their defense on the West, would have created immense problems for the formulation of bloc military strategies.