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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 21. 5th September 1973

Counter Revolution within Counter Revolution

Counter Revolution within Counter Revolution

To justify its naked aggression, the Soviet Union demagogically claimed that it had occupied Czechoslovakia in order to "defend socialist gains " and out of "concern for the consolidation of peace". But at no time was socialism involved. In the Soviet Union itself a new bourgeois stratum has seized control of state power and turned that country into a new type of monopoly capitalist state. Dubcek's programme was one of capitalist restoration dressed up as the "Czech road to socialism". What was at stake was whether Czechoslovakia would remain tied to the Soviet Union or whether there would be Czech-West German-US economic collaboration.

At the time of the Soviet invasion what threatened in Czechoslovakia was not counter-revolution — that had arrived with Novotny — but a congress on the Czechoslovak Communist Party which would have entrenched the Dubcek group in power. As a consequence Dubcek would be able to press his political programme, the essence of which was the introduction of bourgeois democracy (allowing a free hand to all the old exploiting elements) and the orientation of Czech foreign policy towards the West.