Czechoslovakia - Ten Years of Soviet Occupation

80,000 Soviet occupation troops still remain in Czechoslavakia although ten years have passed since the invasion of that country by the Soviet Union and four Warsaw Pact dependencies: Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland and Hungary. The troops were supposed to have been withdrawn when the situation "normalised" but remain as symbols of Russian overlord ship.

The invasion started on a night in August 1968 as Warsaw pact tanks, troops and aircraft poured across the border without warning. Taking a leaf out of the American's book they justified their action claiming they had been "invited" by the Czech government. Actually the invasion was not supported by any leading body in the Government or Communist Party. It was the first major concrete manifestation of the brutal "Brezhnev doctrine"; that is, the policy of the Soviet Union as an ascendent, imperialist superpower.

The battle for Eastern Europe

The key factor leading to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was the fear of the Soviet ruling class that the policies of the Dubcek grouping would lead to Czechoslovakia being drawn out of its sphere of influence and into closer harmony with US imperialism and West Germany. All the fine words about "defence of socialism" by the Soviets were mere cover for the actions of a great power asserting its hegemony over an important dependency trying to break out of its bondage.

The actions of the Soviet Union in insisting the invasion of Czechoslovakia and continuing to maintain troops of occupation ten years later form part of a pattern of ruthless subjugation of Eastern Europe. It began in the aftermath of World War Two in response to the threat of US-led imperialism.

This pattern has been well described in the booklet The Superpowers, the Threat of War and the British Working Claw (¹).

'Ever since 1945, there has been a fundemental assymetry between the role of the USA in the West of Europe and that of the Soviet Union in the East. The USA emerged from the Second World War overwhelmingly predominant in the world economy, possessing slightly over half of the world's liberated industrial capacity in its own home territory.

"In the part of Europe it liberated, as also in Britain, it found a social system fundementally like its own (private monopoly capitalism/bourgeois democracy), which was gravely weakened by war, but could be put back on its feet by injection of US dollars rather than bayonets. (Even in Italy and France, the CPs did not give the Anglo-American liberators too much trouble).

"The economic dependence of West European capitalims on the United States allowed massive export of US capital, leading to a consequent flow of surplus-value westwards across the Atlantic, but the United States never had to contemplate using military force against the peoples of Western Europe to maintain the status quo. Its position vis-a-vis the European bourgoisies was that of 'first among equals', and the NATO alliance, in particular, never gave the US any direct peacetime command over European forces. The greater wealth of the West European economies, once they were rebuilt with US support (the Marshall plan), also exerted a constant subverting effect on the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

The Role of the Soviet Union

"The role of the SU in Europe has been fundementally different. Suffering the most terrible invasion from Nazi Germany, it bore the main brunt of the antifascist war in Europe and defeated the aggressors at an immense cost in human life and resources. The Soviet Union could not appear in the countries it liberated as a wealthy benefactor, and yet it was determined that there would be no new imperialist attack from the West.

"The road it chose to ensure this was to forestall US penetration of Eastern Europe with the so-called 'iron curtain', making it clear that the United States would not be able to use its economic power to gain influence in the sphere allotted to the Soviet Union by the Yalta agreement. The US response to this, of course, was to try and reverse the Yalta partition and use the nuclear threat to 'roll back' the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe though it flinched from the all-out war that would have been necessary to achieve this end.

"The concern of the Soviet Union to create a reliable buffer zone between itself and US imperialism was understandable. But the choice that was made, whatever the reasons behind it, meant not relying on the peoples newly liberated from fascism and their common interest with the Soviet Union in rejecting US imperialism and a new war, but relying instead on the military supremacy of the Soviet Army in Eastern Europe to maintain a sphere of influence, even at the cost of provoking major anti-Soviet sentiment among its 100 million people.

Great Power Chauvinism

"The flagrant great-power chauvinism that the Soviet Union exhibited in Eastern Europe, forcibly transforming the social systems of the countries under its sway after its own model, quite irrespective of the interest or sentiment of the working class in those countries, both says something about the nature of Soviet society and the state at this time, and already provided a constituent element of the pattern of social-imperialism ('socialism in words, imperialism in deeds': Lenin) that was to take full shape in the 1960s. And because the Soviet Union could only transform Eastern Europe to its desired social conditions by forcible means, it has ever since played a completely different role vis-a-vis the European people than that of the USA.

"In Western Europe, the economic revival of the 1950s and 1960s, the formation and extention of the EEC and the relative decline in the economic supremacy of the USA, has weakened American control of the West European countries, which was exerted from the beginning by economic means. The American burden that Western Europe has to bear can be in no way compared with the burden inflicted by US imperialism on the South American countries, for example, whose economics it fetters, or develops in grotesquely one-sided ways, while enforcing its rule through military juntas that it trains and bribes.

Soviet Military Might

"In Europe it is the Soviet burden that is heavy, while the American burden is relatively light, and far easier to remove altogether. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union only maintains regimes allied to its own by sheer military force. In four cases it has had to send tanks against the people of these supposedly independent countries to prevent them from changing their government.

"The same assymetry applies to any propective expansion by either of the superpowers of their spheres of influence in Europe. The USA would certainly like to see Eastern Europe opened up to American capital, and undertakes various kinds of subversion in support of anti-Soviet tendencies in the various East European countries that might be favourable to a rapprochment with the Western camp (though with with far less vigour now than it did in the 1950s).

"The Soviet Union, however has far less opportunity for 'peaceful' expansion to the West, at least so long as the Atlantic Alliance remains united. Already dependent on its military force to hold down Eastern Europe, it would have to expand in the same terms."

Dubcek's "Czech Road to Socialism"

In January of 1968 when the Dubcek faction in the Czechoslovak Communist Party deposed the ruling Novotny faction Czechoslovakia was suffering under fascist rule by a bureaucratic elite. Far from offering "socialism with a human face" Dubcek and his followers only offered bourgeois democratic reforms.

Following a long period of fascist oppression these new democratic liberties were welcomed by Czech workers. They were also welcomed by large numbers of pro-Western bourgeois and former nazi elements who were allowed to openly organise as a result of the "Prague Spring" instituted by the Dubcek regime in early 1968.

At the same time as they instituted bourgeois democratic reforms in the political sphere the Ducekites moved to further entrench capitalism in the economic sphere: control of enterprises in the enterprise themselves, co-ordination by the market, material incentives, control of the means of production and their products in the hands of the privileged elite of managers and technocrats, and widening income differentials.

These internal changes in the economy were matched by a new desire to co-operate with Western imperialism in the form of taking loans and credits as well as the setting up of joint enterprises on Czech territory.

The effect of these changes was to open wide Czechoslovakia to growing Western imperialist political and economic influence. The Soviets saw these moves as leading to the loss of a key dependency. In these circumstances the doctrine of "limited sovereignty" was born and the invasion took place; the Soviets again demonstrating that their position in Eastern Europe was only maintained by military force.

The Dubcek grouping crumbled in the face of Soviet might. They advised Czechoslovakians to "remain calm" and not to oppose the invasion. Resistance was confined to symbolic acts while the Soviets imposed a new leadership and the bourgeois democratic reforms were withdrawn. Since then Czechoslovakia has remained firmly under Soviet domination.

The Czech people, betrayed by the Dubcek group, continue to oppose Soviet domination, but lack leadership and organisation. Opposition is still confined to symbolic acts such as the sabotaging of the TV broadcast of a major speech by Leonid Brezhnev during his visit to Czechoslovakia earlier this year.

A Soviet Satellite

Today Czechoslovakia is firmly tied to the Soviet Union. It is totally dependent on the Soviet Union for its oil supplies. When the Soviet Union arbitrarily raised the price of oil to Czechoslovakia following the OPEC rise, Czechoslovakia had to completely alter its five year plan for expanding industrial production.

Through Comecon the Soviet Union exploits Czechoslovakia along with its other East European dependencies. It uses its dominant position to dictate prices to its Comecon "partners". In one case, Hungary, export prices to the Soviet Union went up 15% in 1974 while in the same year prices of Soviet imports jumped 52%

East European workers are drafted to work on Soviet industrial projects while two-thirds of Comecon investments are made in the Soviet Union. As a result the Soviet Union has grown economically while Eastern Europe has declined. In 1960 the Soviet Union had 69.5% of total Comecon industrial production. In 1970 it had 76%.

The Brezhnev era

At the time of the Czech invasion Soviet apologists were quick to spring to the defence of the Warsaw Pact action. Some like the SUP, ignored the fact that they had wholeheartedly supported, only weeks before, the ill-fated "Czech road to socialism". They claimed that the Soviet Union was "defending peace".

Since then, under Brezhnev's leadership, the Soviet Union has decided to "defend peace" on a worldwide basis. They have launched provocations against China, fomented the war which separated Pakistan, masterminded, supplied and payrolled the Cuban takeover of Angola, supplied and payrolled the Cuban mercenaries again in Ethiopia to suppress liberation movements in the Ogaden, Tigre and Eritrea, incited and aided Vietnamese expansionism in Indochina and occupied and conducted nilitary manoevres in sovereign terrirories of both Japan and Norway.

In order to "defend peace" on such a vast scale the Soviet Union has maintained a non-stop pace in expanding its armed forces. In reality the Soviets are no peace-bringers but out and out imperialists, a characterisation that has been proven by the bloody realities of Soviet expansionism in the Brezhnev era.

The anniversary of the subjugation of Czechoslovakia ten years ago this month is a timely reminder of the aggressive ch character of Soviet imperialism and of the fact that its current offensives in Africa and South East Asia are not new in content but merely the latest manifestations of a policy that has been pursued for well over ten years. The difference is that during those ten years the Indochinese liberation movements have dealt a death blow' to US imperialism while Soviet imperialism has grown stronger and more ambitious. The Soviet Union now threatens not just the vassal states of Eastern Europe with its fascist domination, but the peoples of the whole world.

James Morgan