The return of Alexander Dubček to Slovak and Czechoslovak politics in 1989, and his political prospects after November, were significantly shaped – both directly and indirectly – by the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev. After becoming General Secretary of the CPSU on March 11, 1985, Gorbachev declared the policy of perestroika and glasnost. This sparked political hopes for major change in Czechoslovakia, including a return to the reform process of 1968, which had undeniably been initiated under Dubček.
Dubček seized on this hope, and his political standing within Slovak society began to rise. He repeatedly spoke positively of perestroika and endorsed it. His appeals to revisit the official position on 1968, however, went unanswered. Gorbachev and the new CPSU leadership never offered him a positive response. On the contrary, he faced attacks from some Soviet newspapers.
A schizophrenic message
The peak of disappointment – for Dubček and for all those expecting an impulse for fundamental change – came with Gorbachev’s visit to Prague and Bratislava on April 8–11, 1987. The welcome he received was comparable, in postwar history, only to the visit of the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. Yet during that visit, Gorbachev’s contradictory stance became clear. Because of Moscow’s power interests, and promises given to the “normalization” leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, he gave no indication of sympathy for the 1968 reform movement. On the contrary, he indirectly backed Husák’s Soviet-installed leadership. In doing so, he effectively delegitimized Dubček and the “January men,” along with the hundreds of thousands of reformist Communists expelled from the Party in the purges, who had hoped to support a Czechoslovak version of perestroika.
Gorbachev versus Mlynář
In his book of conversations with Gorbachev, Reformers Are Rarely Happy, Zdeněk Mlynář – Gorbachev’s classmate from Moscow university – criticized him sharply: “When you came to Prague in spring 1987, the whole nation expected you to say at least something like you later said in Germany: ‘Those who come late will be punished by life.’ That you would somehow show sympathy for the Prague Spring, which you surely had. I’d even say that in Czechoslovakia, society put more hope in your policy than any other country in the socialist bloc at that time.” When Gorbachev replied that he had been struck by slogans on the streets urging him to “stay for a year” and that they “made a huge impression,” Mlynář reminded him: “And yet you told those people they should be proud of what they had achieved in twenty years – that 1968 was chaos, that the ‘hard times’ were behind us, and that you had been with us in those hard times. You were with us, and so were your tanks! How could you speak that way? I didn’t understand then and I still don’t, no matter the pressure you faced from conservatives in the Politburo.” Gorbachev defended himself: “I didn’t want to return to that difficult and dramatic time. I wanted to say only that the last twenty years had not been lived in vain, that much had been done in the country. I was inviting them, in a sense, to join perestroika. And don’t forget, Zdeněk, that as early as March 1985 I had renounced the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ and stood for equality, independence, non-interference, and full responsibility of each state’s leadership for conditions in its own country.” Mlynář’s reply was harsh: “Misha, I don’t doubt your good intentions, but your words had the opposite effect. You let people down badly – your words sounded like a blessing on the past. And you urged them toward perestroika, but under the very same ‘normalizers,’ the heirs of Brezhnev’s stagnation, which you yourself condemned at home. How could you not see that without condemning the intervention, without rehabilitating the Prague Spring, it was impossible to pursue your own reformist policy in Czechoslovakia?” Gorbachev answered: “What can I say? That was the Politburo’s position. It had been specifically debated and approved. The Prague leadership at the time wanted me to support the 1968 events directly. I refused. But you’re right that my statement was ambiguous. At that stage, I couldn’t take the steps in domestic or foreign policy that I later did. We first had to get further down the road.”
Holding the line
Yet even in this conversation with Mlynář, Gorbachev was evasive. In 1988, during his visit to Italy, the local communists urged him to reassess Dubček’s role. He did not. As late as March 1989, he still defended the brutal Soviet intervention in Hungary. In a conversation with Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh on March 3, 1989 in Moscow, regarding Pozsgay’s statements about 1956, he said: “I think Pozsgay’s statements are completely extremist. The events of 1956 truly began with public dissatisfaction. Later, however, these events escalated into a counterrevolution and bloodshed. That cannot be overlooked.” And in notes from Gorbachev’s March 23, 1989 meeting with Hungarian party leader Károly Grósz, he reiterated his stance on the events that transpired in 1968 in Czechoslovakia: “The Soviet leadership recently analyzed the 1968 events and maintains the view that what happened there was a counterrevolution with all the characteristic features of such an event. Dubček’s regime was unable to prevent openly counterrevolutionary forces from gaining ground.” Even Gorbachev’s closest ally, Alexander Yakovlev – the “second face” of perestroika – stated shortly before November 1989: “It is my sincere conviction that in August 1968, antisocialist forces were preparing a civil war.”
Preferring Havel
Dubček, then, was firmly out of favor with Gorbachev. He received no support from the Soviet leadership – neither symbolic nor real – before or after November 1989. None publicly, none through back channels. In this context, Josef Bartončík, then chairman of the Czechoslovak People’s Party, recalled his meeting with the Soviet ambassador on December 7, 1989, shortly after the resignation of Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec following talks in Moscow: “It was quite obvious that Gorbachev was not going to interfere in our internal affairs and was throwing Adamec overboard. He repeated several times how wonderful Havel was, and that Raisa enjoyed reading his plays. It became clear to me that Havel had been designated not only by the West but also by the East.” This testimony points to the international dimension of Václav Havel’s preference over Alexander Dubček at the close of 1989.
The author
Peter Weiss (born July 7, 1952) is a former ambassador of Slovakia to the Czech Republic.
He studied at the Comenius University Faculty of Philosophy. From 1975 to 1989, he worked at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia, serving as its scientific secretary from 1984.
After November 1989, he became the chairman of the Communist Party of Slovakia. In 1990, he was one of the main initiators of its transformation into the socially democratic-oriented Party of the Democratic Left (PDL), serving as its chairman until 1996. In 2002, he left the PDL and founded the Social Democratic Alternative (SDA), which merged with the SMER party two years later.
From 1990 to 2002, he was a member of the Slovak National Council, which was renamed the National Council of the Slovak Republic after 1992. From 2009, he served as an ambassador to Hungary, and in 2013, he took up the same post in the Czech Republic, holding it for seven years.
ad
