CONTEMPORARY ASSESSMENT OF THE 1968 PRAGUE SPRING IN THE EASTERN BLOC – PART II

KÁDÁR’S DUAL PERSPECTIVE

Amid the stern Soviet-sphere rejection of Czechoslovak arguments for, and defence of, the Prague Spring, there was an exception. And it came from the man and the Party which knew the most about what had actually happened in Hungary’s 1956. From March to June (and afterward), Hungarian First Secretary János Kádár’s was a lone Warsaw Pact voice raised in defence of Dubček and Czechoslovak reforms. And yet, Kádár made more references and parallels between 1956 and 1968 than any other. His role was more remarkable, nuanced and intriguing than that of any other foreigner in the Prague Spring.

In some ways the figure of Kádár perfectly represents the ambiguous meaning of both the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring. Unlike a discrete historical landmark such as a battle, these were not in fact events, but tangled masses of events, conglomerated under a singular identity by the demands of history, politics and memory. To define the Prague Spring, while it was occurring, using the meaning of Hungary’s 1956 was, for anyone, to construct a political and emotional judgement on the past and present that could unsettle both by connecting them.

Kádár embodied and lived this process. Hungary’s 1956 meant many things, some of them painfully contradictory, for Kádár. And his use of that simultaneously very personal and public history to define, understand and shape the contested and unfolding Prague Spring was also painfully contradictory. But it was not any less purposeful or realistic for being thus. His understandings of the recent Hungarian Communist past and Czechoslovak Communist present were part of his efforts to create a Hungarian and (consequently) Czechoslovak Communist future that made the same balance between the demands of a pragmatic Soviet-oriented foreign policy and nationally-oriented reform that he had been attempting since he left prison and returned to government in 1954. Characteristically, his efforts so far had been simultaneously a complete disaster and a great success. The former was represented by the still unmarked grave containing the remains of the former comrade and Prime Minister Imre Nagy that Kádár could only bring himself to refer to as the dead man. The latter was represented by the unlikely construction of a regime on such unpromising ground that was embarking on the most ambitious economic reforms that the Soviet bloc had seen before or since; a regime that managed to retain unquestioned political control in Hungary with a relatively light touch.

Much of the admittedly over-hyped achievements of Kádár’s so-called gulyáskommunizmus (goulash Communism) were still in the future in 1968. But the role that Kádár would play in the Prague Spring was partially shaped by the coincidence of Dubček’s ascension to power with the inauguration in Hungary of the long-planned-for New Economic Mechanism (NEM). The NEM was a series of economic reforms that were conceived in the understanding that the Stalinist economic model had unambiguously ceased to be capable of offering either economic or social benefits to the Hungarian people. The plan-driven, aggressively-centralised, and heavy industry-focused model that Stalin had insisted on across the bloc had saddled Hungary with an economy peculiarly unsuited to its geographical and social realities. The package, having been proposed in November 1965 and approved by the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) Central Committee in May 1966, came into effect on 1 January 1968.1

But, even though the NEM was certainly a rational response to economic malaise, it was much more than that. It was the political culmination of the transition that Kádár had begun in the early 1960s, when repressions against “counter-revolutionaries” ceased and the principle of “those who are not against us are with us” was embraced. It has to be remembered that although Kádár was the beneficiary of a bloody Soviet intervention in 1956, his choice as leader by the Soviets and his ability to build genuine domestic authority was predicated on the fact that he was an alternative not only to the “unrealism” and dangers of Nagy on the “right” but also to a Stalinist Rákosi-esque restoration on the far left. That put him in a unique role in both Hungary and the Communist bloc; domestically, this middle position was both his opportunity and his vulnerability. The economic reforms were initiated in the knowledge that, in the Kádár era, the legitimacy of a Hungarian Communist regime could not be maintained on the ideological grounds that had been discredited in the 1950s. Kádár’s middle ground demanded pragmatism and the proof of pragmatism was both security and material gain. Therefore, once the authority of the post-1956 regime had been secured, its emphasis shifted, in Tőkés’ description, from “coercive consolidation” to “an unorthodox strategy of relegitimisation through depoliticisation, consumerism and economic reforms”.2 This was a legitimacy and a governing strategy based on public political acquiescence, not political enthusiasm or even involvement.

Therefore, even though the Kádár regime in 1968 was in some ways a natural ally to Dubček and the Prague Spring, there were also crucial ways in which they were far apart. The supposedly unprecedented enthusiasm of the Czechoslovak public for the reforms, policies and ideas of the Prague Spring and their concomitant participation in Party activities was the entire basis of Dubcek’s claim (in the face of Warsaw Pact criticism) that the Communists were still in the leading role in Czechoslovakia and that any anti-Socialist elements were fringe anomalies. Kádár had both established a space and built a demand for economic reform – which Dubček and his allies also proposed in detail – in the opposite way, by separating the political and the public, negating the centrality of either orthodox or counter-orthodox ideology. Understanding this is important in dispelling some overly simplistic assessments of Kádár’s role in 1968. He was not an uncritical supporter of reform who was turned into an opponent; he was neither a disinterested mediator between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union nor Brezhnev’s stooge. While Kádár’s contradictory role in, and view of, 1956 certainly resulted in contradictory views of the Prague Spring, those contradictions were mostly moral and historical, not political or practical. There was no contradiction between Kádár’s defence of the Prague Spring and his insistence to Dubček that he needed to bring it under control. Nor was there any contradiction between Kádár’s genuine efforts to temper his Warsaw Pact allies’ increasing enthusiasm for intervention and his eventual acquiescence and participation in it. All of these positions and decisions can be and were connected with Kádár’s experiences and role during and after Hungary’s 1956.

Kádár used Hungary’s 1956 as a warning to the Czechoslovak leaders of the dangers of losing control, doing so with more empathetic urgency than Brezhnev could muster for his similar case. But Kádár’s warnings based on Hungarian analogies were also unusually focused on the unwitting and unintentional nature of a possible Czechoslovak slide into counter-revolution. Even as he made this case, Kádár also maintained, uniquely among the Pact allies, that the Prague Spring had been brought about, as had Hungary’s 1956, by the errors of the previous regime. This connection served two purposes. On the one hand, it was another warning. On the other hand, by claiming that the Prague Spring’s impetus was necessary and positive, despite some alarming aspects, he could argue both that it be given space to develop and that the danger from the left be considered as well as the danger from the right. Dubček needed to find a pragmatic middle in which he was indispensable both domestically and internationally and then occupy it; he could not survive merely or simplistically as the figurehead of reform and change.

If Dubček would prove as capable as Kádár had so far (in some ways) been in negotiating the varied demands of Communist left and Communist right, of Soviet and domestic imperatives, then Czechoslovakia could be an invaluable economic ally of Hungary’s within the Soviet bloc. It was these practical goals that helped bring Kádár and Dubček together in the early months of the latter’s tenure. In search of a basis for new economic models within the constraints of the Soviet bloc, Kádár had already resuscitated the culturally rich but nearly smothered concept of Mitteleuropa and broached the old idea of a Danubian Confederation. “The peoples of the Danubian basin”, Kádár had argued in December 1964, “share a common destiny.”3 Then, in January 1968, Kádár was the first foreign leader Dubček met with after his appointment as KSČ First Secretary. Dubcek had given Kádár details, which he would have especially understood, about the confrontations with Novotný over rehabilitation that had presaged the former leader’s downfall. In fact, according to Kádár’s report to the MSZMP Politburo, “Comrade Dubček mentioned that there was not another person in the world with whom he would have been able to discuss the same subjects in the same manner”. Kádár found that Dubček’s views on the importance of establishing normalised relations with West Germany accorded with his own.4 Czechoslovakia had already exchanged trade missions with West Germany under Novotný, in 1967,5 but full diplomatic relations could open the door to the kind of expanded access to credit that both the Hungarian and Czechoslovak economies greatly needed.

But as this essay has attested, March brought a sense of crisis to Soviet bloc discussions about Czechoslovakia that caused the overall nature and direction of the Prague Spring to eclipse all other multilateral and bilateral issues. And, at Dresden, even while referring to 1956 more than his counterparts, Kádár engaged in what amounted to a defence of Dubček with caveats. After selectively referring to and aligning himself with Brezhnev and Gomułka’s pro forma nods to non-interference in Czechoslovak affairs, Kádár added a new and uniquely (in the context) warm expression of support: “But I would like to add that we stand by the Czechoslovak fraternal party and the Czechoslovak people and believe and wish that the great and difficult problems which are on the agenda will be resolved successfully.” The situation, he insisted, was “complicated”, in contrast to Brezhnev’s rush to judgement, and Kádár refused to employ the terms counter-revolution or counter-revolutionary to describe any developments or forces within Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian Politburo had discussed Czechoslovakia in detail, Kádár disclosed, and had concluded that there are “great differences” between the current Czechoslovak experience and Hungary’s 1956, to which Gomułka had just associated it. However, the Hungarian leader did not elaborate on the differences because he quickly moved on to his assessment that there were also “very many similar aspects”.6

“The Czechoslovak comrades know best, I believe, what is happening in Czechoslovakia today”, Kádár maintained as he began his discussion of similarities; another refreshing contrast to Brezhnev’s supposedly authoritative analysis based on press reports.

But the process which we observe, what we see and hear […] is extremely similar to the prologue of the Hungarian counter-revolution at a time when it had not yet become a counter-revolution. This means that this is the process which took place in Hungary from February 1956 to the end of October. And we ask you to think about this.7

There are a number of intriguing aspects to this comparative statement. First, there is the somewhat characteristically Communist diagnosis of a process, occurring in the past and being ineluctably repeated in the present. His description, of both 1956 and 1968, suggests a logical inevitability in what was unfolding. But more significant is that Kádár identified February as the start of the “process” in Hungary’s 1956, placing those events in the context of the 20th Congress and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech – a justified reference, but not one that any of Kádár’s Pact counterparts were eager or prepared to make. It was at this point that Kádár most clearly demonstrated historian Csaba Békés’s analysis of his performance at Dresden: “Kádár attempted to divide his efforts evenly between two goals: to assure the Czechoslovak leaders of his unqualified support and to point out the dangers inherent in their present situation.”8 While the spectre of an ultimately tragic “process” was designed to give pause to the Czechoslovak delegation, it also indicated to the others that the instability of the situation was a result of the ever unkempt exercise of necessarily correcting the excesses of a hard-line regime. But even as a warning from history, it was a unique one.

In Hungary, comrades, no counter-revolutionary elements of any kind took action openly before 23 October 1956. Those who took action were quite different people. Those were Party members, Party functionaries […]. And the main slogan – forgive me this – was the same that is voiced by everyone in your country. The main slogan was this in Hungary: Forward to the implementation of the resolutions of the 20th Congress […]. And this was so until the evening of 23 October […]. You may ask: what kind of people were taking action then? I can bluntly tell you, these were people who were simply confused, who were grabbed by some sort of senseless wave, people who saw some kind of ghosts. I think that these people, without hostile intention, cause great damage. These people, in a given situation cause greater damage than the openly and expressly anti-Communist elements, because those anti-Communist elements can take no action openly in such situations […]. Imre Nagy had not been a conscious counter-revolutionary aiming for regime-change; he was carried away by the events of 25 and 26 October and made common cause with the class enemy […]. These events can turn any one of you into an Imre Nagy.9

In what ways was this warning from 1956 different from the conclusions arrived at in Moscow? Firstly, Kádár’s main point was that at an analogous stage in Hungary’s 1956, from February to October, the main damage was caused by Communists whose intentions were innocent and whose motivations were ostensibly positive. What did Kádár have in mind regarding the inspiration of the 20th Congress in Hungary’s 1956? For example, in late May 1956, the Petőfi Circle’s first significant and influential debate, which was focused on the 20th Congress, had developed into a wide-ranging forum for criticism of the regime. The Petőfi Circle, after this, had developed into a key alternative source of policy demands through the escalating summer and autumn of 1956. This connection was supposed to redirect Dubček’s attention in a critical manner to those Communist writers and intellectuals (and officials) whose criticism of the recent past had been tolerated or even encouraged by the KSČ leaders. The point was not that criticising the previous regime was unjustified. Kádár appreciated more than any other bloc leader that there could be no progress without legitimate criticism. But, the very fact that such criticisms had objective cause and justification made them potentially more damaging if not brought under the purview and control of the Party leadership. His anxiety about this was exemplified early on when, after meeting with Dubček in Komárno, Kádár informed the MSZMP Central Committee that “all kinds of twelve-point programmes are formulated and submitted to the [KSČ] Central Committee. Their tenor is not hostile or directed against the Party but the initiative has been taken out of the hands of the Central Committee.”10 In other words, while Kádár’s concern for the re-establishment of Party control was similar to Brezhnev’s and Gomułka’s, the kind of danger Kádár believed this held was different and far more specifically related to 1956 then any ideas of shadowy imperialist conspiracy or literally imminent counter-revolution. The Hungarians, like the Soviets, clearly did not buy into Dubček’s idea that thanks to public enthusiasm and participation the KSČ was still in control in Czechoslovakia. In his dispatch to Prague following the Dresden conference, the Czechoslovak ambassador to Hungary stated that the MSZMP Central Committee did not agree with Dubček’s view and “had its own information indicating that the Communist party in the ČSSR had lost control of events and that decisions about the way things in the ČSSR should proceed were now being made in the streets rather than in the Central Committee”.11 But the reason why this required a warning from history, or Kádár, was that when such a groundswell for reform gathered pace outside of the control of the Party, it rendered the Communist leaders unusually vulnerable to nefarious pressure and compromises that would damage the cause of Communism and Party rule. It was a subtle distinction but an important one.

It is this idea that losing control exposed Party leaders, under the pressure of spiralling demands, to fatal compromise that brought Kádár’s 1956 analogies from the well-meaning demands that preceded 23 October to the uprising itself. And just as Kádár refused to ascribe intentionality to those whose calls for reform created danger, he likewise indicated that the leader most implicated in the uprising after 23 October, Imre Nagy, was unwittingly drawn into the events that defined the uprising. Unlike Gomułka, there was no emphasis in his comments on either counter-revolutionaries or their unmasking. Kádár’s formulation regarding Nagy at Dresden demonstrates the careful tailoring of a selective and unusual analysis of 1956 to suit his 1968 purposes because it is a characterisation of Nagy’s role and guilt that Kádár would not have made either in Hungary or in any public context. If we are to believe the stenographic account, he even did what he otherwise studiously avoided doing – using Nagy’s name: “Imre Nagy had not been a conscious counter-revolutionary aiming for regime-change; he was carried away by the events of 25 and 26 October and made common cause with the class enemy.” Contrast these words addressed to Dubček and his colleagues to the official descriptions of Nagy’s role in the uprising that particularly began to emerge in Hungary in January 1957. In the indictment of Nagy on which his trial was based, the former Prime Minister was accused of “initiating and leading” a campaign of subversion. The last official White Book that both literally and metaphorically closed the book on Nagy, from the perspective of the Hungarian government, was unambiguously entitled “The Counter-revolutionary Conspiracy of Imre Nagy and His Accomplices”. We have to go back, in fact, to November 1956 to find Kádár speaking of Nagy this way.

What is Kádár’s message in this altered characterisation of Hungary’s 1956? What were the “events of 25 and 26 October” by which Nagy was “carried away”? Unlike the events of 30 October, upon which a whole mythology of Communist martyrdom during Hungary’s 1956 was erected, the significance of 25 and 26 October hinged on a shocking massacre of civilians in Kossuth Square by Soviet and Hungarian forces, which left between sixty and eighty dead. This incident seriously undermined the Communist leaders and pressured them into a series of concessions to the emerging representatives of the uprising, which gave these groups and their demands an unprecedented degree of official legitimacy. Hungarian Party leaders met with representatives of the protesters and, on the 26th, the formation of a new government that signalled a shift toward their demands was promised on the radio. Here was the moment – in Kádár’s Dresden version of 1956 – that the initiative finally and decisively left the Party because Nagy, in compromise, made “common cause” with those whose agenda was not the consolidation and improvement of the Party, but its destruction. This is the danger that Kádár is holding before the Czechoslovak reformers as an ultimate consequence of forfeited control and lost initiative. “These events can turn any one of you into an Imre Nagy” is Kádár’s conclusion, not because he anticipates Dubček or Černík could become a counter-revolutionary conspirator – that is not the characterisation of Nagy in this particular warning from history – but because the logical conclusion of being led from outside the Party leadership is that an anti-Party agenda will prevail, leaving the well-meaning compromiser as a duped agent of his own destruction. Here, for the purposes of 1968, is Nagy portrayed by his executioner as primarily a tragic, rather than villainous, figure – betrayed by weakness rather than perfidy.

This was a 1968 characterisation of Nagy in 1956 (only made in private) that Kádár continued to implicitly apply to Dubček at the crucial meeting of the Soviet, East German, Bulgarian, Polish and Hungarian leaders on 8 May. “We should consider Comrade Dubček and those around him as Communists who have begun a fight against mistakes committed in the past”, Kádár told the Moscow meeting. “But they are waging this struggle with great naïveté.” And here, again, Kádár’s views of how Dubček needed to toughen up meshed with the Hungarian leader’s perspective on the roots of Dubček’s vulnerabilities and responsibilities in the errors of Novotný’s hard-line policies. “The current leadership of the [KSČ] is conducting a struggle simultaneously against the old mistakes and for the consolidation of the party’s position.”12 This is the classic dual task of de-Stalinisation that leaders across the bloc had faced and addressed in the middle to late fifties. But in the Brezhnev era bloc, it was generally no longer considered either necessary or politically correct, much to the misfortune of Czechoslovak reformers who had, before 1968, never had the same opportunity to address Stalinism’s crimes that other bloc counterparts had experienced. Nevertheless, as we have said, Kádár was uniquely able to represent a strategic middle position in Hungary, identified – to his benefit and strength – as an ideologue of neither the hard-line nor reform. This, as Kádár saw it, was Dubček’s opportunity as well. Therefore, when he urged restraint on Dubček he was pulling him into this middle position away from too close an identification with reform and into a pragmatically tighter control of events. This dual message is the essence of Kádár’s consistently simultaneous criticism and defence of the Prague Spring.

Therefore, on 8 May in Moscow, Kádár on the one hand emphasised that “it is perfectly clear that in Czechoslovakia at the moment there is a weak leadership which does not have the party in its control, much less the society”. Without control, as his Nagy analogy in Dresden demonstrated, there is no defence against being forced into harmful compromise. “Essentially, it is anarchy that prevails there, which is exploited by odd people of all stripes and even by the enemies of Socialism.” This was a characterisation that, as with Brezhnev’s analysis, Dubček and his allies would sharply dispute over the course of the Prague Spring. Nevertheless, on the other hand, Kádár resolutely concluded that “what is going on there is a process that began with a struggle against certain mistakes committed by the previous leadership”. Rather than merely focus on what the bloc leaders considered to be mistakes made under Dubček, Kádár attempted to redirect his colleagues’ attention to the context that “the problem in Czechoslovakia is connected with phenomena that date back much earlier and undermined the position of the Czechoslovak party”. Like Dubček and unlike the rest of the Warsaw Pact leaders, Kádár recognised that the legitimacy and authority of the KSČ had already been weakened by Stalinist leaders and that this problem could not be avoided in a resolution of the current situation.13

Logically, it was on this point that Kádár chose to specifically return to Hungary’s 1956, reminding the leaders again of both his essential middle position since November 1956 and the analogous position that Dubček had been and was being forced into. “Don’t think me a cynic, but in 1956 I said it about Hungary and today I’ll say it about Czechoslovakia: You have to do many things badly for many years for the situation to become so deplorable.” So this was Kádár’s case: If it was true that the present leadership of the KSČ was too weak and presently unable to seize control of the complex political situation, as Nagy had been in 1956, it was also true that there would have been no complex political situation were it not for the way that a hard-line regime had brought Communism and the Party into disrepute over many years, as had also happened in Hungary. Therefore, Kádár and the Hungarian Politburo could confidently conclude, “there is no counter-revolution under way in Czechoslovakia” and that “the forces of counter-revolution have still not gained the upper hand”. And, more significantly, Kádár could stake his position on the assessment that the Czechoslovak leaders “have to wage a struggle in two directions […] to fight against the enemies of Socialism, the counter-revolutionary forces, and the agents of imperialism, and to fight against former mistakes”.14

Therefore, Kádár’s position was a reasonable extension of both his own position within Hungary and the lessons he had gleaned from his 1956 experience. In 1968, he used those historical events of 1956 in a way that was distinct from his usual domestic and public employment of Hungary’s 1956 and in the service of both defending and critiquing the Prague Spring. Kádár had been able, in 1956, to be both a key figure of the Party that had compromised with the leaders of the uprising and the man Khrushchev turned to as leader after he crushed that same uprising because Kádár’s political identity had been formed as both a pragmatic, uncomplicated and loyal Party man and a credible victim of Stalinist oppression. He had consolidated power with the weight of the Soviet military behind him, but had also never lost that dual identity or strategic middle position within Communism in Hungary. But it would take an outside appreciation of Kádár’s unique perspective and an acceptance of the necessity and possibility of a similar strategic middle position in Czechoslovakia for Kádár to succeed in persuading either Dubček or the Soviets and the hard-liners of the Warsaw Pact to restrain themselves. The difficulty of doing the latter was particularly clear. Even as Kádár talked in Moscow of the two direction struggle that the Czechoslovaks needed to wage, Gomułka immediately retorted: “In fact, right now in Czechoslovakia there must be only one struggle: the struggle against revisionism and counter-revolution.” Similarly, Brezhnev was merely interested in identifying the so-called healthy forces in Czechoslovakia who would be willing and able “to undertake the struggle against counter-revolution”.15

The impediment to the acceptance of Kádár’s position was, therefore, that, while the likes of Brezhnev and Gomułka refused to even see the necessity of a two direction campaign, Dubček’s espousal of a two direction effort was obscured by his refusal to take the kind of action against the “right” in Czechoslovakia that would have made it credible in either Budapest or Moscow. Sounding very similar to Kádár, Dubček told the KSČ Central Committee plenum which gathered at the beginning of May that “contradictions and conflicts are quite natural in the current process and … are neither the product nor the consequence of the policy on which we embarked in January. They are, rather”, he explained, “the fruit of a long social crisis that has been maturing over the years, a crisis in which a host of unsatisfied needs and unsolved problems had accumulated without redress from the previous regime.” The resolution that emerged from this plenum stated clearly that the problem the Party faced was to protect the Socialist system from “either side”.16

This had been Dubček’s view and position all along; his success in helping to oust Novotný, in replacing him, and in attracting widespread support for reforms had all been based on the identification of hard-line errors and the determination to correct them. However, demonstrating sensitivity to the arguments that had been used to batter the Prague Spring from the outside, he followed this argument in May with a new emphasis, claiming that, since January, “the situation has changed: anti-Communist tendencies have grown stronger”. But any succour which this admission might have given to the Prague Spring’s critics was immediately mitigated by Dubček’s prescription that “the main way to struggle against right-wing, anti-Communist forces is a positive approach by the party that will marshal all committed, pro-socialist, forces in society to work constructively toward the progress of our society”.17 This was the position that Kádár could understand and agree with no more than Brezhnev could. It seemed to both of them, even if in different ways, as an abandonment of the sine qua non of Party leadership – control. It meant that rather than seeing Dubček as waging a two direction struggle, the Soviets in particular perceived the reformers in Czechoslovakia as only struggling in one direction – and it was not their preferred direction.

(The present chapter edited by Hungarian Review is from David A. J. Reynolds, Revising History, Constructing Counter-revolution: The Meaning of Hungary’s 1956 and the Definition of the Prague Spring, March 2016, unpublished manuscript.)

Notes:

1 Alexander Dubček, Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubček, trans. Jiři Hochman (New York: Kodanska, 1993), 94–101.

2 Tőkés, 22.

3 Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism, and Hungary (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 156–157.

4 Csaba Békés, “The ‘Prague Spring’, Hungary and the Warsaw Pact Invasion”, in M. Mark Stolarik, ed., The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968 (Mundelein: Bolchazy–Carducci, 2010), 206.

5 Piotr Wróbel, “The ‘Prague Spring’, Poland, and the Warsaw Pact Invasion: A Comment”, in

Stolarik, 136.

6 “Stenographic Account of the Dresden Meeting, March 23, 1968 (Excerpts)”, Navrátil, 67–69.

7 Ibid., 69.

8 Csaba Békés, “The ‘Prague Spring’, Hungary and the Warsaw Pact Invasion”, in Stolarik, 209.

9  Ibid., 209–210.

10 Ibid., 206.

11 “Dispatch from Budapest Outlining Hungarian Concerns about Events in Czechoslovakia after the Dresden Meeting, April 6, 1968”, Navrátil, 81.

12 “Minutes of the Secret Meeting of the ‘Five’ in Moscow, May 8, 1968 (Excerpts)”, Navrátil, 138.

13 Ibid., 137–138.

14 Ibid., 137–139.

15 Ibid., 140–141.

16 “Document 36: Czechoslovak Reply to the Warsaw Letter”, Remington, 238.

17 “Document No. 37: Alexander Dubček’s Speech to the CPCz CC Plenary Session, May 29–June 1, 1968, with Discussion by Vasil Biľak (Excerpts)”, Navrátil, 153.

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