Under An Iron Heel
Posted on August 21, 2008
40 years ago troops from the USSR and vassal states (not including the German Democratic Republic for obvious reasons) invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the ‘Prague Spring’ under the iron heel of the Stalinist boot. The invasion came just 18 days after the Bratislava Declaration in which representatives from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Hungarian People’s Republic, People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Polish People’s Republic, German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovak Socialist Republic had pledged
unwavering loyalty to Marxism-Leninism, efforts to educate the masses in the spirit of the ideas of socialism and proletarian internationalism, and a relentless struggle against bourgeois ideology and against all anti-socialist forces all guarantee success in strengthening the positions of socialism and thwarting imperialist conspiracies.
What the declaration failed to mention was that the ‘anti-socialist forces’ were in residence in the Kremlin, that instead of ‘proletarian internationalism’, the interests of the Eastern Bloc or Warsaw Pact states were subordinated to those of the USSR, and that the Stalinists themselves had formed ‘imperialist conspiracies’ against workers’ revolutions in Spain, Germany, Hungary and then Czechoslovakia. With safeguards in place after the near armageddon of 1962, the bureaucratic apparatus had much less to lose in the stalemate with NATO than it did if the contagion of revolution spread from the satellite states to the Rodina (Motherland), inspiring workers to renewed struggle against their ruling class and a reinvigorated proletarian revolution. The ’stand-off’ with the US and its allies — deals done, communications through ‘back channels’ and acting through ‘proxies’ instead of direct confrontation — ensured business as usual, chauffeur-driven in armoured ZiLs along nomenklatura roads to nomenklatura shops. On both sides of the Inner German Border, huge military-industrial complexes kept spooks, soldiers and scientists in sausages and beer. For all the American bleating about the Soviet Union exporting ‘revolution’ the Stalinists were interested in exporting nothing but the dead hand of the bureaucracy.
In the event, Alexander Dubček was sacked and Czechoslovakia’s ruling élite fell into line behind their Soviet masters. There was no socialist revolution and Czechs and Slovaks endured another 21 years of occupation at the behest of an increasingly ossified bureaucracy, independent worker’s organisations operating underground and in secret. The USSR’s élite passed into anonymity and retirement, to be replaced by the Siloviki, formerly their juniors in the military and security services. Where Russia once paid lip service to socialism the new ruling class has, without apology, made intrinsic to itself nationalism and naked chauvinism — not to mention imperialist adventures.
