CZECHOSLOVAKIA INVADED

Four years ago, late on the night of August 20, 1968, heavily armed units of the Soviet, East German and Polish armed forces rolled into Czechoslovakia and took up position throughout the country.

They met with universal hostility, but little active opposition. Prague radio had called on the population not to resist.

So ended the brief period of liberal reforms in which a wing of the bureaucracy, led by Alexandr Dubcek, tried to give itself 'a human face'.

Unable to call on the working class for a struggle against the bureaucracy, of which it was itself a wing, the Dubcek leadership found itself swept aside. Direct nominees of the Kremlin were brought back into power.

The Warsaw Pact troops were told that they were being sent to Czechoslovakia to forestall a capitalist restoration and outside intervention. There was never any danger of this kind. Indeed, Washington had been informed of the invasion and neither it nor its NATO allies had any intention of intervening in the country.

The invasion was aimed against the working class. The armoured columns occupied Prague and the industrial centres. They did not take up positions on the frontiers with the capitalist countries where strong units of the Czech army were already stationed The troops were required in order to prevent the weak and vacillating Dubcek regime from being swept aside by a great upsurge of the working class. It was no accident that the intervention followed so soon after the events in France of May and June in which the Communist Party had played a counter-revolutionary part in preventing the General Strike from becoming a struggle for power.

Whatever propaganda use the imperialist media made of the invasion, the capitalist states were happy to see the Warsaw Pact armies forestall a revolution which would have broken the existing political equilibrium in Europe and threatened capitalism in the What is the projected European Security Pact about if it is not to enable the bureaucracy to remain master in its own house and deal with the working class in whatever way it thinks fit? The meaning of 'peaceful co-existence' was powerfully demonstrated in August 1968.

Behind the events of August was long-maturing crisis which had erupted in Czechoslovakia in the Spring of 1968.

For many years after the coup of 1947, which established the Communist Party in power, Czechoslovakia appeared to be the model Stalinist country of Eastern Europe. Already highly industrialized and comparatively prosperous, it was under the control of a seasoned bureaucracy led by Clement Gottwald and later by Antonin Novotny.

The events of 1953 in Berlin, and even the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the events in Poland in the same year, had little effect on Czechoslovakia. The men of the Stalinist apparatus appeared to be firmly in control. They had risen to power after the massive purges of the 19491954 period and continued to rule through censorship and the secret police.

There was a deep fear among Party and government leaders that any 'liberalization' would bring up the question of the trials and purges which swept the country after 1948. Ordered by Stalin, supervised by the Soviet security police and carried out by the all-powerful Czech secret police, the purges were carried through with great thoroughness.

Thousands of local communists were imprisoned or shot. Show trials were organized on the lines of the Moscow Trials of the 1930s. Principal defendant in the main trial was Rudolph Slansky, who had himself built up the security apparatus which was later to arrest and frame him.

The men who held power under Gottwald and Novotny were guilty men. They had signed the death warrants of many of their former Party comrades that they knew to be innocent. They had climbed into their jobs over a pile of corpses. They knew that the trials were frame-ups. They knew that the purges were completely unjustified. They feared the anger of the masses. Beneath the exterior of calm which Czechoslovakia presented in the 1960s to the outside world or the casual visitor a deep-going ferment was taking place. It first of all found expression among the students and intellectuals. It spread to wider sections of the youth and began to affect the working class, even those most loyal to the Communist Party.

The Party had, after all, deep historic roots in the Czech working class which went back to the 1920s. The strength of this working class, in a highly - industrialized country, was a force to be reckoned with.

What helped to bring the welling discontent and criticism of the Stalinist regime to the surface was the virtual economic breakdown after 1936. This was the fruit of 'socialism in one country' and lavish adherence to the Soviet model of planning. well as in the universities. Once the Novotny regime's failure to make any substantial changes became apparent the dissent and criticism began to assume a sharper form. By the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968 the solid mass of the Czech working class began to move into action. Novotny was pushed aside and hopes for a change were focused on For a few months, especially after March 1968, the new Dubcek regime made a series of important concessions. There was a new atmosphere of free discussion and debate, a pre-revolutionary ferment which caused increasing alarm in the Kremlin.

Representing a wing of the bureaucracy which had no intention of relinquishing power and wishing to find a modus vivendi with the Kremlin, Dubcek soon reached the end of his possible concessions. But the working class was not only just beginning to appear on the scene as an independent force.

It turned, as might have grant them rig on paper but exercised in pr The Dubcek thrust into contradictory the demands f class on the ( growing hosti on the other. T of August 20, wal vuu. the hope that Moscow's con way out of th At all time the working vented its independent vasion brutall hopes. Carted he was forced protocol rescir of the 'Prag hts which existed had never been ractice. ‹ leadership was an increasingly position, facing rom the working one side and the ility of Moscow :Intil the invasion Dubcek lived in ATTA • THUANAR L he could, with isent, find some e impasse. es he held back class and premergence as an force. The inly destroyed his I off to Moscow I to sign a secret ading the reforms socialism with forced to give up their courses.

The sorry story of arrests and victimization still goes on, four years after the invasion. That invasion was condemned, in words, by a number of communist parties, including the Communist Party of Great Britain, which had expressed their support for Dubcek. They nothing today, to oppose the repressions. . The . Czech workingn class showed its strength in 1908 by defying the bureaucracy, by supporting the secret 14th Congress of the Communist Party held under conditions of occupation in August. riots'.

The working class of the capitalist countries has powerful allies in the working class of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But only revolutionary parties on the programme of the Fourth International can defeat their common enemies-the bourparasitic bureaucracy. In a statement issued immedialtry diler LIC atalxr aftar the invacion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 the Political Committee of the Socialist Labour League issued a statement under the slogans: Arm the Czech workers! No capitalist restoration! Withdraw the Soviet troops!

Speaking of Dubcek and the streets of Prague in August 1968.

situation. Only the political revolution of the working class can defend the nationalized property in Czechoslovakia...

The working class in Britain must support the struggle of the Czechoslovak workers against Stalinism. Only through that struggle will they be able to secure the socialist property Our support for the Czech workers is support against imperialism, against all those anti-communists who are given ammunition by the Soviet intervention. In the event of any capitalist inter-