Prague Spring of 1968 and Disagreements in the Socialist Camp

Abstract

The article analyses the different views of the leaders of the socialist countries on the Prague Spring and the August 1968 intervention of fi ve countries — members of the Warsaw Pact — in Czechoslovakia. Although Moscow tried to present the military ac- tion to suppress the Czechoslovak experiment as a manifestation of common concern for the “salvation” of Socialism in one of the countries of the bloc, the intervention did not receive, for various reasons, the full support of even all those countries that were members of the Warsaw Pact (Romania opposed it, as well as Albania, who had long distanced itself from the eastern bloc). The Hungarian leadership supported the collective action with hesitation. The intervention of 21st August was not supported by the second communist power of the world — China — and the infl uential non-aligned socialist country — Titoist Yugoslavia. Special attention is paid to the attitudes of Ro- mania and Yugoslavia, which caused new problems in Soviet-Romanian and Soviet- Yugoslav relations. Although disagreements on the Czechoslovak question persisted, by the beginning of the 1970s, Soviet-Yugoslav relations, as the author shows, did not deteriorate further. As for Romania, where they feared a similar military intervention, its leader N. Ceauşescu as early as in the autumn of 1968 took the fi rst measures to nor- malize relations with the USSR.