The Brezhnev Years: Dithering at the Top and Revolt from Below

Abstract

The invasion of Czechoslovakia meant that the Soviet Union had imposed a veto on radical reform anywhere in Eastern Europe. The limits of the Eastern European countries’ sovereignty were now clearly spelled out. On 26 September 1968 Pravda carried an official statement on the ‘Sovereignty and International Obligations of the Socialist Countries’. This attacked the doctrine of non-intervention into the internal affairs of other states as ‘legalistic formalism’, and added that ‘sovereignty should not be understood abstractly’. The independence of the People’s Democracies did not include the right to get rid of socialism; every communist party was responsible before its own people and the whole communist movement for the maintenance of the achievements of socialism. ‘The weakening of any member of the world socialist system … would strike directly at all the socialist countries, and they could not stand by indifferently in this situation.’¹