Soviet Security and the Role of the Military: The 1968 Czechoslovak Crisis

Karen Dawisha

British Journal of Political Science, 1980, vol. 10, issue 3, 341-363

Abstract: One of the major issues surrounding the perennial debates over Soviet alliance management is whether the Soviet leadership considers its military position vis-à-vis Western Europe to be a more important determinant of policy than the political stability of its East European allies. Moscow showed itself willing to use force to achieve its objectives in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but analysts are not agreed either on the nature of those objectives or on the wider priorities governing Soviet policy. Before 1968 it was widely believed that security considerations relating to the unity and strength of the Warsaw Pact dominated Soviet thinking. It was assumed that East European regimes would be allowed to undertake some, primarily economic, reforms provided they did not repeat the mistake made by the Hungarians in 1956 of calling for a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. This belief in the supremacy of strategic considerations led the Czechoslovaks, and many Western analysts, to miscalculate both the extent of the Soviet Union's ideological disagreement with the reform movement and the interrelationships between political and strategic considerations.

Date: 1980
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