principle that there could be discussion within the
party but that there could be no anti-party: only
one party was allowed.
The Hungarians had broken both conditions
in 1956. A decade later, in 1968, the Czech lead-
ership of Alexander Dubcˇek appeared to the
Kremlin to be following the same dangerous
course. Dubcˇek’s ‘Prague Spring’, granting great-
er freedom to press and radio, and promising
economic reform, was intended to modernise
socialism, to create ‘socialism with a human face’,
turning it into an attractive system of government
rather than a repressive one to be feared. But
Dubcˇek’s reforms appeared to be heading towards
the forbidden shores of ‘democracy’, a multi-party
system that would reduce the power of the
Communist Party machine. The reforms were
immensely popular, and started the process of
replacing control from above by support and con-
sent from below. Was Czechoslovakia only a step
away from abandoning the Soviet alliance for the
West? The Kremlin’s fears were exaggerated; with
the experiences of Hungary before them, the
Czech leadership understood that they could not
afford to denounce the fraternal Soviet alliance.
Despite the international outrage that would
ensue, Brezhnev and the Politburo, after repeated
altercations with the Czech leadership and debate
among themselves, opted for armed intervention.
The Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet tanks on
20 August 1968. It was a clear indication of the
Kremlin’s continued paranoia about safeguarding
the frontiers of the USSR. The figleaf of interven-
tion by all the Warsaw Pact allies – Romania alone
refusing – only made a bad situation worse when
East German troops entered Prague thirty years
after Hitler’s Wehrmacht had crossed the frontiers
of a democratic and sovereign Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet justification was embodied in the
so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that
socialist states (that is, communist) had the right
to intervene if a neighbouring ally threatened to
revert to capitalism. That, it was claimed, repre-
sented a danger to all; by Soviet definition this
unnatural course could only be the result of inter-
nal and external Western subversion.
Little more than a decade after the Prague Spring
and the reimposition of one-party communist rule
in Czechoslovakia, the Politburo faced what
looked like a similar challenge to the Brezhnev
Doctrine in Poland.
The economic failure of the Polish communist
regime in the 1970s became evident when the
dash for modernisation based on heavy industries
and Western technology landed the regime deeply
in debt. Agriculture, though largely in the hands
of small peasant farmers, lacked the investment
necessary to make it productive. To provide food
at prices the urban population could afford on
their low wages required heavy state subsidies.
The huge rise in oil prices in 1973–4 added
to the country’s woes. When the government
attempted to improve its economic management
by cutting food subsidies, workers marched in
protest at the ensuing price rises. From 1976
onwards, despite arrests and repression, the Polish
masses could no longer be totally subdued by the
regime. Intellectuals led by Jacek Kuron ́ set up a
Workers’ Defence Committee, demanded the
release of arrested workers, and insisted on truth
instead of lies, the reality of justice in place of
rhetoric and propaganda. Polish nationalism was
further encouraged by the visit of the Polish Pope
John Paul II in 1979. An alliance formed with the
workers by Catholics, intellectuals and other
opponents presented a powerful challenge to the
regime. Another rise in food prices in the summer
of 1980 sparked off strikes and a nationwide
political confrontation.
It began in the Lenin Shipyard at Gdan ́ sk. An
electrician, Lech Wa∏e ̧ sa, emerged to become a
national hero. The striking workers at Gdan ́sk
proved more determined than the communist
leadership. The Gierek regime, forced into negoti-
ations, effected a tactical retreat, promising to
allow the setting up of free trade unions, the right
to strike, freedom of the press, and the right of reli-
gious organisations to propagate their faith. The
new free trade union was called Solidarity and soon
attracted 9 million members, presenting as it did
an alternative organisation to the Communist
Party and to communist satellite organisations.
Though it had in theory accepted the ‘leading role
of the Communist Party’ and claimed not to be a
political party, it nonetheless represented a political
challenge to the communist state. The Polish