impact on the political life of Czechoslovakia over the past five years.
Soviet Communist Party secretary, Mr Brezhnev (centre) together with Czechoslovak party leader, Gustav Husak (left) and President Svoboda (right) in Prague earlier this year SABATA FAMILY -If no news is good news, then things would appear to be going well in Czechoslovakia these days.
It is difficult to find even a mention of events in that country in the British press. Perhaps it is again business as usual, perhaps life has returned to 'normal"? That, at least, is the impression which both the present government of Gustav Husak and his companions in arms in Moscow would like to present to the Was the invasion, then, just an unfortunate interruption, a discordant note in 25 years of harmonious development towards socialism in Czechoslovakia? Such an impression might possibly have carried the day on this, the fifth anniversary of the invasion, but for one most regrettable leakage that reached the newspapers last week. In spite of the greatest security precautions, news escaped that the libraries of Czechoslovakia are being purged of anything that could rekindle the spirit of anti-bureaucratic struggle, the fight for socialist democracy in that country. The work begun with the biggest military operation by the Soviet army since the Second World War has still not been completed.
POLITICAL CREDENTIALS On 21 August, 1968, the armies of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia. Six hundred thousand troops in all. Within 24 hours, this enormous force had occupied all the main centres of the country. The military experts of the Russian leadership itself Instead the Russian leaders raised the bogy of counter-revolution as the political basis for the invasion. Twenty years after the overthrow of capitalism in Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev was trying to persuade the world that an army of 600,000 was required to invade the country in order to prevent the counter-revolution! And the task of that invading army was to confront and repress a united resistance movement by the Czech and Slovak people. What kind of 'socialist' development. over a period of twenty years could have led to such a confrontation?
WORSENING CRISIS From the early 1960s, Czechoslovak society was marked by a profound and steadily worsening political and economic crisis. Already in 1963, an estimated 57% of total machinery in the Republic was worn out; it was not rare, especially in the field of consumer goods, for the machinery in use to be 60 to 80 years old. Economic growth and productivity of labour were disastrously low. The bureaucratic system of planning and plant management led to the piling up of unsaleable goods that satisfied no real need of the masses, but only the abstract production targets communicated from above.
The economic crisis was produced by, and in turn called for, methods of bureaucratic repression which have been the traditional Stalinist answer to rising social discontent. By 1967, however, repressive measures simply brought the crisis to explosion point. Following