20 February 2022 — 2137 mst
Will Putin reprise the Soviet Cold War
invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia?
By James Conner
Three generations ago, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia to reinstall pro-Soviet puppet governments. I remember both events and how they shook the west. President Joe Biden also remembers, which may be why he believes Putin has decided to invade Ukraine — and why he also believes that diplomacy may yet spare Ukraine a terrible beating and Russia crushing sanctions.
Hungary
Russia invaded Hungary in late 1956 to crush a freedom movement that began 12 days before. I remember watching on snowy black and white television newsreels of the fighting.
On November 4, 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush, once and for all, the national uprising. Vicious street fighting broke out, but the Soviets’ great power ensured victory. At 5:20 a.m., Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy announced the invasion to the nation in a grim, 35-second broadcast, declaring: “Our troops are fighting. The Government is in place.” Within hours, though, Nagy sought asylum at the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest. He was captured shortly thereafter and executed two years later. Nagy’s former colleague and imminent replacement, János Kádár, who had been flown secretly from Moscow to the city of Szolnok, 60 miles southeast of the capital, prepared to take power with Moscow’s backing.
The Soviet action stunned many people in the West. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had pledged a retreat from the Stalinist policies and repression of the past, but the violent actions in Budapest suggested otherwise. An estimated 2,500 Hungarians died and 200,000 more fled as refugees. Sporadic armed resistance, strikes and mass arrests continued for months thereafter, causing substantial economic disruption.
Czechoslovakia
Twelve years later, on 20 August 1968, Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring suffered a similar fate. Now a college student, I learned the news when a plenary session of a national conference I was attending in Manhatten, Kansas, was suspended momentarily while the presiding officer announced that the Soviets had invaded and arrested Alexander Dubček. Source: history.com.
…on the night of August 20, nearly 200,000 Soviet, East German, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops invaded Czechoslovakia in the largest deployment of military force in Europe since the end of World War II. Armed resistance to the invasion was negligible, but protesters immediately took to the streets, tearing down streets signs in an effort to confuse the invaders. In Prague, Warsaw Pact troops moved to seize control of television and radio stations. At Radio Prague, journalists refused to give up the station and some 20 people were killed before it was captured. Other stations went underground and succeeded in broadcasting for several days before their locations were discovered.
Dubček and other government leaders were detained and taken to Moscow. Meanwhile, widespread demonstrations continued on the street, and more than 100 protesters were shot to death by Warsaw Pact troops. Many foreign nations, including China, Yugoslavia, and Romania, condemned the invasion, but no major international action was taken. Much of Czechoslovakia’s intellectual and business elite fled en masse to the West.
On August 27, Dubček returned to Prague and announced in an emotional address that he had agreed to curtail his reforms. Hard-line communists assumed positions in his government, and Dub%#269;ek was forced gradually to dismiss his progressive aides. He became increasingly isolated from both the public and his government. After anti-Soviet rioting broke out in April 1969, he was removed as first secretary and replaced by Gustav Husak, a “realist” who was willing to work with the Soviets. Dubček was later expelled from the Communist Party and made a forest inspector based in Bratislava. Source: history.com.
Dubček died in an automobile crash in 1992.
Ukraine
Ukraine is slight smaller than Texas but has a population slightly larger than California’s. Subsumed by the newly formed Soviet Union after World War I, it had, as described in Anne Applebaum’s elegant and chilling Red Famine, it had a turbulent and terrible history as Stalin’s vassel state. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it declared independence and began an uncertain and awkward attempt to establish a western oriented, corruption free, democracy.
What kind of deal could persuade Putin not to invade Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union for the first half century of his life? Something along the lines of the Minsk framework, I suspect:
- An explicit or tacit agreement that Ukraine will be neutral and not join NATO.
- Autonomy for the Russian speaking breakaway provinces abutting Russia in eastern Ukraine.
- Reopening of the North Crimea Canal that supplied water to Crimea before Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
- Possibly a Ukraine-Russia mutual security pact that allows Russia to station armed forces in Ukraine.
Ukraine rightly would balk at such a humiliating outcome — but agreeing to it without a Russian invasion would be far less painful and damaging than agreeing to a similar or worse outcome following a bloody beating by Russia’s powerful and brutal armed forces.
If Russia invades, I think it will set up a puppet government, impose on Ukraine a peace treaty containing the provision identified above, then withdraw all forces except those manning newly established Russian military bases.
An invasion would bring down upon Russia severe sanctions including Europe’s no longer buying Russia’s natural gas, an export that provides foreign currency Russia needs to buy economically critical goods from the west. But an invasion would not send western military forces to Ukraine’s rescue. Were Ukraine a member of NATO, a Russian invasion would initiate a NATO military response that could set off World War III.
Sanctions would not be without pain for the west. For example, exports of fossil fuels to Europe could raise energy prices in the United States. I suspect Putin believes that pain eventually would cause the west to break ranks and once again buy Russian natural gas. He may be right about that, but thus far the west remains united in its resolve to not let a Russian invasion of Ukraine go unpunished.
Thank Joe Biden for stiffening the west’s spine and presenting a united response to Putin. Unlike Trump, Biden is acting as the leader of the western world, a role that other nations expect, need, and demand the most powerful nation on Earth to play. If diplomacy prevents a Russian invasion of Ukraine, thank Joe Biden for standing up to Putin. Had Trump won re-election, he would be embracing Putin in downtown Kyiv, surrounded by Russian tanks and the fires and smoke of a war he didn’t try to prevent.