Czechoslovakia

Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

… as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol. 

She’d come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.

Yevgraf Zhivargo, in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Some books can be unrelentingly bleak and brutal, so grim and graphic in fact that you have to push yourself to finish them. Cormac McCarthy’s odyssey tale The Road is one such. But one doesn’t often say that about history books. Usually it is time, ennui or both that cry “enough, already!” You set it aside, promising to return to your bookmark – but you never do. I persevered with English author and historian Anthony Beevor’s latest foray into Russian and Soviet history, a veritable catalogue of the horrors that men can inflict upon their fellow humans (and yes, the perpetrators are apparently exclusively male and the victims are males and females of many ethnicities). His previous, highly acclaimed books Stalingrad and Berlin 1945 are chilling, but Russia – Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 takes top prize. And finish it I did …

The following is not a review of Beavor’s grim opus as such, but rather a thematic compendium of thoughts and observations derived from or inspired by the book.

Most academic accounts and university courses focus on the ideological and geopolitical dimensions of the origins, rise and consolidation of the Soviet Union, and its ultimate disintegration seventy years later. General public knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the civil war which followed it is relatively limited and cursory, often derived and books like Mikail Sholokhov’s saga of the Don Cossacks, Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home To The Sea, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Indeed, it was these novels and David Lean’s powerful adaptation of Doctor Zhivago that first attracted my interest in Russia as a school student in Birmingham. I majored in Politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and Soviet history and politics were an important part of my studies. Between those days and today, I’ve read widely about Russia’s history, past and present, and I am familiar with the events, ideas and personalities, their role in the broader and longer tableau of history, and the reverberations that are still felt today.

I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. My tutor in Soviet Studies at Reading was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919 and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.

He would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.

You – Bolshevik recruiting poster 1918


Contemplating civil wars

A civil war can emerge from the ashes of a wider, ongoing conflagration when factions or parties dispute the nature and terms of the post-bellum status quo and fracture along political and ideological lines. Many civil wars have arisen from the ashes of a prior war when there are what are perceived as existential issues unresolved and the availability of weapons and materièl and experienced and discontented men to use them.

There is a view that civil war can retrospectively be seen as a crucible of nation, a fiery furnace through which the righteous must walk – an ex post facto rationalization of the Nietzschean paradox of “that which does not kill us makes us strong”. Abraham Lincoln verbalized this in his Gettysburg Address in 1863 on a battlefield where the fallen had been only recently interred. Franco made a similar play as he laid claim to the wreckage that was Spain in the wake of three years of carnage, but then petrified his riven, country in autocratic stone until his death many decades later. The Russian Civil War was not accorded such a nation-building ethos as it was viewed by the Bolshevik victors as the crushing of a counter-revolution against a new world already being born.

Given Russia’s vast expanse, long history of restive regions, and large non-Russian ethnicities – all a result of centuries of imperial conquests – there is always the potential for the disintegration of centralized control and fragmentation. There is a rich history of state collapse following wars, revolutions, system breakdowns, economic crises, and other epochal events. Napoleon’s empire collapsed after his disastrous march on Moscow and subsequent defeat at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1918, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires all collapsed in military defeat. Of course, people, decisions, and policies played a role, but ultimately it was war and the attendant economic and social crises that pushed these states over the edge into political chaos and often violence.

Once thing for sure, civil war, the Hobbesian “war if all against all” (Hobbes was thinking England’s) is undoubtedly the saddest, bloodiest and most visceral of all conflicts. I leave the last words to WB Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

See: In that Howling Infinite, A House Divided – the Nature of Civil War

All fall down …

Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shockwaves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-by shootings and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”

When the Tsarist Russian empire collapsed halfway through the First World War, it was the first of four great empires to disintegrate. By war’s end, the conflict had destroyed the German, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. But unlike these three, though the imperial house perished, the empire it ruled did not disintegrate. A handful of national movements, Finnish, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian succeeded in breaking free, but most of murdered Tsar’s realm emerged from the convulsions of world war, revolution and civil war within a new Soviet empire, one that still ruled millions of square miles and a multitude of peoples.

The Russian Revolutions – the two in 1917, and a failed rising in 1905 in the wake of the disastrous (for Russia) of Russo-Japanese War – and the civil war that followed can be said to have defined the contours of modern European geopolitics, setting the stage for the Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war. The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.

The USSR was officially declared in the Bolshoi Theatre on 30th December 1922. Most people find this slightly surprising, because we assume that the Soviet Union must have been proclaimed immediately after The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. In fact, it only came into existence after a horrendous civil war that killed an estimated 10 million people, in which the deep national and ethnic tensions inside the old Russian Empire had been laid bare for all to see.

Historian Orlando Figes says in his seminal book about the Bolshevik revolution, A People’s Tragedy, that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and what had started as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship.

In Russia, the revolution of February 1917 did not provoke a counterrevolution. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back was illustrative not so much apathy, as a feeling that there was very little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending. The overthrow of the czarist regime prompted a variety of reactions amongst the former ruling class: a resignation to events, bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the Imperial Court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together.

Soon after the November 1917 revolution, Lenin made it clear to the Bolsheviks that civil war was necessary to cleanse Russia of reactionary forces and old ways and to rebuild as a communist state and society. Moreover, he was confident that the Bolsheviks’ example would ignite revolution in the countries of Western Europe. German and Hungarian communists obliged, establishing people’s republics, which in turn invited counter revolution, the ousting of the revolutionaries, and reactionary military and police exacting bloody revenge on any leftists that could find.

The determination to resist only crystallized when the Bolshevik programme in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 polarized opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the Civil War itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12,000,000 people, the impoverishment of the whole country, and suffering on an unimaginable scale.

In June 1918 the Bolshevik regime was enjoying a brief respite from the rigors of revolution and civil war. Although surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, the Bolsheviks were in no immediate military danger. This welcome hiatus, lasting from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) to the collapse of the Central Powers at the end of the year, allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their political and military strength.

In an uneasy alliance with the Bolsheviks were leftwing Socialist Revolutionaries who still dreamed of a constituent assembly and the anarchists who regarded Brest-Litovsk represented the watershed of the Revolution. In coming to terms with the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks had paid a staggering price in territory and resources. But, more importantly, they had preferred to make a pact with the imperialists rather than attempt to propagate the Revolution through popular initiatives, in particular, by partisan warfare.

Shortly after Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks turned against their erstwhile allies. The Cheka (the successor to the Czar’s Okrana secret police and the precursor to the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB) ostensibly created to suppress counterrevolutionaries, was unleashed on the Bolsheviks’ critics on the left. There were fierce battles between Chekists and anarchists in Petrograd and many other Russian cities.

It was game on.

It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the civil war that broke out in Russia in terms of its territorial extent, the numbers of nations and would-be states engaged in the conflict, and the destruction and carnage it wrought to soldier and civilian alike. Nor the ongoing relentlessness. Western European invaders had been defeated in the past (and indeed, the future) by what Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who defeated Napoleon, called General Winter, but within the empire and its Soviet successor, weather did not stop play. Certainly, it complicated military operations, played havoc with logistics and supply-chains, and inflicted indescribable suffering upon soldiers and civilians. And the war went on …

The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918

Revolution and reaction

If Lenin was politically flexible with foreign powers, he was ruthless with his own people, including rival parties on the left. He grabbed power when the hapless provisional government lost its way in setting up a constituent assembly that was intended to be a democratic representation of all Russians. Lenin initially paid lip service to the assembly, while calling for power to go the “soviets” – people’s councils. In reality he had no intention of allowing any diminishment or oversight of his control of the Bolshevik party and, through its Council of People’s Commissars, the battered Russian state.

But no sooner had the Bolsheviks cemented their rule than they were fighting a civil war on multiple fronts against a mind-boggling array of enemies, stretching from revolutionary socialists  and anarchists to unreconstructed “White Russian” tsarists, nostalgic for a corrupt and flagrantly unjust regime and in between the Reds and Whites were the Greens or Partisans, mainly deserters from all sides who hated both Reds and Whites and attacked both, increasingly so as the war continued. And a range of foreign powers dealt themselves into the game to further their own strategic and ideological interests. [the featured picture of this piece is an idealized manga depiction of charismatic Ukrainian anarchist and Green Nestor Makhno, a larger-than-life figure who miraculous survived the civil way and died in his bed in exile]

The Whites were a confused, fractured and often dysfunctional coalition with rapid changes of command occasioned by personal ambitions and fluctuating military fortunes. White generals were committed to restoring the integrity of the Russian Empire, a self-defeating handicap that alienated potential allies on the fringes, like Finland, the Baltic states and Poland. Churchill underestimated this imperial obsession which prevented the alliances he wanted to defeat the Bolsheviks. The Greater Russia obsession also hampered efforts in the Caucasus where Georgians stirred regions like Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, giving Britain nightmares of Bolshevism spreading through Central Asia towards India, an obsession that continued through the twenties as described in Peter Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze – Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia.

Out on the edge of the old empire, White warlords endeavoured to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Many commanders spent more time terrorizing locals than fighting the Red partisans who were operating behind enemy lines across the war zone, creating a legacy and tradition the persist to this day.

The diffusion of opponents played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as their differences were so extreme that a unified opposition fighting force was never a viable option. But if the battle lines were often blurred, the hatred felt by the combatants for each other was nightmarishly vivid.

The White’s defeat in the civil war wasn’t for lack of outside moral and materiel support. It was due largely to their inflexibility, including their refusal to contemplate land reform until it was far too late, and their refusal to grant any autonomy to nationalities of the Czarist Empire. Their administration was so useless that it’s barely existed. Paradoxically, they lost for reasons very similar to the way the Republicans lost the Spanish Civil War two decades later. In Spain, the antifascist alliance of the Republic could not prevail against Generalissimo Franciso Franco‘s disciplined and militarized regime. In Russia, the utterly incompatible alliance of socialist revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists didn’t stand a chance against the single-minded Communist dictatorship.

A leftist libertarian with St. George’s Cross, and a Sister of Mercy nurse, 1916.

World War 1.2

It in many ways it became World War 1.2. The idea of a purely Russian Civil War is misleading simplification, prompting one historian recently to describe it instead as ‘a world war condensed’.

It was waged across European and Asian Russia, including present day Belarus and Ukraine and the successor states of the Soviet Union in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – from Warsaw and Eastern Europe to the Urals and eastwards through the vastness of Siberia’s forests, deserts and tundra to Vladivostok in the Far East, from the arctic north to Crimea and the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the borders of what in 1918 ceased to be the Ottoman Empire. Fronts stretched for thousands of miles and advances and retreats likewise. The Trans-Siberian Railway, stretching the length of the former empire from Moscow to Vladivostok, was almost six thousand miles long, and it’s tributary lines served as strategic and logistical thoroughfares for all protagonists who weren’t mounted like the innumerable Cossacks tribes and the nascent Red Cavalry, bringing to prominence the armoured trains that became a symbol of the revolution.

It drew in most of Russia’s contemporary neighbours and more far-flung nations, including The USA, Britain, France, Germany Italy and Japan – the latter providing the largest contingent, estimated by British Intelligence as some 85,000 soldiers, more than many of the various White armies. Combatants included soldiers from these countries, the British dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India, and Chinese and Mongolian troops. And a multitude of ethnicities fought for their own warlords, their national place in the sun or else their very survival. Caught up in the transcontinental maelstrom were Slavs, Cossacks, Tartars, Turkmen, Arabs, Azeris, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Buryat Mongols, Kalmyks (Europe’s only Buddhist nation) and Jews. White divisions were augmented in Siberia by Mongolian, Chinese, Uighur and Kirghiz mercenaries.

Various nationalist movements arose, successfully and unsuccessfully in all parts of the former Russian Empire. The aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Russian Empire saw Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and myriad other nationalities fighting for disparate sides, and Beevor skillfully frames the bizarre impact of this on the ethnic nationalist dimensions of the conflict.

The scale of military manoeuvres was unprecedented, as were the physical and supply difficulties over vast distances, and the extremities in climate, particularly the bitter Russian winter. The conflict became very much a cavalry war and indeed, a “railway war” notable for its armoured trains and the logistical lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway, protected for much if the conflict by the Czechoslovak Legion, a force of Czech and Slovak nationalists who having fought in the Czarist army, joined the Whites who controlled many towns in Siberia.

In addition to the Czechs, there was also a Polish Legion operating in the Far East. The commanders of both forces became increasingly disenchanted with the White officers who refused to countenance the independence of the border states and who shocked many with their brutality towards prisoners and civilians, and though thousands of miles from Europe, demanded repatriation – ostensibly by sea from Vladivostok.

Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the civil war was ambivalent. Though many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. In the wake of the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.

British regiments were nevertheless deployed in Siberia and in the Far East as well as the Arctic and Caspian Sea. Royal Navy flotillas blockaded Petrograd in the Baltic, floated up the Volga in the south and down the Dvina in the arctic north, and controlled the Caspian Sea and the waters around the Crimean Peninsula. The Royal Air Force deployed Sopwith Camels and sea planes in surveillance and surveillance missions against the Red forces, who British officers called the “Bolos”. And artillery units and armoured car squadrons were attached to the various White armies.

Wider imperial concerns were in play too. Churchill rang alarm bells as the Reds pushed the Whites back in Siberia and Central Asia, alarming even his reticent cabinet colleagues with prospect of Reds on the borders of the Raj. The Great Game still had over a quarter of century to run before the final whistle blew. In the Far East, Britain and the US, and Reds and Whites alike, were nervous about the designs imperial Japanese was revealing with regard to the resources and the empty lands of eastern Siberia, the island of Sakhalin, the pacific littoral and Manchuria. Intelligence reports revealed that Japanese forces in the region exceeded all others involved, including the warring Russians.

Pogrom

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of the lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions which they engender. The fighting ranged right across the Eurasian landmass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of the Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that archconservative politician VV Shukgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the whites what is a “moral collapse” – that they behaved as badly as their enemy.

There was nevertheless one subtle yet important difference. All too often, whites represented the worst examples of inhumanity, yet on that score, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable. It has been said that their ruthlessness has few parallels in recorded European history up until that time – believing that history was on their side, and that a new world was being created. The almost religious zeal with which they brutalized and killed combatants and innocents alike could be likened to the Albigensian Crusade in the early thirteenth century. [The Crusaders were accompanied by an official representative of the Pope, a French Cistercian monk named Arnaud Amalric. According to accounts written decades later, as the attack began, a soldier asked Amalric how they would be able to tell which Beziers townspeople were Catholics and which were Cathars. Some sources give the alleged quote as “Kill them all, for the Lord knows his own” or as “Kill them all. The Lord knows his own.”]

The focus on ordinary people also means their suffering is brought to the fore. And Beevor is unsparing in showing the chaotic violence of the conflict, and unrelenting in showing the sheer violence of both sides. Reds and Whites are both revealed as more than comfortable burning villages, shooting traitors, suspected or real, and torturing and massacring prisoners, and men women and children caught in the crossfire.

There were many instances of racist violence mainly on the White side – particularly towards Jews. The Whites’ antipathy towards Jews was to some degree due to their perception that most senior Bolshevik were Jewish, but mostly it was that old devil that never went away, antisemitism. The fall of the Romanovs and the ancien regime and the anti-Semitic pogroms they perpetuated continued. Retreat from the major cities brought out the worse in the Whites, with terrible massacres of Jews – although they were not the only perpetrators. Playwright And author Isaac Babel, attached as a correspondent and propagandist to the Red Cavalry on the Polish Soviet front in late 2020 posed the question: “what sort of person is our (Red) Cossack? Many layered: looting, reckless daring, professionalism, revolutionary spirit, bestial cruelty. The population await their saviors. The Jews look for liberation – and in ride the Kuban Cossacks”.

It is estimated that there were some 1300 anti-Semitic pogroms in the Ukraine during the civil war, with some 50000 to 60000 killed by both sides. There were pogroms in Belarus also, but these were not nearly as murderous as in Ukraine. A Soviet report of 1920 mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured.

Churchill was well aware of the effect of the pogroms on public opinion in the West and sought in vain to exert pressure on white leaders to restrain their forces.,

Terror begat terror, leading to greater acts of conspicuous cruelty. After a particularly hard-fought battle in early 1919, a young White horse artillery officer recalled “for the first time since the start of the civil war, prisoners were not shot. There were too many of them”. This did not happen often – and such was the brutality meted out to captives on both sides, shooting was actually a blessing. An Odesa women witness after the fall of the city to the Whites, “Urrrraaa! Four and a half months under these five-pointed star oppressors”. Two days later, Beevor notes, she noted that all the Jews were in hiding. When a city held by the Reds fell to the Cossacks, a a female surgeon observed that fearing a program, two Jewish doctors in her hospital wisely ran to hide in the attic.

Bolshevik leaders and commanders on the field eventually realized that brutality did not endear their cause to the general populace and moderated their behaviour. Some Whites too came to that conclusion, and sought to prevent it at least limit atrocities, but reactionary officers and uncontrollable Cossacks persisted in burning, looting, torturing and murdering, inflicting irreparable damage to the anti-Bolshevik cause. Beevor reports instances when allied forces actually fired on Cossack perpetrators.

The End

As the whites retreated, support for the red army amongst the populace grew, as did its numbers as deserters returned to its ranks encouraged by the announcement of an amnesty and as defections from the White forces grew. Peasants grew less reluctant to serve in the Red Army Fear that with white advances and victory, old landlords would reclaim their land. Success bred success. The Whites’ ranks thinned with desertions defections and the need to transfer troops to defend its rear from attacks by partisans and freelance militias units. The Cossacks, disappointed and tired of war, turned about and headed home to their stanitsas laden with loot. The size of the frontline Red Army was eventually twice that of the Whites, as it eliminated the White armies in the north and east and closed in on the last remaining area under White control, Crimea, where rearguards held out long enough to ensure the evacuation of 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea protected by the British and French navies.

In the aftermath of total Soviet victory, starvation struck the towns and cities across the land. Food requisitioning detachments scoured the countryside for supplies, their rapaciousness and brutality igniting peasant rebellions from Belarus to Siberia; tens of thousands of peasants rose in revolt, dealing brutally with any Bolshevik that came into their hands. The Red Army and Cheka reciprocated in spades with burning and looting, rape and torture, execution and exile to the emergent Gulag. Workers went on strike in the starving cities, and with the Whites vanquished and the civil war won, the call for democratization of Soviet rule grew louder.

And then, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet at the Kronstadt naval base, who’s guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and whom Trotsky had called “the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution”, rebelled. The regime responded with lies – that the sailors had been suborned and were now Whites – and that White forces in Finland would be crossing the ice to help them. When this didn’t work, I resolved to crush them without mercy, dispatching trustworthy forces against them.

At the end, of 16000 sailors and their families, most were able to cross that ice to final and. But some 3000 fought a last stand and died by assault or firing squad. One of the last cries of protest by the Kronstadt sailors was “All of Soviet Russia has been turned into a Russian penal colony”.

Thus ended the Russian Civil War in November 1920.

… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts.
British war and foreign correspondent Robert Fisk

Evacuees board ship in a Crimean portEpilogue

Epilogue … history repeats

Whilst there were many active fronts during the civil war, often simultaneously, extending for thousands of kilometers, around Archangelsk and Murmansk in the arctic, along the great rivers the Volga, the Don and the Dniester in the south, in the Baltic provinces, and in Belarus, and along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway. And as during WW2 and the present-day Ukraine war, opposing armies advanced and retreated across Ukraine. Kiev was occupied, often several occasions, by Reds, Whites and Greens, and finally, the Polish Army which invaded Russia and Ukraine in 1920 to reclaim and defend the independence of the onetime Polish state, long divided between the now destroyed Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The names of the war-torn cities are today tragically familiar. Mariupol and Melitopol, Karchiv and Kherson. Kiev, Odessa and Lvov are now Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Eastern Europe:

That was the year that was – the road to nowhere

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Well we know where we’re going
But we don’t know where we’ve been
And we know what we’re knowing
But we can’t say what we’ve seen
And we’re not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
The Talking Heads

To borrow from Boz, these were the worst of times, these were the strangest of times. So disillusioned were we with our politics and our politicians, so dispirited by the sad state of the plant, so fissured and fractured as a society, with our intractable culture wars, we retreated into own private Idahos, pulled up the drawbridge and settled in with our iPads and iPhones and our Foxtel with the vino collapso and watched all the fun of the fair.

The mellifluous but perennially entertaining Donald Trump had a bad year, and a resolute Theresa May likewise. Confounding critics, she endeavours to persevere as she steers her foundering shipm of State towards Brexit and China’s Uighur Muslims. Barbaric Da’ish had a bad year (which was rather a good thing) , as did the unfortunate Rohinga of Myanmar, and the long-suffering people of Gaza.. Resilient Bashar Assad had a good year, with a little help from his Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah friends, but the wars of the Ottoman succession grind on. Vladimir Putin and the fat conductor Kim Jong Un had an excellent year, courtesy of POTUS. Angela Merkel lost her sparkle but royal Markle sparkled, and the luminous Taylor Swift, all legs and lipstick, emerged from her apolitical closet to swing the vote against the Donald in the US midterms. Her trim gluteus maximus starredin a court case that typified a year that saw women stand up strongly against years of aberrant male behaviour.

The Australian parliament devolved into a circus of tantrums and turncoats as the Liberal and National coalition devoured its own in a year book-ended by smutty sexual scandals, whilst canny Labor kept its powder dry for what bodes to be an whopping electoral victory in 2019. We wished that our rulers and representatives would stop behaving like children and start running the country and governing it for all of us.and then the children walked out of school en mass and told us that when they grew up they’d do a better job. The circus clowns huffed and puffed and denigrated the young ones – which only served to embarrass them more for their paucity of vision and partisan division.

And so, to the year in review:

During what was to many observers a dispiriting year of division and destruction, In That Howling Infinite maintained its  watch  with an eclectic mix of commentary, commemoration, culture and comedy. It was a big year – some forty posts in all. So many indeed that decided to reposted my favourite top five – those that I most enjoyed writing – on In That Howling Infinite’s Facebook page. See these at the conclusion of this review.

In a December post, Free Speech, One Each, we expressed disappointment with the ignorance, naivety, and self-absorption of electorates, left and right: their lack of historical knowledge and of curiosity, an unhealthy and self-defeating habit of accepting facts, narratives and theories based upon their preconceptions and prejudices. Nowadays, it often seems as if the reasonable middle has been excised from political discourse, drained out by the shrill voices of the extremes with their identity politics, virtue signalling, and vested interests. Social media has exacerbated the situation as folk lock themselves into their own echo chambers, listening only to those with whom they agree, ignoring or even avoiding contrary opinions and perspectives. It is a self-defeating, delusional, zero-sum form of groupthink that erodes trust and goodwill and prevents the development of consensus and cooperation. Meanwhile, opportunistic politicians and commentators build their constituencies by appealing to the particularistic, even atavistic wants and fears of their followers. Too often this reduces things down to atavistic lowest common denominators. They literally seize the low moral ground. Peoples problems and fears are real enough, and do need to be solved or allayed, but too often they are gulled, manipulated and recruited by modern-day snake-oil salesmen and show-tent shysters.

It was with this in mind that we caste a weary and cynical eye over Australian politics and society, particularly the ongoing history and culture wars, beginning in January with the self-explanatory We’ve Got The Australia Day Blues , and continuing with Conservatism in Crisis, Milo Downunder, an alt-right love story, and the ongoing angst about the Ramsay Centre and its proposed university course on western civilization. Never in recent memory have so many words been printed about so little – at least not until the right’s last holy war. And so, there is The long, dark teatime of The Australian’s soul and its sequel The Oz’s lonely crusade. By year’s end, both sides appear to have run out of puff and the course will most likely end up in small regional campuses rather than the prestigious halls of Sydney and Melbourne.

Southern Discomfort.

The year’s leitmotif was the ongoing fiftieth anniversary of 1968, a tumultuous year for the world, and a formative one for myself personally. Stories of the events of that year are interspersed my own recollections – what I was doing at at the time, and what was going through my youthful head.  In Encounters with Enoch, I revisit English politician Enoch Powell’s controversial ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Then it’s Springtime in Paris as I recall les Évènements de Mai. And thence to Prague and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia with Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life. Finally, there was the year in review with Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited.

2018 was also the centenary of the armistice that ended The Great War. November 1918 – the counterfeit peace discussed how for many countries and peoples in Europe and beyond, the conflict and the bloodshed continued. We also shared a poignant, fitting tribute by Gerry Condon  to all the “doomed youth” of all wars with Dulce et ducorem est – the death of war poet Wilfred Owen

There were other anniversaries. The Wild Wood and the Wide World revisited Kenneth Grahame’s riverbank pastorale The Wind in the Willows 110 years after it’s publication. Ghosts of the Gulag, which followed on from an earlier discussion of film The Death of Stalin released earlier in the year, looked at the contribution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the fiftieth anniversary of The Gulag Archipelago. The Russian theme continued with Whoar! And Peace – a light look at the BBC’s recent racey adaptation of Tolstoy’s celebrated house-brick.

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of John Steinbeck inspired The last rains came gently – Steinbeck’s dustbowl Blues. This featured the complete first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, describing the unfolding of an environmental disaster. Two other posts also covered ecological bad news stories: The return of the forest wars in Australia, and Losing Earth – the decade we almost stopped climate change.

As always, the politics and people of the Middle East feature prominently in In That Howling Infinite. January kicked off with Ahed Tamimi – A Family Affair, a discussion about the young Palestinian activist and the first family of the resistance. Out of season, we visited the birthplace of the Christ child with O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie and tell the story of a border town that has existed since the beginning of recorded history. We considered whether an Israeli-Palestinian confederation was possible, and republished Israel author David Grossman’s A Fortess But Not Yet a Home, and a review of author Amos Oz’ Dear Zealots – letters from a divided land. Sadly, Oz passed on 28th December, his death and that of the indomitable Uri Avnery (see last September’s Seeing through the eyes of “the other’) in August saw the passing of two of the most forthright intellectual proponents of the receding ‘two state solution’. We also reviewed  the intimations, imperfections and implications of Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal”, an ostensible end to the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict but which is effectively Throwing Abbas under the bus. The wider Arab and Islamic world features in Islam’s house of many mansions, and, in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Yemen war, we consider the possibility of Sanctioning Saudi -1973 revisited.

Our history posts were as eclectic as ever. We continued our series of Small Stories with a profile of The Monarch of the Sea, Prince Roy of Sealand, the smallest country in the world, and The Odyssey of Assid Corban from a tiny village in Lebanon to a wine dynasty in Auckland, New Zealand. A video of University College Dublin’s celebrated Choral Scholars inspired a look at an old Jacobite song  Mo Ghile Mear, whilst the anniversary of the Irish rebellion of 1798 recalled another song and a host of personal memories: The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. We reviewed two historical novels. In Cuddling up to Caligula, we discovered a soft side to the controversial Roman Emperor; whilst melancholy Martin Sparrow’s Blues shone fresh light on the travails of Australia’s early white settlers. And a review of Ulrich Raulff’s Farewell to the Horse, a history of man’s long relationship with our four-legged friend, galloped away from me as we sang the song of the horse with The Twilight of the Equine Gods  – part history, part memoir, part prose-poem.

And that was the year that was.

And the top five?

Number five was that slap that resounded around the world – the story of young Ahed Tamimi and her family. Four, the tale of melancholy Martin Sparrow. Three, the Jacobite love song Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody. Two, the reverie of 1968. And, number one, my very, very favourite and indeed, a labour of love, The Twilight of the Equine Gods

Happy New Year. See you on the other side.

Our reviews of previous years: 2017; 2016;  2015

Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life

Paul Hemphill 9 Comments

Fifty years ago this month, on August 20, 1968, troops from the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance formed in 1955 between the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European nations in its thrall invaded Czechoslovakia to crush liberal reforms enacted by communist leader Alexander Dubçek in the brief era known as the Prague Spring. In ex post factum justification, the following month, Leonid  Brezhnev, General Secretary if the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, expounded what became known as The Brezhnev Doctrine: “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries”.

The Brezhnev Doctrine was meant to counter liberalization efforts and uprisings that had that challenged Soviet hegemony inside the Eastern Bloc, considered by Moscow as an essential defensive and strategic buffer in the event hostilities were to break out with NATO, the western alliance. In practice, it meant that  bloc members enjoyed but limited independence. Any challenge to the cohesiveness of the Eastern Bloc, whether, by either threatening the communist parties’ grip on power, or Lenin forbid, actually attempt to secede, the Soviet Union assumed  the authority and the power to define “socialism” and “capitalism“, and to act militarily to defend the status quo.

With Dubçek detained and Prague occupied, the country was subsequently taken over by a hard-line Communist regime subservient to Moscow. In 1968 alone, 137 people were killed by Warsaw Pact soldiers, and a total of more than 400 died during an ccupation of that ended only after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, when veteran dissident poet Vacláv Havel became the first and last democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia – he served from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 when he became the first President of the Czech Republic. 

The events in Prague in August 1968 are described and appraised in an recent, informative ‘long read’ in The Independent, republished below.

With friends like these…

But first, as part of a continuing chronicle of the events of 1968 in Into That Howling Infinite (see below), here are some recollections of my own.  

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was in many ways a seminal event in my own journeying. Until then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist (yes, a member – the only party I have ever joined!) fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding as I studied the history and politics of Russia and the Soviet Union, under the tutelage of exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely.

The summer’s events in what is now-bisected Czechoslovakia occurred against a backdrop of anti-war demonstrations in the US, including the Kent State shootings (“four dead in Ohio”), the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the tumultuous evenements de Mai ‘68 in Paris. These came as I was writing a dissertation on the Hungarian Rising of 1956 – a tragic precursor to Prague and to Brezhnev’s doctrine – and provided a pertinent background narrative and also, a coda for my story.

The shock-waves of the Prague pogrom rippled through my own world the following August when I was contemplating how to spend my summer vacation once I had earned enough money on the motorway construction site to pay for my travels.

I had a Czech friend – self-exiled Camille –  who encouraged me to visit his country that summer and to  drop in on his folks in Prague. Having completed my dissertation, I was pretty keen to visit such a historical and controversial city. So I booked a one-way ticket to Prague on British Caledonia – my first-ever aeroplane flight! It was my intention to visit the place where “Good King Wenceslas last looked out” and then head home to England via Austria and Germany. 

But, as they say, man proposes, God disposes. Or life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. The date I’d chosen to travel just happened to fall a year to the day of the Soviet invasion. Our turboprop plane headed east into what was still the Soviet Bloc – that had twenty yeqrs to run – and flew OVER Prague! The first we happy travellers – students mostly – knew was that we were circling to land in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.

So there we were, in passport control, without visas and accommodation, our itineraries awry, amidst border officials who were wondering who the hell we were and what the f@$£ we were doing there in their portal to the Iron Curtain. Eventually, things were sorted, visas issued, money exchanged (exorbitantly, as was the way in those days), and a bus provided to take us to a Communist Party Youth hostel, bleak, spartan, and crowded with enthusiastic, gorgeous Young Communist lads and lasses.

So there I was, in my first communist country. And, you know what, “they who know only England, who only England know”. I walked through old Buda and Pest, strolled by the Danube and the Sejm, the famous parliament building, walked the boulevards of my dissertation, and saw the scars of battle still there in the brickwork twelve years after the doomed Intifada of 1956. 

I’d heard and read about how the affluent and decadent west was an altogether different and better world than the drab, depressed and depressing cities of the workers’ paradises to our east. And yet, to my ingenue eyes, the look, life and life-style of Budapest appeared no better or worse than my Birmingham and Berkshire backwaters. 

Maybe it was because of my youth, inexperience, and background – maybe I hadn’t traveled enough to interpret and to judge. Apart from brief Boy Scout and schoolboy excursions into Europe-lite, Brit-friendly Belgium and Luxembourg, this was my first foray into distinctly ‘foreign’ lands with histories, cultures, governance, and world views quite different to the fields that I had known. 

I’d like to think that perhaps it is something intrinsically part of my software – an ability to adapt, accept, empathize, and, as far as it is indeed possible for a stranger, to become one with the scenery and slip into the machinery, and, to put it bluntly, take it all at face value.  As a “stranger in a strange land”, I accepted what I saw, observed, heard and learned, moved on – to quote American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti – like “a mirror walking down a strange street’. For this is how I traveled in thise roving years, leaving very little by way of words and pictures of my travelling. All I saw, heard, observed, felt and learned was mostly stashed away on my hard-drive to be accessed in latter years – waiting, perhaps, for the advent of social media, blogs and highly portable electronic devices. 

Given the circumstances of our arrival, and the atmosphere prevailing in the Bloc on the anniversary of Prague invasion, the authorities had given me a visa for four days only. I had therefore to depart the country quick-smart. I had effectively two choices of non-Soviet countries –  westwards to Austria, or south to what was then Yugoslavia. In a split second decision, I took the road less traveled – south to Szeged and the Serbian border. Wondering through the rural outskirts of Novi Sad, I was taken home by a pair of Serbian boys. I spent my first evening with their most hospitable family and slept that night on a bed of furs. “Novi Sad, Beograd” the lads had chanted, and so, instead of setting my direction home, I hitch-hiked south to the ancient Danube city of Belgrade.

In the Yugoslav capital, I resolved to keep going southwards. Over the next two weeks, I transited Yugoslavia to Thessaloniki, where decided to continue with my southern odyssey – to Athens and the Greek Islands. At journeys end, I hitchhiked back the way I’d come, only this time, reaching Austria via the Croatian capital of Zagreb. 

That impulsive decision in Budapest led me into new pastures. Back in Britain, an Indian summer gave way to bleak autumn and dark and damp winter, and my compass re-calibrated. I had been focused on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, on deep history and the Russian ‘soul’ (whatever that might be), on ideologies, betrayals, and Cold War skulduggery. But the clear Hellenic sky and the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean, the parched hills and pine woods of the Peloponnese, the dazzling light and the warm sun on my body, and the ruins and bones of antiquity sang a siren’s song. As Jack Bruce warbled:

You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever, but you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun. And the colours of the sea bind your eyes with trembling mermaids, and you touch the distant beaches with tales of brave Ulysses. 

My thoughts and dreams no longer ranged eastwards. My next journey took me back to the Mediterranean, and thence, following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great – the golden hero of legend, not the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” destroyer – through the Middle East and on to the Hippy Trail to India. There and back again, to quote JRR Tolkien, so fresh in my undergraduate canon. I traveled through lands of which I knew little, picking up fragments of history and heritage, parables and politics as onwards I roamed. 

Through the lands of antiquity and of empire: Greece and Cyprus; Egypt and Israel; the Levant (old French for the lands of the rising sun – Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan; Iraq before Saddam, and Iran under the Shah; Pakistan and India, who went to war with each other whilst I crossed their frontiers (a story for another time); and then back to Britain by way of Turkey and the fabled Pudding Shop.

I stood beside the great rivers of ancient stories – the Nile, the Jordan and the  Orontes, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges. I traveled though deserts and mountains, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. I climbed through the Kyber Pass, immortalised by imperial  endeavour and hubris, and the valley of Kashmir, a betrayed and battered paradise. I stood atop ancient stones in Memphis and Masada, Baalbek and Babylon, Jalalabad  and Jerusalem. 

On my return, I resolved to learn more about these lands, their peoples, and their histories, and this I did. The Middle East has long-since captivated and colonized much of my intellectual life,  Imbuing it with a passion that has found expression in my persona. my politics, my prose, my poetry, and my songs.

In these troubled times, much of the world I once traveled is closed to the casual and the curious. I mourn for those dear, dead days when the map of the world was a signpost and not a warning. But today, I go wherever and whenever I can go, and I feel a wonderful sense of homecoming when I touch down in the bright sunlight. I get the thrill of fresh adventure when I arrive in new places with their sights, sounds and aromas. I reclaim and revel in the curiosity and wonder, knowledge and understanding, awareness and wisdom that was born back there in Budapest. 

And that is how Leonid Brezhnev changed my life!

These are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here since time immemorial. We still see the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We can chart their decline and fall in the fortunes of their monuments and their mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines”. Histories carved in stone,  mysteries locked in stone, as “canyons and castles pass ageless and ageing and captive in time”.  Forward to East – An Arab Anthology. 

See also, A Middle East Miscellany

Here are other posts in In That Howling Infinite with regard to 1968:  Things fall apart – the centre cannot hold;  Springtime in Paris – remembering May 1968; and Phil Och’s Chicago Blues 

And the ‘sixties: Encounters with Enoch; Recalling the Mersey Poets; The Strange Death of Sam Cooke; Looking for Lehrer; Shock of the Old – the glory days of prog rock; Window on a Gone World; Back in the day; and, The Incorrigible Optimists Club

Tanks for the memory

The Prague Spring: 50 years on what can we learn from Czechoslovakia’s failed attempt to reform communism?

Mick O’Hare, The Independent, 19 August 2018

Soviet tanks arrive to crush the ‘Prague Spring’ ( AFP/Getty )

Fifty years ago this week, on 21 August 1968, the citizens of Prague awoke to find tanks on their streets. For some it came as no surprise. Student activist Pavel Kamenicky was sleeping. “At first I thought it was the university bus trying to find the right gear,” he says. “But I realised it was way too loud. I jumped up thinking, ‘they’ve come’.”

Czechoslovakia had dominated news bulletins throughout the summer after its premier, First Secretary Alexander Dubcek, had begun reforming his communist government’s structures earlier that year. But now, what had become known as the Prague Spring, or Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face”, was lying crushed beneath the tank tracks in Wenceslas Square.

The Soviet Union feared its grip on the satellite states of eastern Europe was loosening and its patience had finally run out. Czechoslovakia and Dubcek had fallen foul of USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev’s eponymous doctrine, espoused retroactively in justification the month after Warsaw Pact troops took to Prague’s streets: “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries,” Brezhnev said.

Soviet forces, alongside those of Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, crossed the Czechoslovakian border at 11pm on the evening of 20 August. East Germany withdrew at the last minute when it was realised that, just over two decades after the end of the Second World War, the presence of German troops on Czech and Slovak soil could lead to unintended repercussions. The following morning, the foreign soldiers were in the capital, offering fraternal support to loyal comrades in Czechoslovakia.

Soviet tanks had intervened in post-war eastern Europe before. Towards the end of October in 1956, Hungarians revolted against their Marxist-Leninist government and declared a new administration, withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and disbanding the communist-run state security apparatus. But barely two and half weeks later the western world watched aghast, but impotent, as Soviet forces entered Budapest to restore one-party rule.

Yet there had been real hope that Czechoslovakia could be different. 1968 was, of course, a year of revolution and political protest across the planet. But the Czechoslovak version was in many ways a rather gentler form of dissent. Dubcek had never set out to overthrow communism, merely to reform it.

The nation’s planned economy had been in decline throughout the 1960s. Dubcek had replaced previous first secretary, Antonín Novotný, in January 1968 and had attempted to liberalise communist party rule by tolerating political institutions and organisations not directly controlled by the party. Even multi-party government was mooted. More repressive laws were loosened, travel was made easier and freedom of expression, especially in media, accepted.

Leonid Brezhnev shares a joke with US president Richard Nixon in 1973 (AP)

Unwittingly though, Dubcek had created either a vicious or a virtuous circle, depending on one’s political viewpoint. Reform emboldened progressives and led to demand for further liberalisation. Dissidents, especially students, but also the wider population in numerous Soviet satellite nations, began to push for similar freedoms.

He was wrong: 2,000 tanks and a 250,000-strong Soviet-led force of men invaded on Brezhnev’s orders; 137 Czechoslovak civilians were killed resisting; and, pleading with his citizens not to fight back, Dubcek was flown to Moscow.

Some citizens used the power of argument to voice their opposition, engaging troops in discussion to make their point – until photographs were used in Soviet propaganda to suggest the locals were making friends with the invaders. Dubcek returned as little more than a puppet of the Soviet regime and was replaced early in 1969. Half a million of his supporters were expelled from the Communist Party.

Leaders of communist countries meeting in Poland in 1955 to sign the mutual defence treaty commonly known as the Warsaw Pact (AFP/Getty)

The members of Nato, especially the United States – already involved in conflict in Vietnam and aiming to broker a disarmament agreement with the Soviet Union – condemned the invasion but had no intention of intervening. In the aftermath, 300,000 Czechoslovaks, many highly qualified, emigrated to the west, although the authorities soon clamped down on their ability to leave.

The period between 1969 and 1971 is known in Czechoslovak history as the era of “normalisation”. The country returned to the Soviet fold; opposition both within and without the country faded; and the Communist Party returned to the hardline position it had held before the onset of the Prague Spring.

So, 50 years later, what does the anniversary offer today’s Europeans still struggling with political upheaval and, certainly in the east of the continent, getting to grips with increasingly nationalistic, repressive governments? Apart from the sense of betrayal felt by Czechs and Slovaks, both towards their own government and their supposed allies, and the reminder that totalitarianism brooks no dissent, are there lessons to be learned from the Prague Spring; and what became of Dubcek, its architect? Unsurprisingly the legacy is complex – as legacies are wont to be.

Perhaps the key to understanding Czechoslovakia in 1968 is that, unlike similar uprisings against the establishment, both in communist Europe but also elsewhere around the world – witness the Arab Spring of 2010 and 2011 – the Prague Spring was not a movement of only liberals, students (among other young people) and political intellectuals fighting a conservative establishment. It had wider cross-generational support drawing on the strong traditions of democracy that had developed in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, after its formation in 1918.

Czech-born writer Milan Kundera, author of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, who lived in exile in France from 1975, argued that it was a movement falling back on the “best traditions” of Czechoslovakia’s brief history: a “higher quality of democracy not based on the ills associated with capitalism”. By contrast, the later revolutions that would finally overthrow communism in Europe at the end of the 1980s were driven as much by the “victory” of Reaganism, free-market economics and monetarism as they were by the right to vote freely and express opinions openly.

It has become fashionable, with hindsight, to blame the suppression of the Prague Spring on “communism”. But let it not be forgotten that it was fervent communists who were carrying out Czechoslovakia’s reforms. Whether the Prague Spring was a “purer” revolution than those that followed is probably an argument for political ideologues alone, but a glance across the border towards Viktor Orban’s Hungary shows that the spoils of the “freedom” won in 1989 might not always manifest themselves with good intent.

Two decades after Dubcek’s attempt to reform communism from within, the then premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, issued an apology on behalf of all Warsaw Pact nations, stating that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was a mistake, and that the USSR should never have interfered in the internal affairs of another sovereign state. (It should be noted that both Romania and Albania had refused to participate in the 1968 intervention; and Albania ultimately withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in the aftermath.)

It was the culmination of a number of apologies from Warsaw Pact nations throughout 1989 and it seems reasonable to argue that there was a direct link between these acknowledgements and the overthrow of communist governments in East Germany, Poland, Romania and, most poignantly, Czechoslovakia, that same year. Protesters realised that their actions would no longer lead to Red Army interference, and the Soviet bloc of eastern European nations had replaced their communist rulers within months of one another.

                          Vaclav Havel,was elected first president of Czechoslovakia  (Getty)

Perhaps 1968 showed us, if 1956 had not already, that the post-war façade of communist interdependence, internationalism and fraternal allegiance was broken, if indeed it had ever been more than a charade at all. The alliance was built on flimsy foundations and maintained by suppression. Czech historical novelist and writer Ivan Klíma has said that – for good or ill – the most important legacy of the Prague Spring was the delayed but ultimate destruction of the international communist movement.

But warnings must still be heeded. In a world where a nationalistically invigorated Russia under Vladimir Putin increasingly looks beyond its borders for a bulwark against Nato and the EU, the demise of communism and the Warsaw Pact does not mean a concurrent diminishing of militarism: the annexation of Crimea by Russia has shown us that very clearly. And – even putting aside the Brexit debate – illiberal governments in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary threaten to overturn the European Union’s free-market liberal consensus. The threat, while changed in ideology, still lurks.

And what of Dubcek? After he was ousted as  first secretary he worked for the forestry service near Bratislava, in his native Slovakia. And after the final overthrow of communist rule in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution of 1989 he briefly returned to political prominence as chairman of the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly, and later as leader of the Slovak Social Democrats.

Pavel Kamenicky, now 70, says: “We were idealistic. But Dubcek should have realised what was going to happen. Did he really think Brezhnev would shrug and say ‘carry on’?” On the other hand, Dubcek’s son Pavol has defended his father’s position, once saying: “I don’t know if people really understand what it meant to have your fate in Brezhnev’s hands.”

For right or wrong, however, Dubcek had in truth become more or less a political irrelevance by the time of the Velvet Revolution. Václav Havel, the poet and statesman who played a prominent role in the events of 1989 and became Czechoslovakia’s first post-Soviet era president, said: “Dubcek is a symbol of our nice memories, but nobody thinks he can influence the situation now.” Dubcek himself rarely spoke of 1968.

Although a Slovak, Dubcek was opposed to the 1993 split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia and maintained his belief in the idea of a single, united nation. He was killed in a car crash in 1992, declared in an official investigation to be an accident. Conspiracy theories abound and even today 50 per cent of those Slovaks who know of him believe his death was almost certainly not an accident.

The crushing of the Prague Spring continues to echo down the ages, its eventual legacy yet to be determined.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/prague-spring-anniversary-czechoslovakia-soviet-union-wwii-czech-republic-slovakia-a8485326.html