The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy

Matthew J. Ouimet

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807861356
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Since the sudden collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe in 1989, scholars have tried to explain why the Soviet Union stood by and watched as its empire crumbled. The recent release of extensive archival documentation in Moscow and the appearance of an increasing number of Soviet political memoirs now offer a greater perspective on this historic process and permit a much deeper look into its causes. The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy is a comprehensive study detailing the collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe between 1968 and 1989, focusing especially on the pivotal Solidarity uprisings in Poland. Based heavily on firsthand testimony and fresh archival findings, it constitutes a fundamental reassessment of Soviet foreign policy during this period. Perhaps most important, it offers a surprising account of how Soviet foreign policy initiatives in the late Brezhnev era defined the parameters of Mikhail Gorbachev's later position of laissez-faire toward Eastern Europe--a position that ultimately led to the downfall of socialist governments all over Europe.

1 Evolutionary Counterrevolution

The only thing as important for a nation as its revolution is its last major war. . . . What was believed to have caused the last war will be considered likely to cause the next one.

—Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics

IT IS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE IRONY which pervades the entire course of Soviet history that the road to Mikhail Gorbachev’s permissive bloc policies began with an effort to eliminate political diversity within the socialist alliance.¹ During the period between January and August 1968, the new Brezhnev leadership sought to define the boundaries of independent policy within the socialist alliance on the basis of ideological orthodoxy. Unlike the remarkable dismantling of communist monopoly rule that characterized the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring was largely an effort by loyal communists to reform the practice of “real socialism” in Czechoslovakia. As such, it presented the Brezhnev leadership with one of the more intractable legacies of the Khrushchev era and its policy of “separate roads to socialism.” To what degree could a member-state of the socialist commonwealth renovate its system and institutions without raising the specter of counterrevolution?

The Hungarian Revolution

From the vantage point of the new Brezhnev regime coming to power in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev’s failure to define the limits of “de-Stalinization” in Eastern Europe had resulted in serious instability over the previous decade that could not be allowed to continue. Nowhere were the consequences of this failure more evident than in Hungary. Beginning with the New Course instituted by Khrushchev and Georgii Malenkov throughout the Soviet bloc after the death of Stalin, each step in the direction of correcting past abuses created political tremors in Budapest. Central to the New Course, for instance, was the principle of collective leadership. Unlike the Stalinist-era practice of a single despotic leader in each socialist country, under the New Course the first secretary of the Communist Party was to be a person different from the man running the government. In this way Nikita Khrushchev assumed the post of Soviet first secretary in 1953, while Malenkov became head of the Council of Ministers, or prime minister. Accordingly, Moscow compelled Hungary’s Stalinist leader, Mátyás Rákosi, to surrender the post of prime minister in July 1953 to Imre Nagy, a longtime communist who had spent the years from 1929 to 1944 in the Soviet Union.

Upon assuming his new post, Nagy moved quickly to introduce sweeping reforms to cope with the consequences of Rákosi’s heavy industrialization drive. Light industry and food production were established as investment priorities. Peasants were given permission to dissolve collective farms if they desired. Religious tolerance was expanded. Police powers were reduced, and Stalinist internment camps closed. In all sectors of Hungarian life, discussions addressed the further democratization of Hungarian political life.

The Nagy reform program terrified the members of Hungary’s party apparatus, most of whom worked alongside Rákosi to oppose any meaningful change. Ultimately, another Soviet development decided this political feud. In January 1955, Malenkov was criticized at a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee for favoring light industry over heavy industry and for his agricultural policies. A month later Malenkov submitted his resignation, admitting publicly that “he had not been trained adequately for a role as a government leader.”² Khrushchev’s political ally, Nikolai Bulganin, then became the new Soviet premier. In April, Rákosi similarly overthrew Imre Nagy. The latter lost his position as premier, his seat in parliament, his position on the party Central Committee and Politburo, his membership in the Academy of Sciences, and his university lectureship all in one fell swoop as Mátyás Rákosi abandoned his reform program and resumed full control over the nation.

Rákosi’s removal of Imre Nagy in 1955 elicited strong protests from the people of Hungary, particularly the nation’s intelligentsia, many of whom openly attacked Rákosi for his excesses during the Stalinist era. Meanwhile, international developments added to their concerns. Following the conclusion of the Austrian State Treaty in May 1955, the Soviet troops who had occupied Hungary since World War II were to have left. However, on 14 May, one day before the signing of the Austrian treaty, Khrushchev concluded a treaty of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance with the East European states, including Hungary, that led to the creation of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (commonly known as the Warsaw Pact). As a result, Soviets troops had a legal basis for remaining in Hungary indefinitely.

Only two weeks later, Khrushchev was in Belgrade with Bulganin working to repair the rift that had existed between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia since 1948. During the visit, Bulganin and Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito signed an agreement outlining the basis for reviving mutual respect between their countries. Known later as the Belgrade Declaration, the agreement pledged that separate paths to socialism were permissible within the Soviet bloc. This development only added more fuel to the fire in Hungary, where Nagy’s supporters clamored for a turn from the Soviet model embraced by Mátyás Rákosi. Meanwhile, many of these same individuals strongly opposed the new Warsaw Treaty, demanding both the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Hungary and Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.³ In response, beginning in July 1956, Moscow instructed members of the Soviet military stationed in Hungary to prepare a top secret plan titled “The Special Army Corps’s Participation in the Restoration of Order on Hungarian Territory.” Code-named VOLNA (WAVE), it was intended to provide protection for the communist leadership in Hungary should popular unrest continue to grow.⁴ At the same time, Moscow worked to pacify the Hungarian political scene in July by convincing a reluctant Rákosi to retire for reasons of “hypertension” and move to the Soviet Union.⁵ However, the man selected as his successor, Erno Gero, was too closely identified with Rákosi to satisfy those in favor of a return to reform. Although Gero did restore party membership to Imre Nagy in October 1956, the former prime minister remained largely without any official influence.

It was the Polish “October” and Wladyslaw Gomulka’s apparent assertion of a “national communist” position in the face of Soviet opposition that provided the spark to ignite the Hungarian explosion.⁶ To many in Hungary, it seemed that Moscow might be abdicating its control over the socialist camp. Aware that this belief could have powerful repercussions in Hungary, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest, Yuri Andropov, met between 6 and 19 October with Soviet military leaders to encourage them to step up preparations for Operation VOLNA.⁷ Additionally, by 19 October the 108 Parachute Guard Regiment of the 7th Soviet Air Mobile Division was in a state of total battle readiness. By the following day it was boarding planes in Kaunas and Vilnius bound for Hungary.⁸ Soviet reinforcements were therefore already arriving in Hungary by the time protests began in Debrecen and Budapest on 23 October. Those in the capital city were especially vocal, involving about fifty thousand people, many of them students from Budapest Polytechnical University. They gathered at the monument to Poland’s nineteenth-century general Jozef Bem, hero of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, and proclaimed their solidarity with the Polish stand against Moscow. By evening, the number of people at the statue had increased to two hundred thousand, some of whom then moved on to topple the large statue of Stalin in the center of the city. Another group of protesters marched to the main radio building to broadcast a series of demands, including a return of Imre Nagy to power, the evacuation of Soviet troops from Hungary, and multiparty elections to the Hungarian National Assembly. It was there, at the radio building, that the first shots of the revolution were fired, most likely by state security guards who were on duty at the time.⁹

Soviet ambassador Andropov wasted no time contacting Moscow with the news that the situation in Budapest was “extraordinarily dangerous,” requiring the immediate introduction of Soviet military assistance. At this point, however, the Soviet leadership had not received any such requests from the Hungarians; thus Khrushchev phoned Gero immediately. The Soviet leader told his Hungarian counterpart that he would be willing to send additional troops to quell the popular uprising “if the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic would set it [a formal invasion request] down in writing.” When Gero pointed out that it would be impossible to call the government together, Khrushchev suggested that the president of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Andras Hegedus (then all of thirty-three years old), might draw up the formal request. With this accomplished, Defense Minister Georgii Zhukov received the order to occupy Budapest.¹⁰

Gero, meanwhile, managed to call a meeting of the Hungarian party leadership, and a number of personnel changes were made in an effort to calm the demonstrators, most important of which was the restoration of Imre Nagy to his former party and state positions. On the following day, the Soviets replaced the unpopular Gero with Janos Kadar, a man who had spent World War II not in the USSR but fighting in the Hungarian underground. Their hope was that the new Nagy-Kadar team would be able to work closely to bring about a negotiated settlement to the national crisis.

As the new prime minister, Nagy moved immediately to restore calm. Indeed, Khrushchev later spoke approvingly of the fact that “Nagy had demanded that the population restore order, and he had signed an order to establish martial law with the authority to take immediate action against anyone who resisted. Nagy had said that the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic had invited Soviet troops to Budapest, and that the good movement that the students had started had been taken advantage of by bandits who had stirred up trouble and shootings in the crowds, and as prime minister he demanded that arms be laid down by 1300 hours.”¹¹

At this early point in the crisis, Khrushchev appears to have had full confidence in Nagy, noting that “within the Hungarian leadership, both in the party and the government, there was a complete consensus of opinion. . . . Imre Nagy is acting decisively and bravely, stressing that on all points he is in agreement with Gero.” Indeed, Nagy had gone as far as to issue orders to the Hungarian armed forces on 23–24 October not to resist Soviet troops.¹² Later Soviet testimony suggests that this order was very effective. “The Hungarian army was strong,” Defense Minister Zhukov reportedly told a meeting of Soviet armed forces in 1957. “It consisted of 120,000 men, approximately 700 tanks, 5,000 cannons, and a few air force divisions and regiments. The Hungarians are not bad fighters, as we know from our experiences in the two world wars. This army ceased to exist in precisely five minutes [in the 1956 events].” Lieutenant General Yevgeny Ivanovich Malashenko, in charge of the operational section of the Soviet Special Corps Headquarters in Hungary, offers the more realistic appraisal that, while many units of the Hungarian army did defect to support the revolutionaries, most stayed at their posts and obeyed orders during the crisis. Ultimately, however, they played a decidedly minor supporting role to the Soviet forces in the pitched street battles of October and November. Indeed, for most of the October events, they simply remained neutral.¹³

Largely in the absence of assistance from the Hungarian army, then, Soviet forces fought a desperate battle against the revolutionary forces in Budapest for the days between 24 and 28 October. Hungarian communist historians would later portray their opponents as criminals; in fact, most were young, unskilled workers, along with some students, soldiers, and army officers.¹⁴ This presented a significant problem to those who claimed that the uprising was a counterrevolutionary bid by fascist forces to reestablish control in Hungary against the will of the working people. As one ranking member of the Hungarian Party insisted at an October 26 Central Committee meeting, the opposition was “a broad-based, mass democratic movement, seeking to repair socialism and put a stop to the distorted construction of socialism.”¹⁵ Although the Central Committee rejected this position, some members, like Janos Kadar, had to admit that “the party leadership had certainly come into conflict with broad strata of the population.”¹⁶ It did not take long for this realization to call into question the entire nature of the crisis. Meeting on 27–28 October, the party’s Political Committee (similar to the Soviet Politburo) voted to accept the “broad-based democratic movement” interpretation of events, a decision supported by visiting Soviet representatives Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov.¹⁷ Reporting back to Moscow, Mikoyan and Suslov recommended adoption of this new line in a bid to “win over the workers’ masses.” They were even willing to allow “a certain number of petty bourgeois democrat” ministers to be introduced into the Hungarian state leadership as a demonstration of greater democracy. There were, however, limits to what they would countenance. “From our part,” Mikoyan noted, “we warned them [the Hungarians] that no further concessions can be made, otherwise it will lead to the fall of the system.” Mikoyan was especially adamant about the stationing of troops in Hungary, warning that “withdrawal of the Soviet army will lead inevitably to American troops marching in.”¹⁸

Imre Nagy took his government’s concession to the airwaves on 28 October, declaring in part, “The government condemns those views that say that the present mass people’s movement is a counterrevolution.” That night he returned to the airwaves to discuss how “the events of the last few weeks have developed with tragic speed.”¹⁹ However, he then called for the formation of workers councils, for greater democracy, for the dissolution of state security forces, for state-approved pay raises, for a cease-fire, and for a Soviet withdrawal. For the moment, the Hungarian people were satisfied. On 29 October, Soviet forces in Budapest were ordered to cease fire. The following day they received instructions to withdraw from Budapest immediately.

Nagy now faced a jubilant public, convinced that they had successfully held off the great Soviet colossus. With the Hungarian Communist Party in shambles, Nagy found himself carried along by the current of public demands. Not long before, Zoltan Vas, a close friend of Mátyás Rákosi and a leading Hungarian Party member, had said, “Nagy is not an anti-Soviet person, but he wants to build socialism in his own way, the Hungarian way.”²⁰ By the time of the Soviet withdrawal, however, Nagy was no longer convinced of the compatibility of Soviet and Hungarian national interests. Rather, he had begun to express the opinion that satellite status would forever obstruct the building of socialism in Hungary. National independence, he felt, was a precondition for socialism, but it was inconsistent with participation in a bipolar international standoff. He concluded that the blocs should be dissolved. At the same time, he decided that the presence of noncommunist politicians within the government was not sufficient democratization in Hungary. Rather, the postwar political parties ought t...