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Wait … Eastern Europeans Chose the Soviets? Well, Yes and No — A History of Dissent from 1956-1968
In 1948, Soviet troops consolidated power over Eastern Europe with their takeover of Czechoslovakia.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet foreign policy toward East Central Europe significantly changed, until Leonid Brezhnev reintroduced some more hawkish policies.
In this blog post, I hope to scrutinize the position that the Soviets were entirely responsible for including East Central Europe into its sphere of influence, in the form of the Warsaw Pact (WP). For the sake of this blog, I will pay the most attention to Czechoslovakia because of (1) the scale of demonstrations and (2) Moscow’s attention to them.
In so doing, I will argue that the WP had at different stages fairly equal standing to the Soviet hegemon, depending on the leadership of the Soviet Union.
Under Nikita Khrushchev, the WP member states entertained more of an equal standing. Then under Brezhnev, Czechoslovakia and East Central Europe became unequally yoked once more, culminating with the joint WP and Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968.
So, was East Central Europe voluntarily unequally yoked? Well, let’s get into it.
