Revolution against revolution.

Fifty years ago, Chamberlain 'solved' the Czech problem.

Forty years ago, the Communists rushed in. Twenty years ago, the Prague Spring was crushed Today, the fires started in Budapest Prague, and Warsaw are spreading to Moscow

FIFTY YEARS AGO, on September 29, 1938, in the Fuhrer Haus (since demolished) in Munich, the British prime minister and French premier, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, acquiesced to Adolf Hitler's demand that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Benito Mussolini, the organizer of the conference, looked on. Hitler's demand was ostensibly based on the principle of self-determination, a principle popular today but applied only fitfully in the aftermath of the First World War.

When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered at the Versailles conference, Austria lost the Sudeten Germans and the South Tyroleans, and Hungary lost a full third of its ethnic population to the newly created states of Czechoslovakia (one million plus), Rumania (1,650,000), and Yugoslavia (450,000). The Balkanization of the empire left successor states that were almost as riddled with national minorities as Austro-Hungary had been (in the newly acquired Vojvodina the Yugoslavs made up just 33 per cent of the population); thus the national governments that were set up lacked full legitimacy, leading in turn to the permanent prospect of instability and conflict in the center of Europe.

Victors, as the Russians say, are not judged. It was the Treaty of Versailles that enabled the victors in World War I to apply the principle of self-determination so cavalierly. Had it not been so, Austria most assuredly would have opted to join Germany. The Sudetens, who were Austrians, just as assuredly would have gone along. And Hitter would have lacked the excuse to shatter the Versailles settlement and the between-the-wars European order. For the Munich agreement shattered the Little Entente-the French system of alliances which had for twenty years maintained a precarious balance of power among the new states in Eastern Europe. On October 1 -the day after Chamberlain returned to cheering crowds in London-the Czechs accepted the Polish ultimatum for the ceding of Teschen. On the same day, the Germans occupied the Sudetenland. On October 5, Eduard Benes resigned as President of Czechoslovakia. Slovakia was granted autonomy on October 6, andRuthenia on October 9. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia took in all not quite ten days. But the aggressors' feast was not quite finished. Thereafter, in hardly more than a fortnight, Hungary annexed the southern part of Slovakia-also on the principle of self-determination.

But the destruction of Czechoslovakia did not end matters. The Munich agreement was merely the start of a process: the slipway to World War II. Less than six months later, Hitler actually broke the Munich agreement by invading the Czech rump (Bohemia and Moravia) and declaring it a German protectorate. War was clearly inevitable. In the ensuing race for a Soviet alliance, it was easy for Hitler to outbid the Western Allies simply by making an offer Stalin could not refuse-the Baltic states and half of Poland-under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (which Moscow has acknowledged only this year). By so doing he secured his Eastern front and cleared the board for his attack on Poland in September 1939.

THE MUNICH AGREEMENT and Hitler's subsequent career of aggression had a considerable effect on

American foreign policy. It spawned a Manichaeanism in wartime American thinking on foreign affairs according to which everything German was bad and, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, everything Russian good; Stalin's cooperation in the destruction of Poland disappeared down the memory hole. This dichotomy later produced the doctrine of unconditional surrender on the one hand and the spirit of Yalta on the other (the latter including the colossal gaffe of failing to secure overland access to the American sector in Berlin).

The doctrine of unconditional surrender had one great aim and advantage. It soothed Soviet fears that the Atlantic powers would make a separate peace with Germany. But the price of this Alliance harmony was high. Roosevelt's proclamation of unconditional surrender in 1943 at Casablanca robbed the German resistance to Hitler of any prospect of success. It made clear that the only prospect of national survival lay in a German victory or at least in averting outright defeat. It thus prolonged the war and brought Soviet power deep into Central Europe.

This was particularly ominous in view of the nature of the wartime alliance. When, finally, the two fronts of the opposing world systems, capitalism and Communism, came together in Germany in the historic "meeting on the Elbe," the result was not a meeting but a confrontation. The opposing systems, in alliance, had succeeded in destroying the one thing that had forced their association in the first place-although it took the West some time to realize the fact.

Equally fateful were the doctrine's implications for postwar policy. Indeed, it precluded any serious staff-work on a policy for dealing with Germany. Instead there was the "Morgenthau Plan" for the pastoralization of Germany (turning Germany into an agricultural nation and destroying the industrial base in the Ruhr Valley)-so inherently impractical that in a few weeks it became axiomatic in the American Military Government that the most effective way to sabotage the Morgenthau Plan was to lend it unqualified support.

EVEN IF turning the greatest industrial concentration in Europe into a goat-field had not been a rank absurdity, the division of Europe into two camps would have made it positively dangerous. When the USSR was consolidating its hold on Eastern Europe and encroaching upon the Western sphere, as in the Berlin Blockade, a "pastoral" West Germany would have constituted a self-inflicted wound threatening Western survival.

As a people used to the blessings of peace, for whom peace was the natural, normal state of affairs, Americans were ill-prepared and ill-constituted for what was coming: a situation that was neither peace nor war and yet both, an international political limbo in which phases of "cold war" alternated with phases of "detente," in either of which there was always a strong admixture of the other. But the true face of Soviet power-and the reality of international politics-became clear beyond peradventure before long. Czechoslovakia was once again the victim.

In 1948, just ten years after the Munich agreement, the Soviets pouched Czechoslovakia in a coup organized by the Soviet and Czechoslovak Communist parties. Eduard Benes, the professional political fall guy, was on hand again as president to suffer the overthrow personally. He had been back in office hardly three years after his wartime exile in the United States. Benes's colleague and foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, the son of the founder of Czechoslovakia, fared worse. He was defenestrated, a traditional Prague specialty, by the Communists.

The Soviet role in Eastern Europe represented, by almost any standard-democratic, cultural, or humanitarian -a dreadful regression. But a cynical advocate of Realpolitik might have predicted a compensating benefit: surely Soviet rule would restore the stability that had been absent ftom the region since the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire? Communist governments might lack democratic legitimacy as their pre-war predecessors had lacked nationalist legitimacy. But the Red Army provided a legitimacy of its own. In addition, the interest of the Soviet Politburo in the stability of its ring of satellites would ensure that national conflicts would be kept firmly in check. Communists, of course, had been told by Marx that socialism would altogether abolish nationalist sentiments, which belonged to an earlier stage of development.

It did not turn out that way. In the next few years, the Communists of Eastern Europe, led by the Soviets, broke every conventional economic rule in the book, first and foremost the rule that has entered French folklore: "The equal distribution of the maximum gross national product is acceptable; the equal distribution of the minimum gross national product is not acceptable." The result was a widespread dissatisfaction with Soviet rule, and a catalogue of calamities beginning with the uprising in East Germany in 1953, going on to the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 (hard on the heels of an eruption in Poznan, Poland). In 1961 the Berlin Wall had to be built to stop the flood of refugees from East to West Germany (over four million in the 16 years after the Second World War-of whom more than ten thousand fled during the day before the Wall went up).

In particular, by 1962 the Czechoslovak government became alarmed by unmistakable signs of the disintegration of the country's economy. The cracks had begun to appear as early as 1955 but the regime was slow to react. By 1963 the fat was in the fire. Overall production had not only stagnated: it was falling. Building production fell 10 per cent below the 1962 level, and in the construction of agricultural housing only 5 per cent of the plan was fulfilled. In the fall of 1962 the first queues appeared in front of food stores.

Under the allocation of economic activities laid down in the Soviet grand design for the satellite countries, Czechoslovakia was to provide precision tools and machinery and sophisticated finished products, while predominantly agricultural countries were to provide much of the food. Again, it didn't work out that way. The countries designated simply could not or would not provide the promised food. The Czechoslovak government was forced to delve still further into its foreign-currency reserves to purchase wheat from Canada and soybeans from the United States.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of Czechoslovakia in the world Communist movement. Marx himself, as the first among many, had emphasized that Communism could not work in underdeveloped countries but only in highly industrialized societies capable of committing their advanced technologies to the purpose. In Czechoslovakia, Communism was put to a laboratory test under apparently ideal conditions. What the Party took over in 1948 was an industrial society with one of the most highly skilled Labor forces in the world and a plant in generally good condition. The Communists ruined it. In less than a generation, the incidence of rejects in Czechoslovak industrial production rose to more than 30 per cent (the figure for 1963). As for quality in general, a quip made the rounds that the cardinal mistake of the founding fathers of Communism had been the failure to codify a penalty for sales resistance. But the ponderous, dilapidated machinery of state enterprise creaked implacably on, churning out huge quantities of inferior articles which could never be sold or which, if any were sold, merely ensured that future Czech articles would not be.

IN FACT, the Czechoslovak crisis was the crisis of the Soviet model of socialism. "How could we," asked 0ta Sik, a prominent Czech economist at the time, "the most highly industrialized nation in Eastern Europe, have taken the Stalinist system of highly centralized, nonspecialized planning, which sets the same broad quantitative norms for all fields of production-a system devised to increase radically the basic heavy-industrial plant of a backward nation-how could we have been so stupid as to take such a system and impose it lock, stock, and barrel on our economy? It's incredible."

In order to surmount the crisis, the reformers in tbe Czechoslovak Communist Party had by 1968-the Prague Spring-hit upon a series of proposals that have since become familiar to all who take an interest in the problems of Communism. The first of these was the promise to transfer state property to the people, a sort of socialist denationalization program (in practice it meant a transfer of state industry to workers' councils). The second was the decision that democratic self-management (through the workers' councils) could be realized only in a pluralistic society: there would have to be a multi-party system of some sort with a socialist economic framework. In the third place there was the acceptance that there could be no meaningful political enfranchisement of citizens without the abolition of censorship-"access to all information," as the formulation had it. The Prague Spring, in this respect, was the false spring of glasnost and perestroika. Fourthly and finally came the demand for the right of free association-specifically, for independent trade unions, peasant organizations, and organizations of youth, the intelligentsia, and other strata of society. The whole was to be "socialism with a human face."

These measures were well-meaning but essentially futile. In effect, they were an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable-private initiative with socialist ownership, multiparty elections with a predetermined result, freedom of information with a state monopoly of communications: in short, capitalist freedoms with a socialist organization of society. They could not possibly have survived a serious attempt to implement them. But the mere threat of such reformism, however fragile, and however qualified by the Czechs' assurance that they would remain within the Warsaw Pact, was sufficient to prompt a Soviet-led invasion.

What made the crushing of the Prague Spring so spectacular was, of course, the phenomenon of an international socialist invasion of a socialist country. The "Brezhnev doctrine" of limited sovereignty was born: "A threat to any socialist country is a threat to all socialist countries." But the specific element that forced the recollection of the Munich agreement was the presence of an East German contingent in the invasion force. Just thirty years gone by, the most destructive war in history in the bargain-and here were the Germans again, invading Czechoslovakia! There was the added fillip that the German invasion force was Communist and the irony that the prime purpose of the division of Germany had been to preclude just such an eventuality. And there was a final historical irony concealed in the events of 1968: in that year Czechoslovakia suffered a fate almost identical to that of Poland in 1939: it was invaded simultaneously by Germans and Russians.

That, however, was a reflection of the past. More potent for the future was the example of the Prague Spring as a symbol and model for the "socialist bloc." Marx had said that Communism was a specter haunting Europe. That part of Europe which was living under Communism in 1968 was now haunted not by one specter but by two: economic bankruptcy and the unrest it provoked. These ghosts now went East.

In 1970, urban unrest and mass demonstrations in Gdansk, in the now famous Lenin Shipyards, brought down the wrath of the Polish Workers' Party on the Polish workers and made martyrs of fifty of them. This massacre resulted in a monument to the workers and in the birth of the free trade union "Solidarity" under the leadership of Lech Walesa. Meanwhile in Hungary, although the revolution of 1956 had been quickly crushed by the brutal Soviet invasion, the Kadar regime's will had been broken. Fearing to provoke further uprisings, it embarked on a continuing program of economic reform under the nervous slogan: "He who is not against us is with us."

In each case-in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, and in Poland-the Communist Party split between reformers and hard-liners. The difference between them was that the reformers had no one but the people to turn to, while the hard-liners could always turn to the Soviet Union-and always did. Limits to reformism were set by the Red Army. For example, Alexander Dubcek had been elected General Secretary of the Czechoslovak party without the knowledge of the Soviet leadership. This was the first time this had happened-an ominous omission. The Soviets had always reserved the right to question significant appointments made by any "fraternal party" in Eastern Europe (with the exception of Rumania and Yugoslavia). But by the early Eighties, speculation was rife in Eastern Europe as to how and when the tide of reformism would arrive at its final destination: Moscow.

"For then," said the wiseacres and wise men, "at long last, there will be no Big Brother to turn to." The Prague Spring would have been a dress rehearsal for a Moscow Spring that was sure to come.

Despite the sealing off of the Soviet Union from the fraternal socialist republics of Eastern Europe, ideas have nonetheless seeped through. Indeed, there has been a significant two-way exchange between Soviet dissidents and Czechoslovak reformers. The name Solzhenitsyn first appeared in Czechoslovakia in 1967 when a Slovak journalist, Pavel Licko, managed to travel for the first time to Voronezh, where Solzhenitsyn was working as a mathematics teacher, and to get the first interview with the Russian writer for a foreign newspaper. The trip was possible only because Licko had been a member of a Soviet partisan group in World War II. His former comrades-in-arms, having meanwhile become Party functionaries, were able to help him make the trip to an area normally out-of-bounds to foreigners. Shortly thereafter, someone bought a copy of Solzhenitsyn's "Open Letter to Soviet Writers" into Czechoslovakia. The letter, which dealt with the problem of censorship, caused an uproar at the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union, to whom it was addressed. In the wake of the controversy over whether Solzhenitsyn's letter should be read into the protocol of the Congress, several writers, including Antonin Liehm and Ludvik Vaculik-once stalwart Communists but now disillusionedwere expelled from the Party. The conflict over Solzhenitsyn was one of the trip-wires in the development of the Prague Spring.

In economics, influence flowed in the opposite direction. For fifty years, the Soviets had been trying to run an antieconomy for purely ideological reasons. They had succeeded, but the price of that success was economic ruin. In 1968, Andrei Sakharov's essay "Thoughts about Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" appeared in the New York Times. His message was that the USSR was structurally incapable of coping with the technological revolution. The need was for radical perestroika (though Sakharov used not the noun made famous by Gorbachev but the related verb). At that very time, a group of young economists under Professor Ota Sik, and a staff of young political scientists under Zdenek Mlynar in the Czechoslovak Central Committee, were working on the economic and political aspects of the reform program. Another center of the reform movement was in Prague's Academy of Sciences, where historians, economists, and sociologists were examining the effects of the technological revolution on the socialist system.

Even during the dead years of Brezhnevite stagnation, such ideas seeped into Moscow's intellectual life-albeit behind closed doors or in dissident circles. They have emerged into the open only since Gorbachev launched his glasnost and perestroika campaigns.

But there are, of course, significant differences between the Prague and Moscow Springs. One is the sponsor of the experiment. In Alexander Dubcek, Czech reformers had a reluctant, inexperienced leader of no personal magnetism whatsoever. In Gorbachev, Soviet reformers have the greatest PR talent of this century. The Prague Spring, though it attained wide popular support, was in effect created by reformers from the top of the government and the Party; it put down popular roots only later. Moscow's reforms are taking place after twenty years of dissidence under the tutelage and inspiring leadership of Andrei Sakharov. Perhaps his greatest service to his cause has been that he has accustomed the Soviet government to the idea of a legitimate opposition. This was accomplished by keeping track of the regime's mistakes, suggesting reforms necessary to social progress, and striving to force the regime to abide by the human-rights obligations it ratified in 1973. (Charter 77 played a similar role in Czechoslovakia.) But the greatest difference, as we have seen, is that the Soviet hard-liners have no other hard-liners to fall back on.

That does not settle the question, however. In the Soviet Union, power and privilege are in the hands of a bureaucracy entrenched as perhaps no other bureaucracy before it has been entrenched. As Gorbachev put it in a speech to the Writers' Union last year: "In the Soviet Union, nothing is exploited as much as official position." Soviet bureaucrats are entrenched by virtue not just of a policy, but of an official ideology-an ideology that has the formal force and persistence of an official religion. So, despite the absence of an external Big Brother, the Moscow Spring is likely to remain in doubt for some time to come.

Soviet ideology and Soviet life are both under stress. When it comes to ideology, the greater freedom of glasnost has produced unprecedented confusion. The key history examination held at the end of the tenth school year to test the ideological maturity of the students has been discontinued since the examiners are no longer in possession of the answers to their own questions! As one Muscovite joke has it, it is becoming more and more difficult to predict the past.

But who outside can tell how successfully the nomenklatura is undermining and side-tracking the reforms of perestroika on the ground? Some indication of a discrepancy between promise and performance, glasnost and perestroika, can be found in another cynical Moscow joke about the patient who demands to see both an eye specialist and an ear specialist. His complaint? "I can't see what I hear."

With the Soviet Union in this state of flux, the underlying problems of Eastern Europe are again emerging, fifty years after Munich, forty years after the Czechoslovak coup, twenty years after the Prague Spring. Vague Soviet talk of troop reductions threatens to weaken the only real source of legitimacy for the Eastern European Communist regimes: the Red Army. And as the Soviet Union jettisons or redefines its own ideological justification, so the internal self-confidence of the satellite regimes is undermined further. This weakening of Moscow's control of its satellites, militarily and ideologically, allows the old national disputes, supposedly solved by socialism, to re-emerge. Indeed, the debaclein-progress of Communism in Eastern Europe has enhanced the attraction of raw nationalism as the one remaining option open to local Communist parties to maintain themselves in power without the help of Big Brother. Thus, the minority problems of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Poland (where many are in search of a German grandmother so as to qualify for immigration to the Federal Republic of Germany) are again on the international agenda. With the exception of the South Tyrol, the combustibles are all in the socialist camp. Some disputes-like that over the Hungarian minority that suffers under Ceausescu's persecution in Rumania-are already close to conflagration.

Communism has failed to solve the problems of legitimacy and national minorities in Eastern Europe. It has repressed them for long periods; it has exploited them to buttress its waning legitimacy; it has not settled them. Instead, it has added the further problems of economic failure and decline. This in turn has provoked a worker revolt, a proletarian revolution against the Revolution, which has now reached the gates of Moscow itself. Inevitably, all Eastern Europeans have a burning interest, as it were, in the success of glasnost and perestroika. For only in an atmosphere of greater freedom and prosperity will they ever be able to settle their ancient disputes. It is the choice between liberty and the Red Army. Nothing in between will quiet Eastern Europe.

Munich: Before and After

THE MUNICH PACT of September 30, 1938, opened the floodgates, bringing, not the "peace in our time" of the unsophisticated Neville Chamberlain, but the bloodiest war of all. I was twenty at the time, old enough to feel the shame of a deal at the expense of the helpless Czechs and Slovaks, but a long way from knowing the reasons for the shame. I do remember that the cinema in which I saw the newsreel of the returning Prime Minister, waving the "piece of paper, signed not only by Herr Hitler but myself" was greeted with boos from the audience.

It has been said, in Chamberlain's defense, that if the war Hitler was planning had come in 1938 instead of 1939, the Battle of Britain might have been a walkover for the Luftwaffe. Perhaps. In any case, Munich was the logical culmination of the Depression years, and appeasement of the Fascist and Nazi dictators was the logical refuge of the supine politicians of that period, in France as well as in Britain, who were reluctant to believe what "Herr Hitler" had written in Mein Kampf.

As for Stalin, we were being told by H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and the other Fabians and fellow-travelers that he represented the future (which they had seen and which, they assured us, "works" .

Today, fifty years on, we know so much more. The wrong turning of June 1941, when Hitler sent his hordes into Russia, transformed the Georgian tyrant into the West's glorious ally and created a public prejudice in favor of the USSR and Communism. Of course Stalin blew it by grabbing Eastern Europe, but even today the favorable prejudice inhibits a real understanding of Stalin's prewar relations with Hitler's Germany.

Two strategic visions competed for hegemony in the 1930s: Stalin's and Hitler's. Two, not three. The West was deeply divided, and Western Europe at least was run by second-raters, little men like Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier (whose nickname, "the bull of Vaucluse," doubtless referred to his physical build rather than to any non-existent vigor of character). America was still essentially isolationist, despite Roosevelt's awareness of distant dangers.

The British wanted to keep trouble from their doorstep; the French really believed (collectively, for the apprehensions of the obscure Colonel de Gaulle hadn't made much impact) that any invading German army would obligingly stop at the Maginot Line and not be beastly enough to go round it.

In contrast (leaving aside Mussolini's vainglorious vision of Roman greatness), Hitler and Stalin both thought strategically. Stalin's vision was the wider of the two. Despite the disinformers (Trotskyists included), Stalin was a true Leninist. He believed in world domination.

Hitler believed, first and foremost, in a Germanized Europe, with Russia's vastness for Lebensraum, and with the racially inferior Slavs enslaved (and the Jews eliminated). He seems to have believed that between the Aryan Germans and the "Aryan" English no real conflict existed.

Ideologically, there was much in common between the Communists and the Nazis (a fact which, above all, Soviet postwar propaganda has tried to obscure, with the favorably prejudiced as natural customers). The facts, however, are well documented, among others by William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), Hugh Trevor-Roper (Hitler's Table Talk), Hermann Rauschning (Hitler Speaks), and, not least, Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich in their admirable history of the USSR (Utopia in Power).

Hitler and Stalin admired each other, yet neither fully grasped what the other was up to. They shared a contempt for the bourgeoisie, and a detestation of social democrats. Curiously, though for different reasons, they were both against the German Communist Party. Hitler saw its members as rivals to be crushed, but was always ready to welcome them into his National Socialist Party. Stalin feared their possible ascendancy: a Communist Germany would have relegated backward Russia to a relatively lowly position in the Comintern.

Stalin preferred not to know about Hitler's Lebensraum obsession. Hi strategic plan was to get German and the European democracies Locked in war so that the USSR could pick up the pieces. This aim predated Hit lerism: in 1926 and again in 1931 Germany and the Soviet Union wid ened the scope of the Rapallo Treat of 1922. From the moment of Hitler' advent to power in 1933, Stalin was obsessed by the idea of a pact with Nazi Germany (according to the de fecting Soviet diplomat, Gelfand).

Before 1933, the Soviet Union wel comed officers of the Reichswehr, an the welcome was renewed after the Reichswehr became the Wehrmacht. Indeed, before Hitler felt strong enough to break out of the bonds o the Versailles Treaty, Stalin provided training facilities on Soviet soil for German officers to learn the skills they needed in the forbidden weapons: aircraft and tanks.

STALIN SAW with jaundiced eyes the abject appeasement of Hitler by France and Britain. So confident had he been that there was no danger from Germany that he purged the Red Army and Fleet of some 35,000 officers. The prime victim was Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was shot in 1937 for plotting against Stalin. But if Stalin understood the need to remove a possible rival, there was no point in destroying his armed forces as well, unless he really did think he had nothing to fear from Hitler.

This reluctance to see the German threat extended to the warnings he was receiving from the master spy Richard Sorge in Japan, so that Hitler's massive invasion of the Soviet Union, unbelievably, took him by surprise. By then, of course, he had the added protection (as he saw it) of the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939, under which he grabbed the Baltic States and half of Poland. Little did he know that the flood was about to turn his way.