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4 - The erosion of Soviet trust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2011

Kieran Williams
Affiliation:
University of London
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Summary

The interaction that took place in 1968 between Soviet and Czechoslovak leaders confirms another of Robert Jervis's suppositions, that ‘While a state's intentions may be obvious in retrospect, they are often obscure at the time. A look at the information available to decision-makers as they draw inferences about other states must make us less harsh on those whose judgements prove to be incorrect. Few actions are unambiguous. They rarely provide anything like proof of how the state plans to act in the future.’ Despite the extensive information available, Soviet leaders found it extremely difficult to gauge the real intentions of the Dubček coalition. If anything, their task became all the more onerous as time passed, more information was gathered, more encounters were arranged, and more promises were made.

Even at the very start, the positive Soviet response to Dubček's election was accompanied by awkwardness and ambiguity over signals and indices. Three weeks before, Brezhnev had come to Prague at Novotný's request to help the latter fend off the alliance that had begun to form against him. Brezhnev, who seems to have had only a vague sense of what was happening, arrived on 8 December 1967, five days before the Central Committee was due to convene; this session was likely to resume the critical debate provoked by Dubček at its October meeting.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Prague Spring and its Aftermath
Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970
, pp. 63 - 111
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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