letter of invitation

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The so-called invitation letter is a document from the time of the crackdown on the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. It is a letter to the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee , Leonid Brezhnev , in which some functionaries of the old Stalinist wing of the Communist Party of the Czechoslovakia (KSČ) asked for quick help and intervention to ward off a counter-revolution . Brezhnev used the arguments of this letter to justify the intervention of several armies of the Warsaw Pact on August 21, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, which took place only a few days later .

After the return to democracy in 1989 , the question of this letter, which until then had been mentioned as an incident but never appeared as a document, was hotly debated. A commission that was supposed to investigate the events of 1967-1970 also tried to get hold of documents that were important for the historiographical processing of this time. As a result of these efforts, in July 1992, almost 24 years after the intervention, the Russian President Yeltsin presented the Czechoslovak President Havel with a dossier with seven documents. Up to that point they were in the archives of the Politburo of the CPSU . The authenticity was then confirmed by RG Pichoja, the chief archivist. The original of the invitation letter was also in a sealed envelope with the handwritten note by General Secretary Chernenko “do not open without permission”.

It is a letter from five high-ranking officials of the KSČ, not dated and written in Russian, which, according to information in the memoir Vasiľ Biľaks of the Soviet side, on August 3, 1968 on the occasion of the meeting of five Warsaw Pact states and the ČSSR was handed over in Bratislava . The dossier also contained another personal letter from Antonín Kapek , a former member of the Central Committee of the KSČ, with a similar content, which was sent to the Soviet party leadership on 29/30. July 1968 in the negotiations in Čierna nad Tisou . (There is still speculation about other letters or their variants, which bore the signatures of other KSČ functionaries, but there is still no evidence of this.)

The signatories

The invitation letter was signed by (in the order of the original signatures):

  • Alois Indra , member of the Central Committee of KSČ; In 1971 he became chairman of the Federal Assembly.
  • Drahomír Kolder , member of the Central Committee of KSČ; In 1969 he became chairman of the People's Control Committee.
  • Oldřich Švestka , member of the Presidium of the KSČ Central Committee; In 1975 he became editor-in-chief of the party newspaper Rudé právo for the second time .
  • Antonín Kapek , member of the Central Committee of KSČ; He had already sent a personal letter to Brezhnev beforehand; was instrumental in the "normalization" , died in 1990 as a result of suicide.
  • Vasiľ Biľak , member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of KSČ; after the intervention of 1968 he was secretary of the Central Committee with decisive influence in the field of foreign policy and ideology.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b František Janáček, Marie Michálková, Příběh zvacího dopisu (The story of the invitation letter), in: Soudobé dějiny 1/1993 (Journal of the Academy of Sciences), online at: www.68.usd.cas.cz (PDF; 6 , 0 MB), Czech, accessed July 21, 2010
  2. ↑ Vasiľ Biľak, Paměti (memoirs), Part 2, Praha, Cesty 1991, p 88, cit. according to František Janáček, Marie Michálková, Příběh zvacího dopisu (The story of the invitation letter), in: Soudobé dějiny 1/1993 (Journal of the Academy of Sciences), online at: www.68.usd.cas.cz (PDF; 6.0 MB), Czech, accessed July 21, 2010
  3. ^ A report by Izvestia from July 17, 1992, cited above. in Igor Lewin, hidden things come to light ... Eastern Europe 4/1993, quoted here. according to František Janáček, Marie Michálková, Příběh zvacího dopisu (The story of the invitation letter), in: Soudobé dějiny 1/1993 (Journal of the Academy of Sciences), online at: www.68.usd.cas.cz (PDF; 6.0 MB), Czech, accessed July 21, 2010
  4. ↑ Tomáš Kraus, Před 41 lety armády Varšavské smlouvy zlikvidovaly československý pokus o reformu socialismu, in: eurozpravy.cz (news portal) of August 21, 2009, in Czech, accessed on July 21, 2010

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