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Czechoslovakia "Normalization"
It was not until October 16 that agreement was reached for
the partial withdrawal of the Warsaw Pact armies. The Soviet
Union made a big show over the agreement, sending Premier Aleksei
Kosygin to Prague as leader of a high-level delegation to observe
the ceremony. Czechoslovak joy was tempered by the knowledge that
a sizable army of occupation would remain after the bulk of the
invading force had departed. The Bulgarian, East German,
Hungarian, and Polish troops were ordered to leave the country,
but Soviet units were to remain in what was referred to as
"temporary stationing." In the agreement, Czechoslovakia retained
responsibility for defense of its western borders, but Soviet
troops were to be garrisoned in the interior of the country. As
events transpired, however, the major Soviet headquarters and
four of its five ground divisions were deployed in the Czech
Socialist Republic, where they remained in mid-1987.
During the talks leading to the agreement, the Soviet
negotiators pressed their Czechoslovak counterparts to reduce the
size of the CSLA by eliminating the personnel who had supported
the Dubcek regime. Yet the subsequent force reduction was caused
by more than direct Soviet pressure. Dubcek's Prague Spring and
the subsequent invasion by Warsaw Pact allies had had many
ramifications within the armed forces, particularly among the
professionals of the officer corps and the NCO corps. In the year
preceding the ouster of Antonin Novotny, the first secretary of
the KSC, definite schisms had occurred between those officers
supporting the old order and those favoring the reform movement.
In February 1968, shortly after Dubcek had replaced Novotny as
first secretary, Major General Jan Sejna defected to the West. He
revealed that he and other hard-line communists had planned to
keep Novotny in office, by force if necessary, but the plan fell
through when the Presidium voted to oust Novotny. The political
dichotomy in the military led to a great thinning of the ranks
after the downfall of Dubcek and the rise to power of Gustav
Husak in early 1969.
Once its power was consolidated, the Husak government sought
to re-establish party control over the armed forces and to ensure
their full integration into a Warsaw Pact dominated by the Soviet
Union. The Klement Gottwald Military Political Academy--the
center of the military debate of the mid-1960s--was temporarily
closed, and the CSLA officer corps was purged. When the purge was
completed in 1975, some 11,000 officers and about 30,000 NCOs had
been dismissed. Officer strength in the army was reduced by onethird and in the air force by one-half. Demoralization also
contributed to this dramatic decrease. In the months following
the invasion, nearly 58 percent of all army officers under 30
years of age resigned, and by June 1969 an estimated 50 percent
of all students in the country's military academies also had
resigned. In order to overcome this drastic reduction in
manpower, the qualifications--whether educational or otherwise--
for officer candidates were lowered, and at least some candidates
were rushed through officer training school in half the normal
time. Substantial material and career incentives were used to
entice young people into the ranks of officers. The effect of
these measures was difficult to assess precisely, but it was
clear that their effect must have been minimal. In 1979 a West
German source noted that officer shortages in the CSLA at that
time ranged from 20 percent in the air force to 70 percent in the
motorized infantry. Overall military strength dropped from
240,000 in 1966 to 168,000 in 1969 and generally stayed below
200,000 for most of the 1970s. Ironically, General Martin Dzur,
the minister of national defense at the time of the invasion,
survived the purges and early retirements and retained his post
until his death in January 1985.
In the post-Dubcek era, the armed forces suffered from the
apathy that seemed to infect the entire society after the
Stalin-like crushing of the Prague Spring. The failure to resist
the "fraternal" invaders undermined the prestige of the military
in its own eyes and in the eyes of the public. Despite the purges
of possibly unreliable personnel and the redoubling of propaganda
efforts in military schools and training programs, some outside
observers in the 1970s and 1980s questioned the reliability of
the Czechoslovak forces in the event of an East-West conflict.
The most frequent questions concerned their reliability in a
prolonged offensive war in Western Europe or in a war that was
going badly for Warsaw Pact forces. Other outside analysts,
however, believed that the Czechoslovak armed forces were well
trained, well equipped, and well motivated and that they were
capable of carrying their share of Warsaw Pact operations,
particularly in defense of their homeland
(see Soviet Influence
, this ch.).
Data as of August 1987
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