Moscow, Aug 20 (CTK) – Some Russian conservative media outlets insist on the Soviet interpretation of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring as a “fraternal help” in their comments on its 50th anniversary today.
Some of them argue that leading personalities of the Prague Spring, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC), Alexander Dubcek, and President Ludvik Svoboda agreed with the intervention.
The conservative online paper Svobodnaya pressa wrote that the Soviet troops had protected the constitutional order in Czechoslovakia.
“It is a well-known fact that the West considered Eastern European socialist economies its competitors,” Svobodnaya pressa said.
“Thanks to cheap energy sources from the USSR, Eastern Europe was so solidified in the socialist era that it started pushing out Western Europeans from foreign markets,” it added.
It said the decision on the invasion “was made on the basis of a message from five KSC leaders… There was the appeal by Dubcek who asked Leonid Brezhnev to send the troops four days before the Danube Operation [the invasion],” the paper writes.
The pro-Kremlin server Life described the intervention in a similar spirit. It wrote that Svoboda, who previously advocated a calm solution to the problems, eventually sent a message to Moscow that he agreed with any solution.
Svobodnaya pressa writes that the elimination of Czechoslovakia according to a U.S. scenario was one of the main objectives of the Prague Spring.
Thanks to the Warsaw Pact troops, Czechoslovakia could exist for another over 20 years, the server writes.
Only after the Soviet troops left, Czechoslovakia rapidly fell apart due to the influence of the Western so-called friends of the so-called Czechoslovak democracy, it adds.
“It is simply mad to write how Russia, a successor state to the USSR, is being blamed. If you want to entertain the world, come up with reproaches,” Svobodnaya pressa writes.
“It will be the first precedent in the global legal practice that a whole nation is blamed for the try to prevent the suicide of a different country,” it adds.
“All that will be achieved is the revelation of the truth about the behaviour of your Western protectors. They forced you to attack Communism and then betrayed you and eventually destroyed your country,” the server says.
The server Political News Agency (APN), administered by the Russian National Strategy Institute, writes that politically, the suppression of the Prague Spring caused the start of the export of Russian gas to Europe, the conclusion of agreements on the validity of post-war borders, the Soviet-U.S. disarmament treaties and the 1975 Helsinki agreement.
“If the Soviet Union had lost one of the crucial countries in its sphere of influence, the West would have never accepted the detente. It would have hoped that the policy of pressure would yield some results,” the server writes.
If the Soviet tanks had not ended the Prague Spring, the Soviet perestroika in the second half of the 1980s would have come later and turned out differently.
The server Vesti writes that 120 Czechoslovak citizens were killed during the invasion. “However, the USSR defended its system of values in a much more accommodating way than Western democracies which were given a chance to check the solidity of the Soviet system and the Warsaw Pact by the Prague Spring,” the server writes.
The current Czech and Slovak reactions to the invasion are “simplified and schematic,” Vesti writes.
The anniversary is mostly used for the creation of a “platform of the current Russophobia, its deepening and colouring,” it adds.
“The Prague Spring was an objective consequence of a rightist, liberal deviation in the Communist movement of one country,” Vesti writes.
“Its suppression was a natural reaction by a social and political system of which the country was part,” it adds.