Introduction
On 20 August 1968, at around 11 pm, approximately half a million Warsaw Pact troops from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary, operating under the banner of the Warsaw Pact alliance, crossed the Czechoslovak border and occupied the entire nation-state.Footnote 1 This moment marked a decisive turning point in what is commonly referred to as the ‘Prague Spring’. It signalled the end of Alexander Dubcek’s reformist project to establish ‘Socialism with a Human Face’ and revealed the strict limitations of Soviet tolerance for pluralism within its own sphere of influence. In the aftermath of the invasion, the Kremlin formulated its foreign political programme through the Brezhnev Doctrine, which publicly rejected the notion of ‘abstract sovereignty’, asserting that in a ‘system of other states composing the socialist commonwealth’ no individual country could remain immune to the ‘collective interests of that community’.Footnote 2 Any deviation from orthodox Marxist-Leninist principles was to be treated not as an internal matter, but rather as a direct threat to the ideological cohesion and geopolitical stability of the Soviet Bloc.
While the Warsaw Pact states’ occupation of Czechoslovakia has been extensively studied within a European Cold War context, the perspective of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) has received comparatively less scholarly attention.Footnote 3 For instance, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen’s book Hanoi’s War prioritizes other international dimensions of the conflict, leaving the Prague Spring outside its scope.Footnote 4 Although Pierre Asselin and Tuong Vu provide valuable context on Czechoslovakia in their respective oeuvres, their primary focus revolves around the broader ideological and military arcs of the Vietnam War.Footnote 5 Similarly, the recently published history of the Vietnam War offers limited space for the DRV’s attitude towards this specific event.Footnote 6 Nicholas Khoo’s study of the Sino-Vietnamese alliance is the most extensive analysis of Hanoi’s reaction, but it relies mostly on published materials.Footnote 7
This article, therefore, aims to contribute to the historiography of the Vietnam War. Although Vietnamese primary sources remain largely inaccessible, it utilizes multiple archival sources from Albania, China, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania to shed light on how Hanoi confronted the ongoing crisis.Footnote 8 By placing North Vietnam’s reaction to the Prague Spring within an international context, this article asserts that, throughout 1968, the Lao Dong Party leadership took a genuine interest in Czechoslovakia’s domestic affairs and repeatedly expressed its concern about Alexander Dubcek’s domestic political programme. The Czechoslovak Communist Party’s decision to relax censorship and tolerate divergent public opinions was considered a direct threat to Hanoi’s own reunification struggle. Additionally, historical precedents in Poland, Hungary, and the DRV itself reinforced Vietnamese conviction that capitalist powers were trying to take advantage of Czechoslovakia’s internal fragility and destabilize the entire Soviet Bloc.
Secondly, recently discovered archival evidence strongly suggests that the ruling Lao Dong Party proactively encouraged the Warsaw Pact countries to intervene in Czechoslovakia. Until that moment, the DRV leadership had striven to remain outside of the ideological dispute between the Soviet Bloc and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Fearing that leaning towards one side over the other would have a detrimental impact on its struggle for national reunification, Hanoi had sought to appease its allies and preserve their fraternal support. Nevertheless, sceptical about Dubcek’s ability to offset the spectre of a ‘counterrevolution’ and cognizant of its own reliance on Soviet Bloc assistance to continue its war effort, the Lao Dong Party leadership expressed its fraternal support for external intervention both privately and publicly.
Fighting inside a broken alliance
To grasp the DRV’s perception of the Prague Spring, it is essential to situate Hanoi’s decision-making within the fractured Marxist-Leninist world of the 1960s. Bilateral disagreements between Moscow and Beijing can be traced as far back as the Chinese Civil War and Josef Stalin’s dismissal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as ‘margarine communists’.Footnote 9 Fundamental ideological differences only became explicit in 1956, when the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave his infamous ‘secret speech’, in which denounced his predecessor and declared that the Communist Bloc would adopt ‘peaceful coexistence’ as its central foreign political guideline. The Chinese leadership under Mao Zedong fundamentally disagreed with Khrushchev’s ideological programme, labelling him a ‘modern revisionist’.Footnote 10 Initially, the Lao Dong Party attempted to mediate between the quarrelling behemoths. President Ho Chi Minh, in particular, sought to use his own prestige to act as an honest broker and prevent a Marxist-Leninist split.Footnote 11 Even so, in March 1963, on Karl Marx’s death-day, General Secretary Le Duan gave a public address in which signalled a closer ideological alignment with Beijing. The following August, Hanoi imitated its northern neighbour and refused to sign the Soviet-sponsored Partial Test-Ban Treaty.Footnote 12 Le Duan himself was dissatisfied with the USSR’s (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) financial support for his nation’s reunification struggle. In February 1964, he pointed out to Khrushchev that the United States ‘gives the puppet government of South Vietnam 1.5 million dollars per day’, whereas ‘over the course of ten years, the Soviet Union has supported the war with only about 300,000 rubles’.Footnote 13
Prior to military escalation, the Kremlin attempted to resolve the crisis in Vietnam through diplomatic means. The diarchy of Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, which usurped Khrushchev in October 1964, insisted to the Chinese that ‘we need to help them [the Americans] find a way out of Vietnam’.Footnote 14 As late as 3 December, Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Nikolai Podgorny all assured their Czechoslovak counterparts that the Americans were ‘aware that they have reached a dead end’ and that ‘even President Johnson himself has indicated that he is not willing to push developments to the knife’s edge’.Footnote 15 Kosygin subsequently visited both Beijing and Hanoi in the hope of persuading the two sides to negotiate and offset military escalation. Nonetheless, the North Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong and his Chinese counterpart Zhou Enlai were adamant that Washington needed to be defeated on the battlefield.Footnote 16 Unable to compel the protagonists to draw back from the brink, the Kremlin (along with its Eastern European allies) reluctantly chose to support a war that Soviet military officials considered unwinnable.Footnote 17
Irrespective of the Kremlin’s eventual willingness to sponsor its ally, the ideological split continued to poison relations across the communist world. Mao Zedong told President Ho Chi Minh that capitalism was being restored in the Soviet Union and encouraged the DRV to make an ‘even bigger contribution to the struggle against modern revisionism’.Footnote 18 To Hanoi’s dismay, the dispute spilled over onto Vietnamese soil. In a Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Politburo memorandum, Chinese authorities were accused of ‘systematically carrying out hostile activities against Soviet citizens’.Footnote 19 The most shocking incident occurred on 25 April 1968 near Dien Bien Phu, when a Soviet geologist was dragged out of a jeep by his hair and beaten unconscious for refusing to kneel in front of a Mao Zedong portrait. Responding to such outbreaks of violence, DRV authorities tried desperately to restore order. When around 50 Chinese sailors clashed with their Soviet and Polish counterparts in Haiphong, chasing them all the way onto a docking ship, Hanoi swiftly shut down the ‘International Club’ and banned foreign sailors from staying in local hotels.Footnote 20 At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs prohibited Soviet Bloc diplomats from visiting provinces along the border of the PRC, warning that these expeditions had previously provoked Chinese personnel in Ha Giang to open fire.Footnote 21 Le Duan captured the mood in the summer of 1967, when he exclaimed: ‘Our nation fights with an unparalleled enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. It does not fear death. But when our people hear about the Sino-Soviet disagreements, they simply weep.’Footnote 22
The most damaging consequence of the Sino-Soviet split was logistical. In December 1965, Hanoi and Beijing signed a protocol governing the transportation of supplies from all communist states. Under the agreement, weapons, ammunition, and other ‘urgent military goods’ would be transported by rail, whereas economic aid and ‘non-urgent goods’ would be delivered by sea to Haiphong harbour.Footnote 23 This treaty placed Beijing in a strategically advantageous position: whenever it wished to gain Vietnamese attention or punish its ally, it could either delay or outright block the movement of cargo shipments. In the summer of 1968, North Vietnamese policymakers informed the Kremlin that approximately 500 wagons carrying Soviet weapons, along with seven trains loaded with missiles, had been ‘arbitrarily stopped somewhere in China’.Footnote 24 Even more remarkably, the CCP leadership informed Hanoi in July that, ‘due to certain work and technical difficulties’, it was, at present, unable to ‘forward missile technology coming from the Soviet Union to Vietnam’.Footnote 25
Meanwhile, Hanoi’s military strategy managed to unsettle both communist juggernauts. The Kremlin grew increasingly exasperated with the DRV’s secrecy and steadfast refusal to share any information about the war. The CPSU Politburo’s frustration was laid bare in a sharply worded report circulated to its Eastern European allies on 23 May 1967. Employing explicit language, it argued that after two years of warfare, the DRV lacked a ‘concrete plan’ of how to ‘bring the war to a conclusion’. The Soviet leadership believed that its Vietnamese counterpart’s analysis did not have an ‘objective character’ and fell short of providing an ‘impartial evaluation of the situation’. Despite Hanoi’s insistences that the National Liberation Front (NFL) controlled ‘80 per cent’ of South Vietnamese territory and ‘more than half’ of the population, the memorandum categorically rejected this claim as ‘untenable’, pointing out that the United States’ armed forces were ‘obviously’ enjoying successes in ‘Zone D’. Nor could the Kremlin see any evidence that its ally had a ‘plan for the diplomatic or propaganda struggle’. Instead, it seemed that Hanoi’s ‘sole perspective’ was to ‘resolutely continue the armed conflict’. ‘All of this,’ the report remarked, ‘is causing great concern for the USSR.’Footnote 26
Chinese policymakers, in contrast, expressed contempt for the Tet Offensive. On 30 January 1968, the NLF unleashed the ‘largest military and political operation yet attempted during the course of the war’.Footnote 27 In every single one of the 44 South Vietnamese provinces, it coordinated uprisings and sweeping attacks against American command centres, which included military airfields and the embassy in Saigon.Footnote 28 Drawing on Vietnam’s own experience with the French colonialists, Le Duan believed that Washington would only negotiate after it had suffered military defeats in South Vietnam and thus he sought to ‘create a favourable situation’.Footnote 29 Nevertheless, as Qiang Zhai has noted, the Tet Offensive was a ‘contradiction to Mao’s military doctrine’, which ‘preferred a low- to mid-intensity war’ rather than a ‘general offensive’.Footnote 30 In a personal letter to Ho Chi Minh, the chairman called the assault a ‘misguided step’ and stressed that the NLF should continue its struggle based on the ‘people’s war’ model.Footnote 31 Upon being informed that Hanoi had accepted President Johnson’s proposal for bilateral talks in the spring of 1968, Politburo member Kang Sheng accused the Vietnamese of abandoning their long-term principle that negotiations could only begin once the United States had ‘unconditionally and completely’ stopped its bombing campaign. Unpersuaded by Pham Van Dong’s belief that Hanoi was ‘acting from a position of strength’, Kang Sheng predicted that the United States would use negotiations to stall indefinitely, thus ‘leading’ the DRV ‘by the nose’.Footnote 32
This short overview of North Vietnam’s relationship with its communist allies illustrates how tense and complex the situation was on the eve of the Prague Spring. Throughout the Vietnam War, the DRV leadership sought to strike a balance between maintaining its national independence while relying on its allies to provide political, economic, and military support. During a private conversation with the Romanian ambassador Constantin Babeanu, the deputy head of the Central Committee for External Affairs Tran Chi Hien revealed that his country was ‘against any external influence in Indochina’, regardless of whether it was ‘Soviet’, ‘Chinese’, or ‘American’.Footnote 33 And besides, the Vietnamese communists did not harbour any doubts about their allies’ reliability. In 1966, the deputy leader of the NLF in Pyongyang, Le Van Ha complained that ‘neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Soviet Union is truly interested in total victory’.Footnote 34 Even so, notwithstanding all the difficulties and dangers, Hanoi had successfully preserved the broken alliance and managed not to fall into complete dependency on either China or the Soviet Bloc. The unfolding crisis in Czechoslovakia would soon present a significant challenge to this calibrated strategy.
Socialism with a human face
Prior to Alexander Dubcek’s liberal reforms, North Vietnam and Czechoslovakia had maintained only limited contact. As a small country situated in the heart of Europe, Czechoslovakia largely operated in the Kremlin’s shadow. Ambassador Jiri Meisner informed his superiors in 1968 that, from Hanoi’s vantage point, Czechoslovakia belonged to the ‘third tier’: the USSR and China formed the first; East Germany, North Korea, Cuba, and Poland the second; and the ‘remaining socialist countries’ the third.Footnote 35 Like its Eastern European allies, Czechoslovakia dutifully supported Hanoi’s national liberation struggle with economic, political, and military assistance. Nonetheless, while Prague accepted its fraternal obligations, the archival record depicts an ally that took a critical stance. Above all, policymakers struggled to understand Hanoi’s refusal to negotiate. In the summer of 1965, Antonin Novotny complained to Leonid Brezhnev that the United States ‘wants to find a way out of Vietnam’, but the DRV was too focused on a ‘military solution’ and underestimated the political struggle.Footnote 36 When Prime Minister Josef Lenart visited North Vietnam the following year, he devoted ‘significant effort’ to persuading his hosts of the ‘necessity to combine military activity with maximal political engagement’.Footnote 37 Listening to Pham Van Dong outline the domestic situation and the NFL’s struggle below the seventeenth parallel, Lenart judged it a ‘one-sidedly, optimistic’ appraisal. It seemed to him that the prime minister viewed the current situation ‘unrealistically, both in the military and in the international political sphere’.Footnote 38
Nor did Hanoi and Prague see eye-to-eye on China. Amid the broader ideological split, the Czechoslovak Communist Party sought to position itself as a mediator, capable of influencing the Lao Dong Party’s decision-making. Lenart remarked to the Soviet Politburo that, unlike the USSR, which had to exercise caution as a superpower, Czechoslovakia could speak ‘more openly’ and urge the North Vietnamese leadership to ‘reflect’ on Beijing’s ‘harmful position’.Footnote 39 During his third meeting with Pham Van Dong on 27 September 1966, Lenart thus emphasized that Czechoslovakia was seriously concerned about the contemporary situation within the international communist movement. Careful to provide specific examples, the prime minister contended that Beijing’s Cultural Revolution was discrediting Marxist-Leninist theory and that the communiqué of the Eleventh Session of the CCP’s Central Committee had formulated an ‘anti-Soviet platform, aimed at isolating the USSR and completing the split’. Irritated by these diatribes, Pham Van Dong repeatedly interrupted his guest, bluntly telling him that they were ‘inappropriate’ and that the Vietnamese did not ‘approve’ of the way he spoke about the CCP.Footnote 40
Still, it was only at the beginning of 1968 that the DRV began to take a genuine interest in Czechoslovak political affairs. In a sense, the reforms represented the antithesis of the Lao Dong Party’s own domestic programme. Whereas the new leadership under Alexander Dubcek was embracing progressive and liberal ideas, the Lao Dong Party feared that any deviation from orthodoxy might endanger the stability of its own regime. North Vietnamese angst about dissent and the spread of harmful dogma had already been laid bare in the second half of 1967, when the DRV’s security services uncovered what it described as a large network of ‘saboteurs’ conspiring to ‘overthrow the government.’Footnote 41 These included the former president of the Philosophy Section of the State Committee for Social Science, Hoang Minh Chinh; the former deputy minister of state farming, Dang Kim Giang; the deputy party secretary of the city of Hanoi, Tran Minh Viet; a senior official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vu Dinh Huynh; and, finally, the editor of the army newspaper, Hoang The Dung. All these individuals stood accused of organizing secret meetings in cafes, advocating the end of ‘sacrifices’, as well as supporting a ‘political resolution of the conflict’. The trial of these DRV citizens—dubbed the ‘Yellow Music Trial’, because the pretext for these clandestine gatherings was to enjoy Vietnamese music—provided the Lao Dong Party with an excuse to tighten its grip on power and introduce a decree on ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’.Footnote 42
In short, the Lao Dong Party’s leadership was predisposed to view the Prague Spring with strong misgivings. When trying to understand Czechoslovakia’s reformist policies, North Vietnamese decision-makers initially turned towards Romania, which held a unique position within the Warsaw Pact alliance. Rather than siding with the Soviet Bloc against China, both Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and subsequently Nicolae Ceausescu sought to preserve national sovereignty by nurturing ‘fraternal collaboration’ with all communist states.Footnote 43 Viewed through a wider lens, then, Hanoi and Bucharest were pursuing corresponding foreign political strategies. It was pertinent, too, that North Vietnamese representatives praised both its ally’s independent stance and refusal to become a ‘subordinate’ of the Kremlin.Footnote 44 In a report of 15 July 1968, Ambassador Constantin Babeanu concluded that the two countries enjoyed the ‘existence of similar or close aligned views’, pointing out that DRV bureaucrats expressed satisfaction with the ‘open’ and ‘sincere’ bilateral discussions.Footnote 45 As far as the Prague Spring was concerned, Hanoi no doubt noticed that Romania’s narration did not correspond with that of other Warsaw Pact states. Newspapers such as Munca and Romania Libera offered public support for the Dubcek government and insisted that no other external force had the right to intervene in Czechoslovakia’s internal affairs.Footnote 46
Accordingly, on 20 March 1968, Xuan Thuy, the secretary of the Central Committee, requested a meeting with the Romanian ambassador and enquired whether he had any information about Czechoslovakia. Xuan Thuy complained that the embassy reports he was receiving were based on ‘speculations from the Western press’ and thus he was unable to ‘form a clear picture’ of the situation. Even though Ambassador Babeanu assured him that the Czechoslovak Communist Party would be able to resolve its domestic problems, this did not appear to soothe Vietnamese anxiety.Footnote 47 In fact, Yugoslavia’s subsequent decision to follow Romania’s lead and publicly endorse Dubcek’s liberalization process only heightened concerns.Footnote 48 Ever since Stalin expelled Belgrade from the Marxist-Leninist world, North Vietnam had considered Yugoslavia a ‘Trojan Horse’ within the socialist camp.Footnote 49 Josip Tito’s vocal praise for Dubcek, combined with a marked increase in Czechoslovak-Yugoslav summits, reinforced the DRV’s belief that the reformers in Prague were drawing inspiration from the Belgrade model.Footnote 50
Meanwhile, Czechoslovak representatives in Hanoi recorded that ‘political and journalistic circles’ were taking a ‘keen interest’ in their country’s political developments. On 3 April, the Czechoslovak Press Agency correspondent Odolen Klindera informed his superiors that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was following the situation ‘closely’ and was even issuing daily reports on internal developments. Klindera appreciated that these enquiries stemmed from concern rather than sympathy. Leading members of the Vietnamese Journalists’ Union raised the issue in conversations, enquiring what impact the reforms would have on Prague’s ‘foreign policy’.Footnote 51 It was no secret that the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s action programme, adopted at the Central Committee session in April, had conspicuously avoided framing solidarity with the ‘Vietnamese people’s struggle against American aggression’ as a defence of the socialist camp. Instead, it effectively relegated the DRV to the status of just another developing country, comparable to the United Arab Republic.Footnote 52
In complete contrast to these private exchanges, the Lao Dong Party’s media offered citizens virtually no information about contemporary developments. Aside from a single article claiming that Novotny had resigned for ‘health reasons’, Klindera pointed out that the press organs were keeping the population ‘completely uninformed’.Footnote 53 During Czechoslovakia’s national celebrations in the second week of May, Hanoi organized media campaigns, art exhibitions, and ceremonial screenings of films. It was customary for foreign diplomats to write a personal article for Nhan Dan and deliver an address on national radio. However, when the Czechoslovak ambassador Jiri Meisner submitted an editorial which, in his words, ‘carefully and briefly touched upon contemporary problems’, he was told that the media could only report ‘positively’ on socialist countries, ‘without mentioning problems’.Footnote 54 In fact, without prior consultations, the ideological magazine Hoc Tap decided to publish its own article on Czechoslovakia, which provided a long list of the ruling party’s successes in the fields of industry and agriculture.Footnote 55 Likewise, the pre-recorded speech for national radio was heavily edited by Vietnamese staff members: the entire section concerning economic issues was reduced to one single sentence, while any mention of either the recent plenary meetings of the Central Committee or personnel changes was truncated.Footnote 56
Despite complaining to his hosts that ‘one-sided articles’ would ‘misinform’ readers, Ambassador Meisner recognized the reasons for this reticence.Footnote 57 Throughout the Vietnam War, Hanoi had constructed a rigidly ‘black-and-white’ narrative built on ‘unconditional praise’ for the socialist system. Any attempt to explain the ‘January changes’, Meisner acknowledged, would have required an admission of previous ‘mistakes’, which was incompatible with the Lao Dong Party’s propaganda programme. Still, Meisner could not help but notice that Politburo members were distancing themselves from Czechoslovakia. In the spring of 1968, two high-level delegations that travelled to Hanoi were denied a personal meeting with Pham Van Dong. Although Meisner was told that the prime minister had temporarily left the capital, the Czechoslovak diplomat knew that, on the same day, Pham Van Dong had hosted a lower-level Polish delegation. Departing from previous practices, the Czechoslovak embassy was also barred from holding meetings with representatives of local factories that maintained partnerships with Czechoslovak enterprises. ‘The effort to isolate us from the Vietnamese,’ Meisner concluded, was ‘clearly evident.’Footnote 58
This visible hesitancy of leading politicians to associate themselves with Czechoslovakia reflected growing unease over developments within the country itself. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Dubcek’s reforms was the relaxation of media censorship. For Hanoi, this policy touched directly on its own national interests. After all, the Lao Dong Party’s propaganda machine relied on portraying the United States as an imperialist aggressor, which sought to enslave the southern part of the Vietnamese nation. Yet by the spring of 1968, DRV authorities observed that Czechoslovakia no longer seemed willing to uphold a common Marxist-Leninist line. Prague refused to echo North Vietnam’s dismissal of President Johnson’s peace proposal in March as a ‘deceptive trick’, preferring to openly discuss the subject on radio and television.Footnote 59 Alarmed, the DRV’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Ambassador Meisner to informally convey its ‘displeasure’, stressing that such commentary neither served Hanoi’s interests nor ‘correspond with the truth’.Footnote 60 Meisner, who had previously served as general secretary of the International Journalists’ Association, took this as a personal affront.Footnote 61 In response, the ambassador curtly replied that ‘censorship has been abolished’ and that the Czechoslovak press was now ‘free’.Footnote 62
The Czechoslovak Communist Party’s willingness to tolerate more nuanced reporting on the Vietnam War struck at the core of a long-standing Vietnamese angst—the fear that socialist allies would start opposing its national reunification struggle. Policymakers in Hanoi were acutely aware that the continuation of the war effort relied on ‘support from all socialist countries’.Footnote 63 By 1968, approximately 70 per cent of North Vietnam’s national economy was financed through fraternal aid and any relaxation of state propaganda risked encouraging public dissent or prompting individual nations to reconsider their costly commitments.Footnote 64 The previous year, Chairman Truong Chinh of the National Assembly Standing Committee had admitted to a Romanian diplomat that ‘perhaps some may ask what the Vietnamese are giving in return for the great and precious help they are receiving’.Footnote 65 During the Prague Spring, such concerns seemed increasingly justified. In early May 1968, Ambassador Phan Van Su learnt from Vietnamese students at the University of Pardubice in Czechoslovakia that, with the rector’s approval, the editorial staff of the student magazine had invited two employees of the American embassy to give a lecture on both the military situation in Vietnam and the prospects for peace. Moreover, Czechoslovak students studying in the capital not only visited the American embassy to request information about the war but had even organized anti-war demonstrations. At the May Day parade, emotional Vietnamese citizens clashed with Czechoslovak demonstrators, who carried an American flag and banners proclaiming ‘War is stupid’.Footnote 66
Hanoi’s anxiety, however, extended beyond Czechoslovak scepticism towards its own national liberation struggle. Within a wider framework, Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh admitted to the Romanian ambassador that ‘some feelings of concern’ were caused by past experiences in Hungary, Poland, and North Vietnam.Footnote 67 Twenty-two years before, all three communist states had been rocked by riots and rebellions. At the time, President Ho Chi Minh had adopted an unequivocal stance. Irrespective of the DRV’s own chronic economic problems, he provided Budapest with financial assistance and expressed approval of external intervention to re-establish order.Footnote 68 Within his own country, Ho Chi Minh decided to expel 31 of his own Central Committee members and sentenced at least three individuals to death.Footnote 69 It did not seem inconceivable to the DRV’s leadership that history was repeating itself and that the ferment in Prague might, once again, provide an opening for counterrevolutionary forces to destabilize socialism from within. Law and order, for instance, was coming under increasing strain. On 28 April at 9 pm, three individuals broke into the DRV embassy’s courtyard through an open ground-floor window and demanded cigarettes. Following the staff’s refusal, the intruders picked up an iron chair and smashed the window, before absconding through the unlit streets.Footnote 70 ‘Anti-socialist elements’, Nguyen Duy Trinh complained, were attempting to both ‘undermine the socialist regime’ and ‘compromise’ the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s relationship with fraternal allies.Footnote 71
In his speech on Karl Marx’s 150th birthday, Truong Chinh broached the spectre of domestic revolt. It was a subject close to the Politburo member’s heart. He himself was personally responsible for the ideological education of DRV citizens and considered it an essential part of the ‘revolutionary struggle’. Aware that the United States was trying to convince Vietnamese youth that they were dying for Chinese and Soviet objectives, Truong Chinh emphasized that the task of the ideological education programme was to ‘smash the opposing ideology’ and preserve the ‘purity of Marxism-Leninism’.Footnote 72 On 5 May, Truong Chinh linked this programme with developments in Czechoslovakia. He warned that ‘state-monopoly capitalists’ were attempting to ‘aid, abet, and utilise […] reformist socialism’ and drive a ‘wedge’ in the international communist movement. If there was any doubt which country Truong Chinh was referring to, he specifically mentioned that through the agency of ‘revisionists’, the United States was misusing words, such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, to sow discord in Czechoslovakia.Footnote 73
Although these developments were causing unease, North Vietnam was one of the very few countries that did not publish any statement on the ongoing situation.Footnote 74 In official discussions, DRV diplomats reiterated their country’s ‘principled position of non-interference in the internal affairs of other parties and states’.Footnote 75 It was striking that whenever Czechoslovak or Romanian state officials broached the subject, their Vietnamese counterparts typically responded with vague phrases, such as ‘carefully evaluating’ and ‘currently studying’.Footnote 76 This strategy was justified for two reasons. First of all, there was a recognition in Hanoi that Czechoslovakia was ‘far away’ and that the flow of information reaching Hanoi was limited.Footnote 77 Relying on Marxist-Leninist dialectics, it was easier to conclude that the application of theory into practice would ultimately determine the correctness or shortcomings of Dubcek’s political reforms.Footnote 78 ‘Time and patience’, Tran Chi Hien stressed, was needed.Footnote 79 Secondly, no Marxist-Leninist state appreciated the difficulty of following an independent political programme more than the DRV. Nguyen Thien Thong, counsellor of the embassy in Moscow, noted that Vietnam had been the ‘subject of intervention and aggression’ for ‘over 20 years’ and, hence, fully understood the difficulties of managing domestic affairs.Footnote 80 Of course, Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh stressed to Ambassador Babeanu, other communist parties could ‘offer advice’; however, the ultimate decision ‘rests with the party in question, as it is the sole authority responsible for the situation in its own country’.Footnote 81
A further reason for Hanoi’s reticence lay in its continued reliance on fraternal assistance. Three years of total warfare had devastated the economy and exhausted the inhabitants. Travelling along the main road linking the Chinese border with Hanoi and the southern provinces, Ambassador Meisner reported that ‘there is not a single house intact’. Cities such as Phu Ly, Ninh Binh, and Nam Dinh all resembled dead, evacuated ghost towns. Despite the famous mantra that the DRV was ‘prepared to endure for fifteen to twenty years’, Pham Van Dong privately conceded that the people ‘are already tired’.Footnote 82 One of the leadership’s most urgent tasks was to resolve widespread food shortages. In 1968, rice production barely exceeded 3.7 million tons, representing a decrease of almost one million tons compared to the previous year. Even though the PRC and USSR supplied approximately one million tons of grain, most citizens, especially in the urban areas, were suffering from malnutrition.Footnote 83 The Tet Offensive, which Le Duan had hoped would break the military stalemate, failed to alter the balance on the battlefield and there was no indication that the conflict would end in the near future. Against this backdrop, the Lao Dong Party leadership pressed for a substantial increase in economic and material assistance. Appealing to the moral obligation of socialist solidarity, Pham Van Dong declared in April 1968 that the ‘measure of internationalism in any country is its stance on the war in Vietnam’.Footnote 84
Hanoi’s eagerness to foreground fraternal assistance was starkly evident during Politburo member Le Thanh Nghi’s visit to Prague in June 1968. As in previous years, he travelled to several European capitals, including Warsaw, Bucharest, and East Berlin, with the purpose of obtaining further economic and military aid.Footnote 85 In his two-hour long presentation, Le Thanh Nghi made no reference to the reform programme or the Lao Dong Party’s concerns. Armed with myriad statistics of American military loses, he concentrated his full attention on portraying the Tet Offensive as an unequivocal success. Le Thanh Nghi was careful to repeatedly express Vietnamese gratitude for Czechoslovak assistance and, pointing to the ongoing talks in Paris, hinted that there was a ‘realistic chance’ of ending the conflict ‘in the very near future’. The presentation seemed to bear fruit. Dubcek assured him that the ‘struggle of the Vietnamese people’ was ‘our struggle’ and that there was ‘no reason to change’ Czechoslovakia’s ‘stance on the war’.Footnote 86 These words corresponded with deeds. Czechoslovakia subsequently granted its ally 8 million rubles of non-repayable aid (2 million more than in 1967) as well as increasing both its credit deliveries and military assistance.Footnote 87 Upon arrival in East Berlin, one of the North Vietnamese delegates who accompanied Le Thanh Nghi observed that ‘in contrast to the previous year’, the Czechoslovaks had ‘behaved in an especially courteous and friendly manner’.Footnote 88
Prague’s readiness to increase its fraternal assistance did not quell Hanoi’s disquiet, though. On the contrary, face-to-face interactions reinforced Vietnamese scepticism about the Czechoslovak leadership’s ability to ‘steer events in the right direction’.Footnote 89 The deputy head of Nhan Dan, Nguyen Thanh Le, who stopped over in Prague on his way to the Paris Peace talks, found an ‘alarming confusion’ among the ruling elite. What disturbed him most was that in their ‘rash actions’ policymakers had ‘completely disregarded the principles of proletarian internationalism’ and the ‘solidarity of the socialist countries’. In his report to the party leadership, Nguyen Thanh Le warned of a serious threat to socialism and argued that the Soviet Bloc countries ‘could not passively accept this disintegration of a strategic position of power’.Footnote 90
Interestingly, it was the publication of the ‘Two Thousand Words’ manifesto on 27 June 1968 that caused the North Vietnamese to abandon ‘non-interference’ and officially raise concerns with their Czechoslovak counterparts. As Jaromir Navratil has stressed, Ludvik Vaculik’s brainchild came to ‘symbolise the Prague Spring more than any other document’. In a remarkably explicit and provocative tone, Vaculik argued that the entire structure of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was broken. Rather than build a ruling government on cooperation and public support, he contended that political leaders’ ‘mistaken policies’ had constructed an organization for ‘exerting power’, which had attracted ‘power-hungry individuals’, ‘cowards who took the safe and easy route’, and ‘people with bad conscience’. Despite praising the ruling party’s ‘honest effort at the eleventh hour to save its own honour and the nation’s’, Vaculik called upon ‘ordinary citizens’ to act independently from the communist party and form their own ‘civic committees’.Footnote 91 It was no surprise that Vaculik’s support for decentralization and grassroots democracy did not go down well in Hanoi. After all, the DRV’s entire governmental structure was centralized and decisions were taken by a handful of Politburo members. Citizens did not have the right to question their rulers’ authority. Even listening to a foreigner’s opinion was considered ‘counterrevolutionary’.Footnote 92 Shortly after the article appeared, therefore, Tran Chi Hien bluntly told Ambassador Meisner that he ‘strongly condemned’ Vaculik’s ideas and expressed surprise that such an article ‘could even be published’ in Czechoslovakia.Footnote 93
The following week, Tran Chi Hien heard a two-and-a-half-hour presentation on the Prague Spring from Ambassador Meisner and Czechoslovakia’s Asian expert Bohuslav Handl. Tran Chi Hien appeared calm and receptive to the two men’s analysis. He requested that Czechoslovakia send ‘as much information as possible’, emphasizing that fraternal parties needed to trust each other. ‘The policy of each party,’ he reminded his guests, ‘is reflected in actions and results.’Footnote 94 Yet outside the confines of these bilateral discussions, DRV officials began adopting a far more urgent tone. This was evident when the Central Committee asked the East German embassy in July to speak ‘openly like communists’ about its own assessment of the crisis.Footnote 95 In Budapest, DRV diplomats insisted that the situation within Czechoslovakia ‘worries and unsettles’ their own government ‘just as much as it does the Hungarian leadership’.Footnote 96 As these anxieties deepened, the rhetoric began to mask a growing preference for external intervention.
Reflecting this emerging position, Pham Van Dong broached the issue at a cocktail party on 5 August. Contrary to preceding official conversations, the prime minister did not shy away from the subject but raised it himself. Addressing a wider audience, he expressed approval of the signing of the Bratislava Declaration.Footnote 97 In a final attempt to cooperate, Czechoslovakia and other Warsaw Pact states agreed that each ruling party had the right to decide ‘all questions of further socialist development’ within its own national boundaries. At the same time, the signatories repeatedly warned that the ‘aggressive policy of imperialism’ compelled the individual states to ‘coordinate their actions’ and that the alliance would protect the ‘gains of socialism’.Footnote 98 Pham Van Dong declared that the document represented the ‘normalisation of relations between the participating countries’. The Lao Dong Party’s press organs reinforced this position by publishing the full text of the communiqué.Footnote 99
And yet, when subsequently discussing the subject in private with the Soviet ambassador Ilya Shcherbakov and the GDR’s ambassador Wolfgang Bergold, Pham Van Dong admitted that he considered the situation ‘very serious and dangerous’. He complained that the Dubcek regime had repeatedly failed to follow through on its pledges to ‘suppress counterrevolutionary activities’. With one eye on both West Germany and the United States, he expressed concern that the regime was attempting to separate Czechoslovakia from the ‘socialist state community’. ‘The consolidation and strengthening of the Warsaw Pact,’ he stressed, ‘also in the military field is urgently needed.’ While he acknowledged that it would be preferable for the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR) to resolve its own internal problems, he insisted that it could not be allowed to drift away from the broader socialist community. Should that occur, he warned, then ‘intervention would be necessary’. Ambassador Shcherbakov was clearly surprised that the prime minister had decided to speak so candidly.Footnote 100 Until that moment, he himself had expressed irritation about DRV policymakers’ repeated refusal to share their personal opinions.Footnote 101 Sensing an opening, Shcherbakov decided to push the matter: ‘Will our fraternal parties support us if we take decisive measures, or will they criticize us for alleged interference? Will the [Lao Dong Party] support us?’ The prime minister’s response was affirming and unequivocal: ‘We will support you!’Footnote 102
It is worth pausing to reflect on this remarkable statement. For a government that had always advocated the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other communist states, the prime minister’s unambiguous endorsement of so-called ‘decisive measures’ represented a blatant departure from established orthodoxy. Just a year earlier, Pham Van Dong himself had told a Romanian representative that each people must forge its ‘own path, based on its capabilities and the guidance of its party’.Footnote 103 General Secretary Le Duan had similarly declared that ‘internationalism cannot be exploited as a pretext for one party to interfere in the internal matters of another’.Footnote 104 Throughout the Prague Spring, DRV bureaucrats had returned to this position, assuring other communist officials that their nation would not intervene in internal affairs of other parties and states. Even so, the spectre of Czechoslovakia either abandoning Marxist-Leninist scripture or falling prey to Western-sponsored counterrevolution, caused the Lao Dong Party leadership to express its support for external intervention. As Le Duan later stressed to the Polish first secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka: ‘When you sent in Warsaw Pact troops, not only party members but the entire population in both North and South Vietnam applauded that step. It is clear that if imperialism had won at that time, it could have struck elsewhere as well’.Footnote 105
Leaning towards one side
Barely two weeks after Pham Van Dong’s remarks to Ambassador Shcherbakov and Ambassador Bergold, Warsaw Pact forces launched a coordinated military assault against Czechoslovakia, entering from multiple directions to suppress the Prague Spring. For ten days, the Lao Dong Party leadership held its breath. At official receptions, Foreign Ministry executives avoided mingling with Czechoslovak officials and only received the chargé d’affaires (Ambassador Meisner was on holiday) after a 48-hour delay.Footnote 106 On the international stage, Hanoi’s press organs satisfied themselves with periodically publishing the communiqués of the Warsaw Pact countries.Footnote 107 Behind the scenes, North Vietnamese diplomats assured their Soviet Bloc allies that they supported the invasion. On 22 August, the DRV’s envoi in Beijing, Ambassador Ngo Minh Loan, asserted that it had been ‘absolutely necessary’ to both ‘protect socialism in Czechoslovakia’ and ‘repel the attacks of the reactionary and revisionist forces’. In fact, he disclosed that Vietnamese policymakers had been ‘surprised’ by the Soviet Bloc’s ‘patience’ and had even expected a reaction sooner.Footnote 108
These comments were not mere rhetoric. This show of support was likewise noticeable during Romanian-Vietnamese discussions. On 23 August, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoang Van Loi listened patiently to Ambassador Babeanu’s insistence that there was ‘no justification’ for the invasion but made it clear that his government had an opposing viewpoint. Hoang Van Loi claimed that Czechoslovak state officials had requested allied support ‘as a result of threats from counterrevolutionary forces’ and ‘external’ dangers. ‘The manifestations of antisocialist elements in Czechoslovakia,’ he argued, ‘[…] do not fundamentally differ from those of counterrevolutionary groups in Hungary in 1956.’Footnote 109 Just a few hours later, his superior, Nguyen Duy Trinh, echoed this standpoint, telling the Romanian representative that within Czechoslovakia there had been an ‘evident drift’ to the right, which would have ‘compromised socialism’.Footnote 110
At home, the Lao Dong Party worked hard to suppress any mention of the supposed ‘counterrevolutionary’ activities. All the evidence suggests that ordinary citizens were largely unaware of the ongoing crisis. Prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion, the Hungarian ambassador Imre Pehr had notified his superiors that the workers and farmers were ‘not informed about the Czechoslovak event’.Footnote 111 His East German counterpart, Wolfgang Bergold, confirmed this analysis, pointing out that the ‘vast majority of mid-level cadres have no knowledge of the serious situation in the CSSR’.Footnote 112 Hanoi evidently wanted to keep it that way, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs suspended its daily bulletin, which typically featured news from Western radio broadcasts, citing ‘technical reasons’, as well as informing Romanian and Canadian diplomats that they did not have the authority to share official materials.Footnote 113 In Czechoslovakia itself, the DRV embassy made no effort to explain to its bewildered students why the Warsaw Pact states had invaded their host country, choosing instead to evacuate them from the city and take them on a four-hour bus journey into the mountains.Footnote 114
Although the North Vietnamese were consistent in their praise for military intervention, behind the scenes, there were clearly ongoing disagreements. Hoang Van Loi had initially informed Ambassador Babeanu that an official position would be announced ‘in a day or two’. Four days later, the Romanian envoy reported that no such statement had appeared and that Foreign Ministry officials were now briefing that time was needed to ‘study this matter’.Footnote 115 In the words of Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh, the situation was ‘delicate’.Footnote 116 One challenge the DRV leadership faced was that justifying external intervention on the basis of Czechoslovak requests did not fit the facts. On 26 August, Ambassador Phan Van Su was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, where Czechoslovak bureaucrats informed him that the Warsaw Pact states had invaded their country and appealed for ‘international support’ during this ‘difficult time’.Footnote 117 When formulating a public response, therefore, Hanoi needed to square the circle of being supportive of the military assault without endorsing the falsehood that the Czechoslovak Communist Party had advocated foreign assistance.
It was only on 30 August, at the twenty-third anniversary celebrations of the establishment of the DRV, that Pham Van Dong finally broke the silence and publicly confronted the Prague Spring. Nhan Dan’s editor-in-chief Hoang Tung informed the Romanian ambassador that his government had eventually decided to take an official stance, with the purpose of expunging ‘all interpretations and speculations’.Footnote 118 It was striking that leading policymakers—Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, Truong Chinh, and Vo Nguyen Giap—were in attendance. There was evidently an eagerness to present a united front and counteract rumours of party-political infighting. At the mass meeting, Pham Van Dong began his speech by insisting that the DRV had always made great efforts to ‘preserve’ and ‘deepen’ solidarity with other communist states. This, he continued, was considered an ‘internationalist duty’ and ‘a fundamental characteristic of every socialist country’. Pham Van Dong pointedly emphasized that the Marxist-Leninist countries had ‘united into a big family’, thereby creating the ‘socialist world system’, which was the ‘greatest achievement of the revolutionary struggle’. He informed his audience that the CSSR was, at present, in ‘grave danger’ from both the United States and West Germany, which had been preparing to ‘violently intervene’ and assist ‘counterrevolutionaries’, with the aim of ‘eliminating socialism in Czechoslovakia’. As a result, Pham Van Dong did not justify military intervention based on supposed pleas for external support but rather on the ‘threat of losing Czechoslovakia’.Footnote 119 In his opinion, the suppression of the Prague Spring had been essential to preserve the ideological cohesion and political stability of the Soviet Bloc.
Despite the speech being delivered on 30 August, it was not distributed until four days later. According to French journalists in Hanoi, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had imposed an ‘embargo’ on both its transmission and publication.Footnote 120 Surveying the global reaction to the Warsaw Pact’s occupation, policymakers were no doubt unsettled by the rift across the Marxist-Leninist world. Not only Yugoslavia, but also Albania, Romania, and China expressed their fury about the Warsaw Pact invasion. All four nations feared that if the USSR was willing to occupy one communist state, it might just as easily move against their own. In Tirana, the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha summoned the North Vietnamese representative and accused the Lao Dong Party of ‘supporting aggression’. ‘The Soviets say that a counter-revolution is also taking place in China and Albania,’ Hoxha raged, ‘does this mean, then, that they should send troops into our countries?’Footnote 121 This ingrained fear of a potential Soviet attack was echoed in Bucharest. On 21 August, Nicolae Ceausescu publicly declared his nation’s ‘full solidarity with the fraternal Czechoslovak people’, as well as condemning the invasion as a ‘great mistake’.Footnote 122 The most significant concern for the DRV, however, was the reaction of its northern neighbour. After all, Albania and Romania were on the other side of the world and their material aid was negligible. Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu readily admitted that his country’s support was ‘insufficient’ and could not even satisfy the quantum of aid requested by Hanoi.Footnote 123 True, Romanian aid was somewhat higher; however, to put it into perspective, Bucharest’s assistance in 1966, combined with both Bulgaria’s and Hungary’s, was still less than half of what the GDR was contributing.Footnote 124 The PRC was, of course, a completely different case. Its geographical proximity to North Vietnam, its strong military presence above the seventeenth parallel, together with its sustained material support meant that its response could not be ignored.
In contrast to the North Vietnamese, the PRC leadership did not consider events of 1956 as comparable with the Prague Spring. The deputy foreign minister Qiao Guanhua insisted during a heated argument with the Bulgarian ambassador that a ‘real counterrevolution’ had existed in Hungary, whereas ‘the same could not be said of present Czechoslovakia’.Footnote 125 Make no mistake, the Chinese did not support Dubcek’s reform programme. On the contrary, prior to intervention, Beijing had accused its counterpart of ‘betraying Marxism-Leninism’ and dismissed its invitation to the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s Fifteenth Party Congress as ‘insulting’.Footnote 126 Still, the intervention fitted perfectly into Mao Zedong’s Weltanschauung. Throughout the ideological dispute, the chairman consistently argued that the two superpowers had carved up the world into their own respective spheres of influences and that they were ‘dancing on our heads’.Footnote 127 For years, Chinese diplomats had accused the Kremlin of ‘fundamentally reversing the relationship between friend and foe’.Footnote 128 The decision to invade Czechoslovakia, then, reinforced Beijing’s belief that the two superpowers were conspiring against the PRC. Mao himself was worried that the Soviet Union intended to turn its gaze towards its eastern border. On 22 August, he warned his colleagues that if the Kremlin occupied Daqing in Heilongjiang province, then the nation would have ‘no oil’. ‘We must pay attention,’ he stressed.Footnote 129
Initially, the PRC was confident that its neighbour would align with its own position. During the last week of August, the first secretary of the embassy in Hanoi, Zhao Chenkui, assured the Romanian ambassador that it would be ‘unimaginable’ for the Vietnamese to ‘publicly support the action undertaken by the Soviet revisionists and their lackeys’.Footnote 130 The Chinese had good reasons to be confident. As mentioned previously, throughout the Vietnam War, the Lao Dong Party leadership had consistently refrained from publicly sharing its opinion on either Chinese or Soviet decision-making, preferring instead to express gratitude for their material and political support. Pham Van Dong’s speech thus came as a nasty shock to the PRC embassy and immediately created a ‘very tense’ atmosphere. Listening to the address, the charge d’affaires sat motionless in his seat and refused to join in the applause. Once he had finished reading his prepared statement, Pham Van Dong pointedly spent the rest of the festivities avoiding other communist diplomats and only conversed with ‘non-socialist countries’. Ho Chi Minh himself left the reception after barely 10 minutes.Footnote 131
Even though Chinese officials were surprised by the prime minister’s explicit endorsement of the invasion, they swiftly blamed the Kremlin’s influence over Hanoi’s foreign policy.Footnote 132 It is certainly true that the Soviet Bloc countries had put increasing pressure on their ally to lean to their side. For instance, at a Polish reception in July, Ambassador Bergold had confronted Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh and bluntly told him that ‘no Marxist-Leninist Party could remain indifferent’ to whether the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s position was ‘being weakened or not’. Referencing the shared interests of the entire international communist movement, Bergold had stressed that it was the ‘duty’ of every single Marxist-Leninist Party to ‘raise its voice’ for the Czechoslovak comrades.Footnote 133 When attempting to sway its ally, the Kremlin had one major advantage over its Chinese rival: whereas Beijing and Hanoi had already signed a bilateral aid agreement for the upcoming year, Moscow had refrained from making any contractual obligations.Footnote 134
It may, however, be oversimplifying to view North Vietnam’s public support for the occupation as solely the result of external pressure. The archival evidence suggests that senior officials viewed their stance as an extension of the DRV’s own revolutionary priorities. As Xuan Thuy pointed out to his West European counterparts, Hanoi always confronted problems from the ‘position of the DRV’. The country was engaged in a ‘difficult struggle’, needed ‘solidarity from the socialist states’, and any success that the United States enjoyed in other parts of the world would ‘encourage further aggression’ against Vietnam.Footnote 135 At the Lao Dong Party’s Central Executive Committee meeting on 29 August 1968, it was acknowledged that the so-called ‘Czechoslovakia issue’ had made the disagreements within the Marxist-Leninist world ‘more and more serious’. Yet rather than dwell on these ideological rifts, the final report adopted a pragmatic tone, urging state officials to ‘make every effort to gain material assistance’ from ‘fraternal socialist countries’.Footnote 136 This implies that Hanoi’s endorsement of the invasion was perhaps less a product of Soviet coercion (as the Chinese claimed) and more a strategic choice to secure essential fraternal support for its own cause.
In short, the Prague Spring was a key turning point. It was, as the East German Ministry of Foreign Affairs pointed out, the ‘first time’ that the DRV had ‘openly opposed’ the position of the ‘Maoist group’.Footnote 137 It seems pertinent that in the aftermath of Pham Van Dong’s speech, PRC representatives avoided interacting with their hosts and ‘adopted an indifferent attitude towards the speeches made by Vietnamese personalities’.Footnote 138 Chinese anger over its ally’s stance was visible in the CCP’s decision to erect two banners along the Sino-Vietnamese border, which read (in both Vietnamese and Mandarin): ‘Even though you are revisionists, the Chinese people help you in the struggle against U.S. aggression’, along with ‘The Vietnamese people do not help the Chinese people, but the Chinese people still assist Vietnam’.Footnote 139 On 6 and 9 October, Zhou Enlai reacted coldly to repeated Vietnamese requests for disaster relief by informing Pham Van Dong that his government could not receive a party delegation because it was supposedly too preoccupied with ‘domestic affairs’.Footnote 140
Above the seventeenth parallel, the PRC escalated its propaganda campaign. Every day, North Vietnamese citizens—primarily young people—collected material at the Chinese embassy. Standing outside of the building, the East German press correspondent reported that no fewer than 40 individuals had picked up Chinese Communist Party literature within a span of just 10 minutes.Footnote 141 Embassy staff utilized official receptions and public celebrations as platforms to deliver anti-Soviet speeches in front of DRV politicians.Footnote 142 Nor did Chinese representatives shy away from violating Hanoi’s national sovereignty. On 17 October, security forces cordoned off an entire quarter of the capital when four Chinese vehicles—a jeep, a truck, as well as two passenger cars—surrounded a Soviet delegation in a Volga and danced around the vehicle for eight hours, furiously waving Mao Zedong images in the air, shouting ‘Destroy the Soviet Union!’Footnote 143
Aware of Beijing’s dissatisfaction with its official endorsement, Hanoi moved quickly to alleviate tensions. On 6 September, the Lao Dong Party abruptly halted all press coverage about the ongoing crisis in Czechoslovakia.Footnote 144 From that point onwards, no further public statements appeared in the national press, nor were Czechoslovak expressions of solidarity with the Vietnamese people cited.Footnote 145 In a bid to restore harmony, North Vietnamese press organs laid stress on the ‘successes’ of the PRC.Footnote 146 At an expanded Politburo meeting, the leadership passed a resolution emphasizing the need for the Vietnamese people to ‘strengthen its ties with the Chinese people’.Footnote 147
Yet, as Chen Jian has argued, the occupation of Czechoslovakia compelled Beijing to reassess its foreign political strategy.Footnote 148 On the one hand, Chinese statistics reveal that the supply of military goods for Hanoi reached its apogee in 1968, after which there was a sharp decline.Footnote 149 On the other hand, the chairman informed Pham Van Dong that the majority of Chinese personnel would be withdrawn.Footnote 150 Shortly thereafter, a Chinese delegation visited Hanoi and explained that they had decided to ‘withdraw most of their troops’, given that ‘the People’s Republic of China needs them and the DRV is no longer being bombed’. While three to four divisions were placed along the Sino-Vietnamese border, Romanian archival evidence indicates that only a few engineering units remained above the seventeenth parallel to maintain roads linking the two countries.Footnote 151 The Lao Dong Party leadership was forced to conclude that the Vietnam War was no longer a central priority for its northern neighbour and that Beijing was turning its attention to the Sino-Soviet border.
Notwithstanding this breakdown in Sino-Vietnamese relations, Hanoi reaped significant benefits from endorsing the occupation of Czechoslovakia. In November 1968, Pham Van Dong visited Moscow and subsequently signed a bilateral treaty which obligated the Kremlin to expand its fiscal aid. The USSR agreed to deliver various goods worth 10 million rubles free of charge. It likewise consented to providing 300,000 tonnes of petroleum products, 4,000 vehicles, several hundred tractors, along with additional machinery, equipment, and commodities. In turn, approximately 6,000 Vietnamese workers, technicians, and engineers were invited to enrol in technical schools and industrial conglomerates. On 1 December, the Lao Dong Party’s Politburo sent a note to the Kremlin expressing its satisfaction with the outcome of the negotiations and its sincere gratitude to the ‘CPSU, the Soviet government and the Soviet people’.Footnote 152
This is not to suggest that bilateral relations had transformed into an unbreakable bond. On the contrary, DRV policymakers remained tight-lipped about their relationship with Beijing and evaded Soviet enquiries about China’s contribution to the war effort.Footnote 153 In June 1969, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ refusal to share information about the Paris talks or the situation on the battlefield so infuriated Ambassador Shcherbakov that he barked at the officials to ‘show more respect’.Footnote 154 Still, the Lao Dong Party leadership had preserved its lifeline. It had secured the continuation of the Soviet Bloc’s material assistance. And it had obtained the support necessary to sustain its national liberation struggle. The Prague Spring had shaken North Vietnam’s carefully crafted equilibrium—but it had not destroyed it.
Conclusion
The archival evidence presented in this article indicates that Warsaw Pact states’ invasion of Czechoslovakia represented a fork-in-the-road for the Lao Dong Party leadership. Throughout the Vietnam War, it had avoided expressing a public opinion on the ideological discord within the Marxist-Leninist world, knowing full well that it relied on both the PRC and the Soviet Bloc for strategic backing. In response to the Prague Spring, Hanoi decided, for the first time, to lean publicly towards one side within the ideological dispute. It did not merely offer public support for the invasion. Instead, by providing private, high-level diplomatic assurances weeks before the event, Hanoi proactively encouraged the Soviet Union and its allies to prioritize the cohesion of the socialist bloc over Czechoslovak sovereignty.
From the outset, there was a striking scepticism in Hanoi towards the post-January developments. Alexander Dubcek’s liberalization programme was in diametric conflict with the Lao Dong Party’s own conception of socialist development. In his November report, Ambassador Meisner told his superiors that unlike Czechoslovakia, which had endeavoured to ‘modernise’ socialism by democratizing ‘party and public life’, North Vietnamese policymakers believed that ‘freedom exists only within the framework of implementing party and state order’.Footnote 155 Relying on historical precedents, Hanoi thus drew a straight line between the ‘Nagy elements’ in 1956 and the ‘group around Dubcek’ in 1968.Footnote 156 True, the Lao Dong Party leadership did initially give the reformist policymakers the benefit of the doubt, yet both developments on the ground and personal interactions with state leaders nurtured a growing sense of alarm. Two weeks before the Warsaw Pact states’ invasion, Pham Van Dong abandoned any pretence of non-alignment and promised the Soviet ambassador that Hanoi would support external intervention. On 30 August, nine days after foreign troops crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, the prime minister was true to his word. Pham Van Dong’s own public address fully aligned with the Warsaw Pact states’ position and left no doubt that North Vietnam had joined ranks with the Kremlin. In the aftermath of the military assault, Hanoi refrained from any interaction with Czechoslovakia. It ceased all news reports and suspended the dispatch of students and postgraduates for the 1968/1969 academic year.Footnote 157 At the end of 1968, when Hanoi requested fraternal assistance to mitigate the damage of natural disasters, Prague was glaringly omitted.Footnote 158
It is crucial to point out that for Hanoi, the Prague Spring was never about its relationship with Czechoslovakia. North Vietnamese policymakers viewed the crisis through a nationalist lens, fearing that it would inevitably have repercussions on its own reunification struggle. At a time when the DRV relied on fraternal assistance to feed its inhabitants and continue the war effort, any sign of division within the Marxist-Leninist world risked either emboldening the enemy or eroding the fragile assembly line of material support. Rather than consider the Prague Spring an organic backlash against the communist system, the Lao Dong Party leadership concluded that the ideological split within the international communist movement was encouraging Washington to pursue a strategy of ‘peaceful evolution’ and fuel counterrevolutionary sentiment.Footnote 159 The DRV’s steadfast resolve to suppress the distribution of news revealed a deep anxiety that the Prague Spring might undermine public morale or foster dissent within its own ranks.
The biggest impact of the Prague Spring was the damage it wrought on the relationship between North Vietnam and China. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Pact states’ assault, the CCP’s press organs launched a polemical campaign against the Kremlin, accusing it of conniving with the United States in both Czechoslovakia as well as Vietnam. Pham Van Dong, however, ignored the Chinese publications and (at least implicitly) contradicted Beijing’s interpretation of events. Even though Hanoi did thereafter attempt to mend fences, such as refraining from participating in the subsequent International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties, China drastically decreased its personnel and material assistance. By October 1968, North Vietnamese representatives were complaining that, aside from its military support, Beijing’s conduct was ‘contrary to the policies of the DRV leadership in all important areas’.Footnote 160 Bilateral relations never fully recovered from the rupture of the Prague Spring, setting in motion a gradual unravelling that would, a decade later, culminate in the Sino-Vietnamese War.
Finally, according to Tran Chi Hien, the Lao Dong Party leadership drew ‘two lessons’ from events in Czechoslovakia. First of all, ‘under no circumstances’ could it ‘neglect’ ideological work. Tran Chi Hien believed that the Prague Spring had crystallized because the Czechoslovaks had, ‘for years’, failed to educate its people in the way of Marxism-Leninism. ‘Otherwise,’ he pointed out to Ambassador Wolfgang Bergold, ‘it would not have been possible for the enemy to undermine the party’s ranks so deeply and shake the masses’ trust in the party.’ Quoting Le Duan, Tran Chi Hien noted that the general secretary had acknowledged ‘mistakes’ in the DRV’s policymaking. However, with one eye on Dubcek’s liberalization process, the general secretary had made it clear that even though the ruling government would not ‘conceal’ or ‘trivialise’ mistakes, it ‘could not discuss the mistakes in our contemporary struggle’. Simply focusing on the negative, Le Duan declared, would curtail progress. The second lesson, Tran Chi Hien continued, was that the crisis had revealed to the DRV which countries it ‘could rely on’. Despite not mentioning the PRC, he explicitly denounced both Romania’s and Yugoslavia’s response to the military occupation. Akin to Hungary in 1956, Tran Chi Hien declared, the Vietnamese had considered it their ‘duty’ to evaluate Czechoslovakia in light of their ‘own struggle’.Footnote 161 In other words, military intervention had been judged the most favourable option for Hanoi’s national reunification struggle.
There was, perhaps, a third lesson, which Tran Chi Hien left unspoken. The military assault against Czechoslovakia served as a stark reminder to Hanoi of the ever-present spectre of external interference. In the aftermath of the crisis, foreign diplomats noticed that the Lao Dong Party’s press organs adopted a far more nationalistic tone. The most striking example was Pham Van Dong’s article in Nhan Dan, published on 29 April 1969, which paid tribute to the Hung Dynasty and the legendary founder of the Vietnamese state, declaring that the commemoration of King Hung was a ‘manifestation of national pride’.Footnote 162 This was a clear signal to friends and foes alike that the DRV was acting autonomously and that, despite its reliance on external material aid, the Lao Dong Party’s leadership would always follow its own national interests.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
