Much in the same way as the Americans have felt they’ve had a right to invade Latin American countries on whim, the Soviet Union was intent on keeping many East European leaders under its thumb.

Outside of the Warsaw Pact countries, Soviet imperialism was not as extensive or dangerous as the Americans claimed. One of the few imperialistic moves that the Soviets made towards countries not already aligned with them was their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 - a despicable act, no more justifiable than, say, the American invasion of Vietnam (actually, the US example involved an awful lot more bloodshed). The Afghanistan invasion, it is worth noting, was nothing to do with attacking capitalism or democracy - it was a case of lending support to one group of Marxists (a pro-Soviet group) against another, dissident group (a non-Soviet group).

The imperialism towards Eastern Europe took much the same form. When East European leaders were tempted to liberalize or democratize their regimes, the Soviets intervened and stopped them. Eventually the Soviets themselves decided to liberalize, under Glasnost; and Mikhail Gorbachev engineered the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. (The American idea that this was down to Reagan, a rightwing militarist hawk, is something of a joke.) But before that, there was some sorry history.

A few years after World War Two, "de-Stalinization" was begun under Khrushchev. The worst excesses of the Stalinist era - in particular, mass terror and the personality cult - were renounced and denounced. (Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania revived these and was not loved for it. China, and its allies - such as Albania and Cambodia - also remained Stalinist in character. Vietnam, on the other hand, was responsible for the liberation of Cambodia from the China-backed Khmer Rouge.)

But the Soviet states and their satellites remained essentially totalitarian in character. Most East European states, communist as a result of Second World War liberation by the Soviets, had joined Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, where they became a net burden to the USSR, and the Warsaw Pact, a military grouping created in 1955.

The Polish ruling Communists were furious when Khrushchev told them that Stalin had had virtually all the pre-war Polish Communist leaders murdered on imaginary charges. The same year (1956), popular protests prompted the Polish and Hungarian governments to re-examine their policies without consulting with Moscow. Poland got away with it for the time being.

But Hungary, which started admitting non-Communists into its government, released some political prisoners, and withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, was the victim of a Soviet invasion and repression. According to the historian Norman Davies, the final toll of casualties numbered hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately for the Hungarians, the West was too busy sorting out the Middle East and the US presidential elections to do anything at all about it.

Nevertheless, the suppression of Hungarian dissent marked a turning point. Davies says, "It destroyed the lingering sympathies of many leftists [for the Soviet Union], ruined the future for communist parties in the West, and greatly increased the tensions of the Cold War." (The Italian Communist Party was not yet anti-Soviet enough to break the line. In Italy it had made considerable progress in presenting itself as a non-revolutionary party, and in building bridges to other parties and to the Catholic Church. But in 1956 it nevertheless backed the Soviet invasion of Hungary.)

In 1968, a reform-minded administration came to power in Czechoslovakia. Alexander Dubcek, general secretary of the Czech Communists, declared himself in favour of "socialism with a human face". A period of reform began - in the same year as the leftwing student revolts in the West - known as the Prague Spring. The Czech Communists suspended censorship and encouraged free debate. They also planned to strengthen the national assembly. They had much the same agenda as Gorbachev’s Reform Communism would have in the 1980s. But at this stage it was unacceptable to Moscow. Although Prague affirmed its "friendship" with the USSR, its commitment to socialism, and its commitment to the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets were not impressed.

August 1968. All Warsaw Pact countries except Romania aided in a Soviet operation to arrest Dubcek and replace the Czech government with a more authoritarian one. Brutality was minimal, unlike in 1956. But it was another well-deserved black mark alongside the Soviets’ reputation. Romania, a Warsaw Pact country, described the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia as "a flagrant violation of national sovereignty". China, already at odds with the Soviets, called it "barefaced fascist power politics"; and Yugoslavia condemned it as "illegal occupation". The Italian Communists this time condemned Soviet intervention. Most other Western Communists did likewise, though not all; the Finnish Communists split over the issue. Meanwhile, a young Czech student publicly burned himself to death in anger at the Soviets.

 ©1998 Richard Pond