Russia: Hopes and Fears [antikvár]

PREFACE This book had beeri completed before íhe invasion of Czechoslova-kia and was already at the printer when ihat tragedy occurred. 1 have been able to add a few pages at the end, and I have changed the title. Originally the book was called Russia at Peace (it was in-tended as a companion volume to my Russia at War, first pvblished in 1964). Technically, even after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Russia was still at peace. No war had been declared on Czechoslovakia. But the very fact that, in August 1968, Russian and Czech blood (however little) was flowing in the streets of Prague made such a title singularly incongruous, if not downright offensive. It wasrít easy to choose a new title, but, only a few weeks later, I received a letter from a Russian friend—a young intellectual— which provided, I felt, the perfect one. The quotation from this letter, the basis of the new title, will be found on the title page. In those grim days my young friend was perhaps more pessimistic than I was; his feeling that his hopes, like those of millions of young Russian intellectuals, had been betrayed seemed more than justifi-able. But I felt that his fears were exaggerated. I did not believe, nor do I now, that the invasion of Czechoslovakia would intensify in any way a return to Stalinism; this return* had, in various ways, gone on since 1965, the present Soviet leadership, and particularly Leonid Brezhnev, being much more Stalinite in the accepted sense than Nikita Khrushchev was. When I was in the Soviet Union in 1967, nobody could have foreseen, even in his wildest dreams, a Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia a year later. Under the rule of that perfect old Stalinite Antonín Novotny, Czechoslovakia was regarded as being by far the most loyal and reliable of all the Soviet Uniorís allies in Eastern Europe. There were a few student disorders, but nothing to compare with those in Poland or Rumania, the former country being chroni-cally unreliable, the latter showing somé alarming signs of economic, political and diplomatic independence vis-á-vis the Soviet Union. * A more correct word would be "intensification" or "revival"; Stalinism could not return, since it had never really gone, as I have shown in this book.