Červený Poplach: The NATO-Soviet Standoff Over Czechoslovakia

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm afraid Part 40 is going to be put into cold storage for a spell. One of my best friends just lost her father-in-law and I'm obviously not going to be in the best headspace to get much writing done in the near future.

Understandable, thank all the time you need.

1) take your time, we will wait.

2)to you also a happy holiday.

Sorry to have to break this to all of you, but it looks like Part 40 will remain in cold storage for a while longer. I just got a call from my aunt's home health care provider half an hour ago informing me that she passed away December 17th.

My condolences.

Take your time, that is the most important thing.

  


PART 40/How Many Times Must The Cannonballs Fire



By early April of 1969, Soviet ambitions of restoring Communist rule in Czechoslovakia were little more than a distant fading memory-- and so was any hope the Brezhnev regime might have held out for holding onto control of Ukraine. Much of western Ukraine was either firmly in rebel hands or being contested by the anti-Brezhnev guerrilla forces, and the insurgents were also gaining a number of footholds in the east. Though NATO had yet to commit any ground troops to direct involvement in the rebellion, the alliance was supporting the rebels in other ways-- most notably through air strikes from bases in Poland. U.S., West German, and Polish fighter jets launched round-the-clock attacks against Red Army battlefront positions, while U.S. Air Force B-52s and RAF Vulcans hit vital strategic targets behind the lines. A sense of desperation bordering on paranoia was creeping in at the CPSU’s provisional Ukraine regional headquarters in Poltava, where the Communist faction had been forced to hastily evacuate its administration after insurgent forces successfully occupied Kyiv in late February of 1969. Some of the more extreme elements of the regional leadership were calling for Moscow to use nuclear weapons against the insurgent leadership in Kyiv in a last-ditch attempt at crushing the anti-Brezhnev rebellion. Western intelligence agents on both sides of the Ukrainian battlefront noted a growing sense of unease among civilians in the region that the Brezhnev regime might eventually give in to the extremists’ pressure.



That unease was shared by more than one member of President Humphrey’s national security team as they debated what the U.S. should do next in the central European theater. Indeed, the president himself had expressed concerns to his defense secretary Clark Clifford about the possibility of NATO forces getting caught in the path of radioactive fallout from a potential Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces strike against Ukrainian rebel positions. Humphrey’s first two and a half months in the White House had seen a number of former Civil Defense analysts called out of retirement to advise him on the best ways to safeguard Ukrainian civilians and partisans against the dangers of nuclear war; a substantial amount of the post-Czech War emergency management infrastructure that would be established in Ukraine had its roots in those advisory sessions. NBC protective gear was being delivered around the clock to U.S. and allied servicemen in order to minimize the risk of radioactive contamination should the unthinkable happen.



But perhaps few things would do more to affect the course of the final months of the Czech War than the creation of an informal student club at Moscow State University. The club’s name was outwardly an innocuous one: the Civic Health Betterment Society. But at the heart of the organization, there rested a much more ambitious goal-- its members aspired to nothing less than ending the Brezhnev regime for good. They’d seen too many friends and brothers come home in caskets, felt the repressive fist of the KGB once too often, heard mothers and sweethearts shed too many tears for all the lives lost because of Leonid Brezhnev’s Ahab-like obsession with toppling the Dubcek government in Czechoslovakia. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the group decided to begin mounting active resistance against the Kremlin, but modern historians widely agree that the Red Army’s brutal suppression of the Frunze Academy uprising was a major galvanizing factor in the Society’s decision. All the Society’s members had known somebody who was killed or wounded in the revolt; some had witnessed the massacre first-hand. When the group drafted its original charter, the most notable clause of that charter was a pledge among its members to be ready to take what was described as "forceful action" in defense of their ideals. This was a subtle but unmistakable warning the Society was willing to utilize armed resistance to achieve its goals if push came to shove. That would be easier said than done given the Kremlin's rigid control of civilian firearms, but many of the Society's members had aptitudes in chemistry and engineering and could therefore improvise homemade weaponry if they had to.

At first, though, the Society's main method of opposing the Brezhnev regime was anonymously circulated anti-government propaganda leaflets and underground magazines calling out Brezhnev's refusal to end the war with NATO. It wasn't until May 4th, 1969 that their campaign to oust Brezhnev from power would officially escalate to violent insurrection. That day a professor who'd been teaching one of the Society's junior members died in KGB custody after undergoing nearly a week of torture for refusing to divulge the identities of the Society leadership. For the Society's members, whose anger towards the Kremlin had been seething to begin with, the professor's death would prove to be the last straw. Over the next 48 hours they would make preparations to strike back at those they deemed responsible for what nearly amounted to an extrajudicial murder. On May 7th, as Moscow was getting ready to celebrate the annual Victory Day holiday marking the end of World War II, the United Press International bureau in Vienna received an anonymous tip that a bomb had detonated just blocks from KGB headquarters; further inquiries confirmed the bombing and turned up hints that the target had been one of the KGB's highest-ranking officers. Although nobody in the West was aware of it at the time, the officer in question had been the lead interrogator among the men responsible for the professor's death by torture. In the weeks to come, Muscovites would be locked in the grip of an icy fear the likes of which the Soviet capital hadn't experienced since the Nazi invasion of June 1941; the Victory Day celebrations were canceled and the city was placed under martial law as government security forces waged a frantic struggle to unmask the Civic Society's leadership. While the exact number of casualties from the Society's guerrilla war are still not precisely known even now, the chief effect of that insurgency is crystal clear-- it eroded the last vestiges of support Brezhnev still had within his own party. Combined with the failures the Red Army had suffered in eastern Europe since the Czech War began, it would constitute the tipping point for Brezhnev's internal critics in the CPSU hierarchy to finally oust him....

TO BE CONTINUED