It was Brezhnev himself who effectively buried the Brezhnev Doctrine

Soviet armoured vehicles on the streets of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 military intervention.

In November 1968, at the congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, formally proclaimed as a principle of Soviet policy the doctrine that would later bear his name. According to this doctrine, military intervention would be deemed legitimate whenever “forces hostile to socialism” attempted to redirect the course of development of any “socialist” country towards capitalism. Yet for Brezhnev and the rest of the Stalinist bureaucracy, its real meaning was something rather different: they saw themselves as having the right to intervene against any development that might weaken the privileges of the local Stalinists or loosen the bureaucracy’s political grip over the working class.

Twelve years after that declaration, when the 1980-81 crisis in Poland unfolded, I learned from reading Anatoly Chernyaev’s diary for 1981 that the very same Brezhnev had adopted a markedly different stance. Chernyaev’s notes show that the Kremlin bureaucracy was horrified by the wave of strikes and social unrest that erupted in Poland, yet Brezhnev still refused to countenance a 1968-style military intervention. More than that, the diary suggests that, although he was repeatedly pressed to take such a step, Brezhnev refused to go down that road.

19 December 1981: a celebration in the Kremlin marking Brezhnev’s 75th birthday, held in the midst of the crisis in Poland.

Like many others, I had long assumed that the Brezhnev Doctrine was not abandoned until the second half of the 1980s, with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika”. Until it was explicitly declared dead under Gorbachev, the doctrine tended to be seen as something like an immutable mechanism in the hands of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union - automatic, reflexive, and ready to spring into action.

Yet what took place behind closed doors during the 1980-81 Polish crisis shows that this was not in fact the case. According to Chernyaev, leaders such as Gustav Husák, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and Nicolae Ceausescu, General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, were urging Moscow to take a harder line, repeatedly insisting that “something must be done”. Brezhnev, however, brushed aside these pressures, made no explicit commitment to direct intervention, and did not even entirely exclude the possibility that Poland might “turn into a capitalist country”.

On 6 August 1981, Chernyaev recorded the following note in his diary:

I read the transcript of Brezhnev’s conversation with Ceausescu in Crimea. The main thing that follows from it is that Brezhnev is not planning on, and apparently never seriously considered, sending troops to Poland. But, he said, the Poles shouldn’t think that we will treat a socialist-democratic or bourgeois Poland the same way we would treat socialist Poland (in the sense of material assistance and so forth). (Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev (1981), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, p. 31)

In his diary entry of 10 August 1981, he also makes the following assessment:

In a telephone conversation with Kania, Brezhnev said (he repeated this forcefully at a meeting with Honecker and Zhivkov): our relations with Poland will depend on what Poland will become. If it will be socialist - the relations will be internationalist; if it will be capitalist - our state, economic, and political relations will be different.

It follows from this that the transformation of Poland into a capitalist country is “a possibility,” i.e. troops will not be brought in. This follows also from the atmosphere, in which the subject of Poland is being discussed at the Crimea meetings (with the aforementioned comrades, as well as with Kadar, especially with Husak, who tried to steer Brezhnev towards an interventionist stance. But the latter avoided giving a direct answer). Moreover, Ceausescu tried to “harden” the attitude toward Poland; he kept demanding: something must be done, we cannot allow, etc. Brezhnev checked him: “Why do you keep repeating, ‘do this, do that.’ We are worried over Poland every day. And you keep saying ‘do something’! Why don’t you do something, make a suggestion.” (Ceausescu even volunteered to go to Warsaw).

Brezhnev said to Zhivkov about Nicolae’s outcries: idle talk, he doesn’t know or understand anything about Poland. (ibid., p. 32)

All this amounted to a stance plainly at odds with the spirit of the doctrine. For the essence of the Brezhnev Doctrine lay in the belief that any prospect of breaking away from the so-called “socialist” bloc had to be crushed by whatever means were necessary, including military force.

In short, at the most critical test of the doctrine that bore his name, Brezhnev consciously refused to do what the doctrine required. He did so not by proclaiming it openly, of course, but in practice. He never appeared before domestic or international public opinion to declare that “the Brezhnev Doctrine is no longer valid”. The doctrine continued to exist on paper as an instrument of threat, but at the most vital moment it was not enforced. Had the opposite been true, what Chernyaev wrote in his 1981 diary would not have come as such a surprise to me.

In the shadow of the Polish crisis: Brezhnev, members of the Politburo, and Jaruzelski.

For this reason, I see no problem in saying that it was Brezhnev himself who effectively buried the Brezhnev Doctrine. This is by no means an exaggerated claim; on the contrary, it is an observation that helps us grasp the historical reality more clearly. The official change in rhetoric under Gorbachev - the open abandonment of the old line, accompanied by a joke like the “Sinatra Doctrine”, which might well be thought rather vulgar for a party that still had the word “communist” in its name - was, of course, highly significant. But all of that amounted merely to the political and ideological funeral; the brain death had occurred much earlier. And that moment of death came, to a large extent, during the Polish crisis.

In the final years of his life, Brezhnev - the man who had given the doctrine its name - also set in motion the process of its effective liquidation by refusing to see it applied at a decisive moment. This, of course, does not make Brezhnev a covert reformer, a liberal, or a “soft” statesman. Nor does his refusal to send Soviet tanks into Poland imply any sympathy for the democratic, economic, political, or social demands of the Polish people. Yet the historical fact remains: in conditions of deepening economic crisis, the Soviet bureaucracy was unable to repeat in Poland in 1980-81 what it had done in 1956 or 1968. And the leader who did not do so was none other than Brezhnev himself - the very man who had given the doctrine its name.

Here, then, is another irony of history!

See also:

Decay as seen from the Kremlin

The little-known Hungarian uprising of 1972