A Polish historian asked Mikhail Gorbachev Thursday for his opinion of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which put a stop to reforms similar to those Gorbachev is trying to achieve in the Soviet Union today.
The question, posed during a meeting at Warsaw`s royal castle with about 300 intellectuals, never got a direct answer, but Gorbachev promised written responses to all questions he did not answer on the spot.
Before taking questions, the Soviet leader delivered a speech in which he said communism no longer had any ”binding model.”
The question about 1968 in Czechoslovakia was posed by historian Marcin Krol, the editor of an independent monthly, Res Publica, and a frequent contributor to the feisty Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny.
Krol told Gorbachev that history was sometimes ”too important to be left to historians.”
”History is also a matter for politicians,” Krol said. ”History also influences consciousness. History also sometimes closes the road for us.”
Krol also asked Gorbachev about the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine. That is an idea ascribed by Western analysts to the late Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev, holding that socialist nations are required to protect or enforce socialism`s advances in other socialist countries.
”The Brezhnev Doctrine and its implementation in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago is an important problem for us and for many people in Poland,” Krol said. ”How does a politician, and not a historian, look at this problem today?”
Another intellectual, Rev. Mieczyslaw Krapiec of the Catholic University of Lublin, also mentioned the Brezhnev Doctrine, comparing it to Poland`s domination by Teutones in the Middle Ages.
Gorbachev chose not to mention the military intervention that crushed the liberal reforms of the ”Prague Spring” in August, 1968-reforms similar to those Gorbachev is now trying to implement in the Soviet Union. Nor did he comment on the Brezhnev Doctrine, which Moscow has always contended was a figment of Western imagination.
Before the question-and-answer period, however, Gorbachev ruled out any
”binding model” for modern socialism.
”We are traveling down the same road while taking into consideration our specific characteristics,” he said, noting that ignoring the differences among socialist nations had been a ”serious mistake” in the past.
Last March, when Gorbachev visited communist Yugoslavia, the two countries signed a joint declaration that discussed different roads to socialism and forswore ”any threat or use of force and interference in the internal affairs of other states under any pretext whatsoever.”
In Paris, President Francois Mitterrand announced Thursday that Gorbachev would visit France this year. No date was announced.
