Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia - Reactions in Other Warsaw Pact Countries

Reactions in Other Warsaw Pact Countries

Many people in the Soviet Union did not approve of the invasion. On 25 August, at the Red Square, eight protesters carried banners with anti-invasion slogans. The demonstrators were arrested and later punished, as the protest was dubbed "anti-Soviet".

In the People's Republic of Poland, on 8 September 1968, Ryszard Siwiec immolated himself in Warsaw during a harvest festival at the 10th-Anniversary Stadium in protest against Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the communist totalitarianism. Siwiec did not survive.

A more pronounced effect took place in the Socialist Republic of Romania, which did not take part in the invasion. Nicolae Ceauşescu, already a staunch opponent of Soviet influences and one to have declared himself on Dubček's side, held a public speech in Bucharest on the day of the invasion, depicting Soviet policies in harsh terms. This response consolidated Romania's independent voice in the next decades, especially after Ceauşescu encouraged the population to take up arms in order to meet any similar maneuver in that country: he received an enthusiastic initial response, with many people who were by no means communist willing to enroll in the newly-formed paramilitary Patriotic Guards.

In the German Democratic Republic, the invasion aroused discontent among those who had hoped that Czechoslovakia would pave the way for a more liberal socialism. However, isolated protests were quickly stopped by the police and Stasi.

Albania responded in opposite fashion: already feuding with Moscow over suggestions that the country should focus on agriculture to the detriment of industrial development, and concerned that Moscow was becoming too liberal in its dealings with Yugoslavia (which, by that time, Albania regarded as a threatening neighbor and had branded in propaganda as "imperialist"), it withdrew from the Warsaw Pact entirely. Economic fallout from this move was mitigated in part by a strengthening of Albanian relations with the People's Republic of China, which was itself on increasingly bad terms with the Soviet Union.

In the fall of 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev and other Warsaw Pact leaders drafted a statement calling the invasion a mistake. This change in official history likely helped to encourage the popular revolutions that overthrew communist governments in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania at the end of 1989 by providing assurance that no similar Soviet intervention would be repeated were such uprisings to occur.