Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968; Anatomy of a Decision. By Jiri Valenta, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. P. xii, 208.
Published eleven years after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, Jiri Valenta’s book joins the now staggering literature on the subject. It is an important addition to that larger literature, for it sheds a great deal of light on the murky and sometimes inscrutable process of foreign policymaking in the Kremlin. Professor Valenta does not exaggerate the lessons to be learned from this single, and perhaps exceptional, case study of Soviet decisionmaking. However, the process he has described leading up to the decision to intervene militarily in Czechoslovakia suggests a number of generalizable features in the way the Soviet elite resolves major foreign policy problems.
Valenta postulates a bureaucratic politics paradigm to explain Soviet decisionmaking. The model is derived from western paradigms developed by Graham Allison and Morton Halperin, among others, but Valenta has carefully noted the distinctive features of the Soviet political system. He stresses the supremacy of the Politburo, standing “at the center of the decisionmaking process” (p. 5), and he also analyzes the effect of other powerful organizations in the USSR—the Central Committee and its various departments, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the branches of the armed services, and the KGB. The Politburo itself makes key foreign policy decisions, Valenta affirms, but these decisions are made “in the face of signals and pressures from several powerful Soviet bureaucracies” . . . (p. 158), each of which pursues its separate organizational responsibilities and interests.
In the case of the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis, Valenta has sought to identify the “coalitions” of support for intervention and nonintervention in a policy debate that went on for at least six months prior to the actual decision to intervene. Strong pressures in favor of putting an end to the Dubček
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