REVIEWS
regime’s reformism were exerted by several important Soviet bureaucracies. Officials in the ideological affairs bureaucracy, for example, were alarmed at the impact of Czechoslovak reformist ideas on Soviet dissidents and pressured the party leadership for action that would short-circuit that influence. The Ukrainian party organization, fearful of political instability in its own republic, was another source of pro-intervention pressure. Many KGB officials favored intervention, because they believed their intelligence-gathering activities in Czechoslovakia were jeopardized by the openness of political discussion there. Interestingly, Valenta suggests that the military elites were by no means united behind a pro-intervention position, though the dominant tendency among them was in favor of military action.
Less clearly explained are the forces and motivations behind the “coalition skeptical of intervention, Valenta includes among them the high officials of the Central Committee’s International Department, primarily Boris Ponomarev and V.V. Zagladin, as well as several sections of the Foreign Ministry. Premier Alexei Kosygin and foreign ideological affairs chief Mikhail Suslov are identified as noninterventionists. The author makes it clear that the noninterventionists were not at all proponents of the Czechoslovak reforms, but they strongly urged moderation in their government’s efforts to deal with the Dubček regime.
Professor Valenta has adroitly sifted through much of the available evidence bearing upon the Soviet decision, piecing together many separate strands from previously published works and adding data from Croch and Soviet primary sources as well. He has conducted many useful interviews with knowledgeable principals. As a result of his thoroughness, we now have a more well-integrated picture of the Soviet decision than we had before.
Especially revealing is the discussion of the role played by Soviet information-gathering agencies. Soviet intelligence agencies, according to Valenta, suffer from some of the same shortcomings exhibited by their American counterparts. They produce reports that are sometimes accurate, sometimes mistaken. They filter and distort information, and reports are often slanted for the purpose of influencing the policy judgments of the leaders who must rely on the incoming intelligence. This aspect of the Soviet decision remains only incompletely elucidated, but the book under review has taken us very close to an understanding this crucial question.
The book is a marvel of conciseness and shows few weak spots. One can note an occasional tendency to repetition. (For example, we are told three times that the timing of the intervention was chosen so as to preempt the Slovak party congress, scheduled to meet on August 26.) Some readers might feel uneasy about the Kremlinological approach of the author,
