son Center's Asia Program and Kennan Institute, George Washington University's Cold War Group, and the National Security Archive. Special thanks for their documentary contributions to Jordan Baev (Sofia), A. A. Lyakhovskiy (Moscow); Oldrich Tuma (Prague) and David Wolff.

Excerpts of this conversations were previously published in CWIHP Bulletin 8-9 (Winter 1995/1996), pp. 145-146. The conversation was conducted through an interpreter.

3 Taraki was also president of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan.

4 The Society of Muslim Brotherhood (Jam'iat-I Ikhwan alMuslimin), founded in 1929 in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna was a religio-political organization, pan-Islamic in outlook and aimed at imposing Islamic law on all aspects of the social and political life of the Muslim nation.

5 This circular is an implementation of Attachment 2 of the document agreed upon at the 27 December 1979 Politburo meeting, "Our Steps in Connection with the Development of the Situation Around Afghanistan"; the Politburo decision also carries the notation "Regarding Point 151 of Minutes N° 177" and the classification "Top Secret"]

This circular is an implementation of Attachment 8 of the document agreed upon at the 27 December 1979 Politburo meeting, "Our Steps in Connection with the Development of the Situation Around Afghanistan"; the Politburo decision also carries a "Flash" message precedence, the designation "Special", the notation "Regarding Point 151 of Minutes N° 177" and "Special Folder", and the classification "Top Secret."

7 Excerpts of this document were previously published in CWIHP Bulletin 8-9 (Winter 1996/1997), pp. 161-2.

8 Dost traveled to New York on 4 January 1980 to participate in the United Nations Security Council meeting on Afghanistan. On 3 January 1980, the United States, Pakistan and other countries had requested the Security Council to debate the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the Security Council started discussing the crisis on 5 January. Afghanistan's deputy permanent representative to the UN, Abdul Hakim Tabibi, resigned from his post in protest against the Soviet intervention.

9 The first high-level Soviet-American meeting since the Soviet invasion took place on 16 May 1980 in Vienna on the occasion of the anniversary celebrations for the 1955 Austrian State Treaty that

had provided for an end to the occupation of Austria. Muskie and Gromyko conferred for three hours at the Hofburg Palace.

10 In response to the Soviet invasion, President Carter had threatened to boycott the 1980 Olympic Summer Games in Moscow. The US Olympic Committee voted on 12 April 1980 to endorse the president's call for a boycott.

11 This conversation took place in the wings of the international scientific conference that took place in Berlin from 20-24 October 1980 and was called "The mutual battle for social progress of the workers' movement and the anti-imperialist peoples' liberation movement." See DY30/2367, p.43.

12 Babrak Karmal's visit to the Soviet Union took place from 15 October -5 November 1980.

13 In March 1965, a Chinese government delegation led by Foreign Minister Chen Yi visited Afghanistan to confer with King Zahir Shah.

14 Gromyko met with Shultz in New York on 28 September and 4 October 1982 during the UN General Assembly session in New York.

15 See the reference to this document in A. A. Lyakhovskiy, Plamya Afghanistana (Moscow: Iskon, 1999), pp. 371-2. See also Chernyaev's Notes from Politburo Meeting, 13 November 1986, in this Bulletin.

16 Gorbachev visited India from 25-28 November 1986; he and Rajiv spent nearly 10 hours in talks. See "Rajiv and Mikhail," Christian Science Monitor, 2 December 1986, p. 27; and "Gorbachev in India," New York Times, 1 December 1986, p. A12.

17

An Afghan government and party delegation visited Moscow in December 1986.

18 Armacost visited Pakistan in mid-January 1987.

19 Shevardnadze visited Kabul 13-15 January 1989 to shore up the moral of the Afghan leadership in anticipation of the Soviet troop withdrawal by 15 February.

20 The deadline for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

21 Provided by Najibullah during Shevardnadze's visit in January 1989. See "Memorandum of Conversation between Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Najibullah and other Afghan Leaders on 13-14 January 1989," 14 January 1989, above. See CWIHP Bulletin 8/9 (Winter 1995/1996), pp. 181-84).

22

T

The Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine (TSDAHOU), located in Kyiv, houses all the Soviet-era records of the former Communist Party of Ukraine (UkrCP).' These include documents from the UkrCP Politburo and Central Committee (CC) apparatus as well as many personal papers and reports to the Soviet Politburo from each of the officials who served as UkrCP CC First Secretary from 1939 to 1991: Nikita Khrushchev, Lazar' Kaganovich, Leonid Mel'nykov, Oleksii Kyrychenko, Nikolai Podgornyi (Mykola Pidhornyi), Petro Shelest, Volodymyr Shcherbyts'kyi, Volodymyr Ivashko, and Stanyslav Hurenko.2 All documents from the Soviet period at TSDAHOU are accessible. Although the photocopying regulations are peculiar (with prices dependent on the "value" of a document), it is possible to order copies of documents at substantially lower cost than at most archives in Moscow.3

For those studying the 1968 Soviet-Czechoslovak crisis, TSDAHOU contains enormously rich holdings. Copies of some of the documents stored there are available at one or more archives in Moscow, but many of the items at TSDAHOU are not accessible in Russia, either because of continued secrecy restrictions or because the documents are present only in Kyiv. Numerous files in Opis' 25 of Fond 1 at TSDAHOU are replete with important materials about the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Among these are reports about Soviet military exercises and planning, redeployments of Soviet troops in the leadup to the invasion, the effects that the mobilization of reservists and requisitioning of civilian vehicles was having on the Ukrainian economy, and the morale of Soviet troops both before and after the invasion. Although a separate state security archive in Kyiv is still closed for research on Cold War topics, some materials from the Soviet Committee on State Security (KGB) and the Ukrainian branch of the KGB can be found in TSDAHOU. Translations of a number of Soviet Army documents and military counterintelligence reports, mainly from the commander of the Kyiv Military District, General Viktor Kulikov (who later was appointed a Marshal of the Soviet Union and commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact), the head of the district's Military Council, General Vladimir Golovkin, and the head of military counterintelligence (local units of the KGB Special Departments) in the Kyiv Military District, General Aleksei Shurepov, will be published along with my commentary in the next issue of the CWIHP Bulletin.

The thirty-one documents presented below fall mainly into two broad categories: (1) memoranda transmitted by the

UkrCP First Secretary, Petro Shelest, to the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU), of which he was a full member; and (2) reports to Shelest from the Ukrainian KGB and from senior UkrCP officials, which he used extensively for his own memoranda (or sometimes retransmitted in full) to the CPSU Politburo. Also included are three other items prepared by Shelest: his report to high-ranking UkrCP officials about the April 1968 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee; the statement he presented to the next CPSU Central Committee plenum, on 17 July 1968, two days after a multilateral meeting in Warsaw; and a speech he delivered to high-ranking UkrCP officials on 18 July 1968, the day after the CPSU Central Committee plenum. All of these documents are best read in conjunction with the excerpts from Shelest's diary in Issue No. 10 of the CWIHP Bulletin and the materials from the Russian archives featured in future CWIHP publications.*

The memoranda translated here are only a small sample of the vast quantity of materials that Shelest dispatched to his colleagues on the CPSU Politburo throughout the 1968 crisis often more than once a week, and sometimes more than once a day. As the documents below indicate, the tone of Shelest's reports was uniformly hostile to the events in Czechoslovakia. The Ukrainian leader spoke bitterly about the growth of "anti-socialist and counterrevolutionary forces" in Czechoslovakia and the "pernicious effects" this was having in Ukraine and on the security of the USSR as a whole. He constantly urged "decisive [Soviet] action" to resolve the crisis, and warned that "if the healthy forces [in Czechoslovakia] are threatened with mortal danger and the counterrevolution keeps up its onslaught, we [must] rely on the will of our party, the will of our people, and the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact to resort to the most extreme measures."

Well before the 23 March conference in Dresden, which brought together the leaders of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria to discuss recent events in Czechoslovakia, Shelest had begun commissioning reports about the repercussions of the Prague Spring from a number of senior officials in Ukraine, including Yurii Il'nyts'kyi, the first secretary of the UkrCP's Transcarpathian Oblast committee, General Vitalii Nikitchenko, the head of the Ukrainian KGB, and Colonel Oleksii Zhabchenko, the head of the KGB directorate in Transcarpathian Oblast, the area contiguous with Czechoslovakia. Everything in their reports that reflected negatively on the Prague Spring was selected by Shelest to transmit to the CPSU Politburo.

party and the growth of anti-socialist, counterrevolutionary forces in socialist Czechoslovakia." Il'nyts'kyi's prominent role at the plenum and in other high-level forums in 1968 was clearly attributable to Shelest. The combined warnings of the two officials underscored Shelest's view that the Soviet Union must "provide urgent help to the Czechoslovak Communists and the Czechoslovak nation at this trying hour." The documents presented here, along with Shelest's di

posed toward the Prague Spring, often seeking to reassure his Ukrainian interlocutors that most of their fears were unwarranted. Nevertheless, Koscelanský gradually became worried about "unsavory developments" and "excesses," especially in the Czech lands. By 14 May, Koscelanský was warning that "it might be necessary for the Slovaks, together with the fraternal Soviet peoples, to liberate the Czech lands once again. " This comment, along with many other concerns that Koscelanský expressed, were relayed by Shelest to the full CPSU Politburo. Koscelanský was particularly apprehensive that the "Czechs [might] try to outfox the Slovaks," creating a federalized state that would still leave the Slovaks in a subordinate position. Although Koscelanský repeatedly sought to allay Moscow's anxieties and to rectify the "mistaken impressions that some Soviet comrades have gained from poor information provided by the Soviet embassy," his growing misgivings, especially about Czech-Slovak relations, gave Soviet leaders hope that they could exploit rifts among the KSČ reformers.

Koscelansky's chief contact in Ukraine, Yurii Il'nyts'kyi, the head of the UkrCP's Transcarpathian Oblast committee, exerted much greater influence during the crisis than his position normally would have given him. Having spent his whole career as a party official in Transcarpathia, Il'nyts'kyi quickly became apprehensive in 1968 about the spillover from Czechoslovakia. With Shelest's backing, he spoke out repeatedly in public against the "anti-socialist and revisionist elements" in Czechoslovakia who were "exploiting foreign radio stations and television outlets" to disseminate their "vile propaganda" in western Ukraine. Behind the scenes, too, as the documents here indicate, Il'nyts'kyi went to great lengths to highlight what he saw as a fundamental threat to the stability of Ukraine, especially his own oblast. Even though he was not a member of the CPSU Central Committee, he was among the handful of officials invited to speak at the Central Committee's plenum on 17 July 1968, which was convened to approve the results of the five-power meeting in Warsaw. Il'nyts'kyi's remarks at the plenum echoed Shelest's own speech (translated below) in denouncing the "grave

ary and newly released transcripts of Soviet Politburo meetings in 1968 (which I have discussed elsewhere), should eliminate any lingering doubts about the importance of Ukraine during the Czechoslovak crisis. Before the East-bloc archives were opened, several leading Western scholars had been cautious-and understandably so in assessing Ukraine's role in 1968. In a major study published in 1974, Grey Hodnett and Peter Potichnyj marshaled a good deal of evidence from open sources indicating "an important linkage between the situation in the Ukraine and the developments in Czechoslovkia," but they acknowledged that they had no way of determining at least from publicly available materials-whether the Ukrainian issue was a salient factor in the Soviet Politburo's deliberations in 1968. A year after the Hodnett/Potichnyj study appeared, another prominent Western scholar, Roman Szporluk, downplayed the role of Ukraine in 1968, arguing that there had been only "unconfirmed reports [in 1968] that the then first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist party took a stand urging the invasion of Czechoslovakia.... Whatever the truth of these reports, Ukrainian leaders have probably exerted little significance on the external relations of the USSR." Several years later, in a detailed analysis of Soviet policy during the Prague Spring, Karen Dawisha was more willing to emphasize Shelest's role in the crisis, depicting him as a strong and influential proponent of military intervention in Czechoslovakia from an early stage.11 Even so, her book was necessarily limited in the evidence it could provide about Ukraine. Although a few important new memoirs and declassified Western documents had become available in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the top-secret records of the Warsaw Pact countries themselves were still closed. Thus, until very recently it was impossible to offer any conclusive judgments about the role of Ukraine and of Shelest personally during the 1968 crisis.

The new archival evidence, new memoirs, and Shelest's diary leave no doubt that Hodnett's and Potichnyj's conclusion was accurate, and that Soviet leaders themselves were deeply worried about the link between events in Czechoslovakia and the growing unrest in Ukraine. The spillover into

Ukraine and other Soviet republics (Moldavia, the Baltic states, Belorussia, and Georgia) was by no means the only factor in the Soviet Politburo's decision to send troops into Czechoslovakia, but it clearly was of enormous importance. 12 Although the Soviet KGB chairman, Yurii Andropov, was the most aggressive proponent of military intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Shelest and the then-Soviet president, Nikolai Podgornyi (who had formerly served as UkrCP First Secretary), were nearly as vehement. Ukrainian leaders wielded greater "significance [sic] on the external relations of the USSR" in 1968 than many scholars had previously believed.

Quite apart from what the documents reveal about the Soviet-Czechoslovak crisis, they also shed extremely useful light on some of the KGB's procedures. The reports compiled by Nikitchenko and Zhabchenko clearly were based on elaborate networks of "unofficial collaborators" in western Ukraine. Many ordinary citizens were willing to inform on their relatives, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. Although some of these informers may not have realized that the information they provided about other people's comments would be faithfully reproduced in KGB reports, it is likely that most of them were aware of the consequences of their actions.

The boldness of some of the remarks attributed to residents of western Ukraine in the KGB and party reports is striking. Despite the Soviet authorities' efforts to control the media and prevent an influx of "bourgeois, anti-socialist propaganda," it is clear that accurate information about events in Czechoslovakia was making its way to a significant number of ordinary citizens in Ukraine. Some of this information was gleaned either from first-hand observations (of those who lived near military bases) or from Ukrainian-language newspapers and journals published in Czechoslovakia, which were then shipped into western Ukraine. Other information, as Zhabchenko and Il'nyts'kyi acknowledged, came from Western radio broadcasts and from underground materials circulated in Ukraine. The wide range of critical comments cited in the reports suggests that these citizens' "unsavory, hostile sentiments" were typical of the views expressed by a large percentage of non-Communists and even of party members in western Ukraine. Although the KGB and UkrCP reports do not provide any firm statistical breakdown of popular attitudes toward events in Czechoslovakia, the findings are detailed enough to indicate that Hodnett and Potichnyj, far from overstating the spillover into Ukraine, may have been too circumspect. At the very least, the documents confirm that long-standing attempts to foster "monolithic unity" in Soviet Ukraine had yielded little more than a façade.

One final point worth noting about the Ukrainian documents is the evidence they provide about Soviet decisionmaking during crises-evidence that tallies very well with❘ declassified materials from other countries. The documents indicate that large quantities of raw information from intelligence sources and the Soviet bureaucracy flowed upward in 1968, but that otherwise the CPSU Politburo and Secretariat depended very little on lower-level party and state agencies in their dealings with Czechoslovakia. Decision-making

throughout the crisis was from the top down (i.e., the CPSU Politburo ordered lower-level officials what position to adopt, rather than seeking policy advice from below).13 The Politburo kept all media outlets rigidly under its own control. From at least early March 1968 on, all significant articles and broadcasts about Czechoslovakia had to be cleared personally by top officials, and often by Leonid Brezhnev himself.14 A formal directive to this effect was issued by the Politburo in early June. Moreover, a vast number of documents from the Ukrainian archives-as well as countless items stored in repositories in Russia and other former Soviet republics— reveal that the CPSU Politburo transmitted frequent "informational reports" (i.e., binding "position papers") about the crisis to lower-level party and state organizations, including all those in Ukraine. These lower-level bodies were required to disseminate the Politburo's findings to senior employees and party members. 15 By periodically setting forth the "official view" of events in Czechoslovakia and explicating the Marxist-Leninist rationale for Soviet policy, the Politburo was able to take advantage of the CPSU's entrenched practice of "democratic centralism," which prohibited any dissent or divergence from policies made at higher levels. Soviet leaders thereby enjoyed ample leeway to define the Party's stance during the 1968 crisis without unwanted interference from below.

The documents also show that the Politburo took elaborate steps to ensure that its informational reports were disseminated fully and properly, in strict accordance with its own decrees. One way of accomplishing this goal was by sending a Politburo member (or members) to oversee lowerlevel party meetings directly, as Shelest did on many occasions in 1968.16 In addition, the Politburo was able to use the CPSU CC Organizational-Party Work Department as a comprehensive monitoring and feedback mechanism. The first secretaries of all the republic, regional, oblast, and local party committees were obligated to report promptly back to Moscow on the dissemination of the Politburo's analyses and the reactions they encountered. Officials in the OrganizationalParty Work Department were responsible for monitoring the performance of these lower-level party organizations and for distilling the huge volume of cables into a memorandum for the top CPSU leadership." This complex, iterative process allowed the Politburo to keep constant watch over the implementation of its decisions and to deprive lower-level party committees― in all the union-republics and outlying regions as well as in Moscow-of any conceivable opportunity or inclination they might have had to deviate from the Politburo's own position. In the unlikely event that officials outside the Politburo and Secretariat became uneasy about the tenor of Soviet policy toward Czechoslovakia, they would have realized that it was pointless and even dangerous to give any hint of (much less try to act on) their misgivings.

The Politburo's use of multiple oversight procedures, as outlined in the new archival materials, underscores the importance that Soviet leaders attached to the implementation of decisions concerning Czechoslovakia. Until now, Western studies of the 1968 crisis have made no mention of this