Are Ukrainians or Ukraine responsible for the Warsaw Pact´s military invasion of former Czechoslovakia during the so-called Prague Spring in 1968? No, that's not true: the invasion of Czechoslovakia was led by the Soviet Union, under a system that granted individual member states no single-handed control over Kremlin policy decisions.
The claims that Ukrainians were responsible for the invasion appeared in a video (archived here) published by TikTok on July 21 when Stanislav Popelka, a man involved in anti-Ukraine protests in Prague is shown saying:
In 1968, it was Ukrainians and Asians that came to our country, and they voted for the invasion in the politburo, which then had absolute power. Of eleven members of the Politburo, seven were Ukrainians, and only one representative of Russia.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jul 26 17:22:17 2023 UTC)
The Soviet politburo, the highest political authority in the Soviet Union had 11 members in 1968.
It is important to note that ethnicity and geographic birthplace did not play major roles in the public profiles of Soviet authorities at the time, Oldrich Tuma, a senior research fellow of the Institute for Contemporary History, wrote in an email to Lead Stories. All members of the Politburo considered themselves communists and Soviet citizens, defended Soviet interests and, of course, spoke Russian. Some may have argued for the interests of the territories and the republics they led, like Piotr Selest, the head of the Ukrainian communist party, but they would decide matters in the interest of the Soviet Union above all else, Tuma said.
In 1968, the politburo consisted of six Russians, including Brezhnev, three Ukrainians, one Latvian, and one Belarusian member, according to a spokesman of the Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes Martin Vacek. Russian members of the politburo were: Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Kirilenko, Alexei Kosygin, Mikhail Suslov, Alexander Selepin, Gennadii Voronov, Vacek wrote in an email to Lead Stories. Vacek also said that while some members may have had different opinions about invading Czechoslovakia, they all voted unanimously for it in the end, and he believes there is no point in dividing them by nationality.
For Brezhnev, who was born in Ukraine to Russian parents, ethnicity played no role in his rise to the helm of the country, as the leadership of the Soviet Union leadership was based on the Communist nomenclature. The Soviet invasion force into Czechoslovakia in 1968, included troops from Ukraine, but there is no public record of how many Ukrainians, or other Soviet ethnicities, participated in the event. The Czech Army official website has a detailed study of the military side of the invasion here.
Petr Blazek, a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, told iRozhlas.cz that blaming states that were part of the Soviet Union, such as the Baltic states or Ukraine, for acts ordered by Soviet leaders is "absolute nonsense", because of the highly centralized nature of decision making inside the Soviet Communist regime.
The claim that Ukrainians were responsible for the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, appeared to circulate after former Czech Communist Party leader Vojtech Filip told the Guardian in 2018 the history of the invasion was being falsified, and he claimed the Soviet leader at the time Leonid Brezhnev was actually Ukrainian and the majority of invading forces was Ukrainian.
On August 21, 1968, Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the reforms installed by the then-communist leader Alexander Dubcek. The invasion cost more than 100 lives, thousands of injured, and establish a puppet leadership, loyal to Moscow. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the official narrative was that the country was liberated from a Western plot to overthrow the communist government.
