The Brezhnev Doctrine justified the intervention of fellow socialist states. The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet foreign policy that proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in any state of the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe was a threat to them all. The Brezhnev Doctrine was proclaimed in order to justify the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia earlier in 1968, with the overthrow of the reform government there. The references to "socialism" under The Brezhnev Doctrine meant control by the communist parties loyal to the Kremlin. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev repudiated The Brezhnev Doctrine in the late 1980s, as the Kremlin accepted the peaceful overthrow of communist rule in all its satellite countries in Eastern Europe.
"The Brezhnev Doctrine" was first and most clearly
outlined by Sergei Kovalev in a September 26, 1968 Pravda article entitled
"Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries". Leonid
Brezhnev reiterated it in a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United
Workers' Party on November 13, 1968, which stated: "When forces that are hostile
to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards
capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common
problem and concern of all socialist countries."
The Brezhnev Doctrine was
announced to retroactively justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968
that ended the Prague Spring, and the invasion of Hungary in 1956. These
interventions were meant to put an end to liberalization efforts that had the
potential to compromise Soviet hegemony inside the Eastern Bloc, and this was
considered by the Soviet Union to be an essential and defensive and strategic
buffer in the event of hostilities with NATO breaking out.
The Brezhnev Doctrine, and
its policy meant that only limited independence of the satellite states'
communist parties was allowed and that none would be allowed to compromise the
cohesiveness of the Eastern Bloc in any way. No country could leave the Warsaw
Pact or disturb a ruling communist party's monopoly on power. Implicit in The
Brezhnev Doctrine was that the leadership of the Soviet Union reserved, for
itself, the power to define "socialism" and "capitalism".
Following the announcement of the Brezhnev
Doctrine, numerous treaties were signed between the Soviet Union and its
satellite states to ensure inter-state cooperation. The principles of The
Brezhnev Doctrine were so broad that the Soviets even used it to justify their
military intervention in the communist, though a non-Warsaw Pact nation of
Afghanistan in 1979. The Brezhnev Doctrine stayed in effect until it was ended
with the Soviet reaction to the Polish crisis of 1980–1981.
Mikhail Gorbachev refused to
use military force when Poland held free elections in 1989 and Solidarity
defeated the Polish United Workers' Party. Sinatra Doctrine in 1989, alluding to
the Frank Sinatra song "My Way" became the new doctrine. The failure to
intervene in the emancipation of the Eastern European satellite states and the
Pan-European Picnic, as it was called, then led to the fall of the Iron Curtain
and the Eastern Bloc peacefully collapsed.