Červený Poplach: The NATO-Soviet Standoff Over Czechoslovakia

[pats2001]

I'll be delving into that when I start posting the final ten-episode installment of this series in a few weeks. 

[pats2001]

For the benefit of anybody who's wondering about the current status of Part 41, I was delayed in getting started on it because of circumstances beyond my control. I'm currently looking to get the finished product up on this thread by the first week of September.

[pats2001]

Sorry I'm late with Part 41; I've had some medical emergencies come up in the past week.

[lordroel]

Sept 6, 2024 5:36:31 GMT pats2001 said:

Sorry I'm late with Part 41; I've had some medical emergencies come up in the past week.

It’s fine, health comes before updates.

[pats2001]

  


PART 41/You Have Sat Here Too Long For Any Good You Are Doing



“Live by the sword, die by the sword.” That phrase has been used countless times in many contexts, but in late May of 1969 it would serve as a particularly fitting epitaph for Leonid Brezhnev’s political career. Brezhnev had first come to power in October of 1964 by means of an internal coup engineered within the upper echelons of the CPSU hierarchy-- and it would be in a similar fashion that he would be ousted as the Czech War approached its climax. At the time the CPSU Central Committee gathered in
the Kremlin on May 21st, 1969 for what was euphemistically referred to as a “special policy discussion on the Motherland’s defense”, the prevailing sentiment towards Brezhnev from the highest levels of the Kremlin elite to the lowliest factory workers in Siberia was (at best)one of severe displeasure. Far from the glorious socialist triumph which had been envisaged when Operation Danube was first conceived, the military campaign to subjugate Czechoslovakia had proven a barely mitigated disaster the likes of which the USSR hadn’t endured in almost 30 years. Repatriated Soviet POWs were coming home to a nation on the verge of ripping itself to shreds; the Civic Society’s home-brewed guerrilla battle against Moscow’s security forces had effectively split the Soviet capital in half; and Soviet global prestige was at an all-time low. To many observers on both sides of the Czech War it seemed to be less a question of if the Soviet Union would implode than when.



It was in this volatile atmosphere that the Central Committee gathered at the Kremlin just after 7:00 PM Moscow time on the evening of May 21st; paranoia about the risk of a Civic Society attack on the CPSU elite drove the committee leadership to order that the meeting be kept secret from the public until the committee’s final decision on Brezhnev’s political status had been rendered. It also prompted the deployment of a sizable Red Army reserve unit to guard the Kremlin’s perimeter. One ex-CPSU
official who was present at the meeting would later recall in a postwar interview with a Swiss TV news correspondent that everyone who participated in the fateful session, including Brezhnev himself, had needed to run a veritable gauntlet of KGB checkpoints simply to get within seeing distance of the CPSU meeting room. And to get inside the meeting room, it was necessary to endure another set of security checks.



Once all the relevant parties to the meeting had been admitted and the Central Committee called to order, the debate over Brezhnev’s conduct of the war with NATO began. To say the atmosphere was tense would be a hopelessly inadequate description of what it was like inside the CPSU chambers; nearly every publicly available account of the session mentions the use of obscenities by most of the men in attendance, and there are persistent rumors to this day of at least one fistfight erupting outside the chambers during a pause in the proceedings. Brezhnev himself was certainly no shrinking violet— he berated his critics with a torrent of verbal abuse reminiscent of his political mentor Joseph Stalin. He accused those questioning his wartime policies of everything short of first-degree murder, and he might have charged them with that too if the committee session had gone on long enough. But if he’d thought sheer bluster would be enough to retrieve his political irons from the fire, he would soon get a
rude awakening; Alexei Kosygin, the second highest-ranking man in the CPSU political leadership from the earliest days of the Brezhnev regime, played Brutus to Brezhnev’s Caesar and verbally eviscerated him with a concise and damning list of the strategic mistakes that had pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of final defeat against NATO.


The session reached its climax around 9:30 as the Central Committee came to a vote on whether Brezhnev should remain as general secretary or be dismissed to make room for a successor. Without hesitation or exception, the committee members agreed Brezhnev's conduct of the war justified his removal from office and Kosygin was duly appointed as new CPSU secretary general; Brezhnev was then escorted out of the Kremlin in a state of shock bordering on catatonia. He would sit out the final days of the Czech War under virtual house arrest in an isolated cottage southeast of Murmansk while Kosygin began the daunting task of trying to put out the geopolitical fires threatening to burn Russia to ashes....
TO BE CONTINUED

[575]

Oct 13, 2024 4:43:34 GMT pats2001 said:

View Attachment  


PART 41/You Have Sat Here Too Long For Any Good You Are Doing



“Live by the sword, die by the sword.” That phrase has been used countless times in many contexts, but in late May of 1969 it would serve as a particularly fitting epitaph for Leonid Brezhnev’s political career. Brezhnev had first come to power in October of 1964 by means of an internal coup engineered within the upper echelons of the CPSU hierarchy-- and it would be in a similar fashion that he would be ousted as the Czech War approached its climax. At the time the CPSU Central Committee gathered in
the Kremlin on May 21st, 1969 for what was euphemistically referred to as a “special policy discussion on the Motherland’s defense”, the prevailing sentiment towards Brezhnev from the highest levels of the Kremlin elite to the lowliest factory workers in Siberia was (at best)one of severe displeasure. Far from the glorious socialist triumph which had been envisaged when Operation Danube was first conceived, the military campaign to subjugate Czechoslovakia had proven a barely mitigated disaster the likes of which the USSR hadn’t endured in almost 30 years. Repatriated Soviet POWs were coming home to a nation on the verge of ripping itself to shreds; the Civic Society’s home-brewed guerrilla battle against Moscow’s security forces had effectively split the Soviet capital in half; and Soviet global prestige was at an all-time low. To many observers on both sides of the Czech War it seemed to be less a question of if the Soviet Union would implode than when.



It was in this volatile atmosphere that the Central Committee gathered at the Kremlin just after 7:00 PM Moscow time on the evening of May 21st; paranoia about the risk of a Civic Society attack on the CPSU elite drove the committee leadership to order that the meeting be kept secret from the public until the committee’s final decision on Brezhnev’s political status had been rendered. It also prompted the deployment of a sizable Red Army reserve unit to guard the Kremlin’s perimeter. One ex-CPSU
official who was present at the meeting would later recall in a postwar interview with a Swiss TV news correspondent that everyone who participated in the fateful session, including Brezhnev himself, had needed to run a veritable gauntlet of KGB checkpoints simply to get within seeing distance of the CPSU meeting room. And to get inside the meeting room, it was necessary to endure another set of security checks.



Once all the relevant parties to the meeting had been admitted and the Central Committee called to order, the debate over Brezhnev’s conduct of the war with NATO began. To say the atmosphere was tense would be a hopelessly inadequate description of what it was like inside the CPSU chambers; nearly every publicly available account of the session mentions the use of obscenities by most of the men in attendance, and there are persistent rumors to this day of at least one fistfight erupting outside the chambers during a pause in the proceedings. Brezhnev himself was certainly no shrinking violet— he berated his critics with a torrent of verbal abuse reminiscent of his political mentor Joseph Stalin. He accused those questioning his wartime policies of everything short of first-degree murder, and he might have charged them with that too if the committee session had gone on long enough. But if he’d thought sheer bluster would be enough to retrieve his political irons from the fire, he would soon get a
rude awakening; Alexei Kosygin, the second highest-ranking man in the CPSU political leadership from the earliest days of the Brezhnev regime, played Brutus to Brezhnev’s Caesar and verbally eviscerated him with a concise and damning list of the strategic mistakes that had pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of final defeat against NATO.


The session reached its climax around 9:30 as the Central Committee came to a vote on whether Brezhnev should remain as general secretary or be dismissed to make room for a successor. Without hesitation or exception, the committee members agreed Brezhnev's conduct of the war justified his removal from office and Kosygin was duly appointed as new CPSU secretary general; Brezhnev was then escorted out of the Kremlin in a state of shock bordering on catatonia. He would sit out the final days of the Czech War under virtual house arrest in an isolated cottage southeast of Murmansk while Kosygin began the daunting task of trying to put out the geopolitical fires threatening to burn Russia to ashes....
TO BE CONTINUED

That was worth the wait!

Looking forward to Kosygin's efford to save the USSR and possibly end the fighting.

[lordroel]

Oct 13, 2024 9:17:12 GMT 575 said:

Oct 13, 2024 4:43:34 GMT pats2001 said:

View Attachment  


PART 41/You Have Sat Here Too Long For Any Good You Are Doing



“Live by the sword, die by the sword.” That phrase has been used countless times in many contexts, but in late May of 1969 it would serve as a particularly fitting epitaph for Leonid Brezhnev’s political career. Brezhnev had first come to power in October of 1964 by means of an internal coup engineered within the upper echelons of the CPSU hierarchy-- and it would be in a similar fashion that he would be ousted as the Czech War approached its climax. At the time the CPSU Central Committee gathered in
the Kremlin on May 21st, 1969 for what was euphemistically referred to as a “special policy discussion on the Motherland’s defense”, the prevailing sentiment towards Brezhnev from the highest levels of the Kremlin elite to the lowliest factory workers in Siberia was (at best)one of severe displeasure. Far from the glorious socialist triumph which had been envisaged when Operation Danube was first conceived, the military campaign to subjugate Czechoslovakia had proven a barely mitigated disaster the likes of which the USSR hadn’t endured in almost 30 years. Repatriated Soviet POWs were coming home to a nation on the verge of ripping itself to shreds; the Civic Society’s home-brewed guerrilla battle against Moscow’s security forces had effectively split the Soviet capital in half; and Soviet global prestige was at an all-time low. To many observers on both sides of the Czech War it seemed to be less a question of if the Soviet Union would implode than when.



It was in this volatile atmosphere that the Central Committee gathered at the Kremlin just after 7:00 PM Moscow time on the evening of May 21st; paranoia about the risk of a Civic Society attack on the CPSU elite drove the committee leadership to order that the meeting be kept secret from the public until the committee’s final decision on Brezhnev’s political status had been rendered. It also prompted the deployment of a sizable Red Army reserve unit to guard the Kremlin’s perimeter. One ex-CPSU
official who was present at the meeting would later recall in a postwar interview with a Swiss TV news correspondent that everyone who participated in the fateful session, including Brezhnev himself, had needed to run a veritable gauntlet of KGB checkpoints simply to get within seeing distance of the CPSU meeting room. And to get inside the meeting room, it was necessary to endure another set of security checks.



Once all the relevant parties to the meeting had been admitted and the Central Committee called to order, the debate over Brezhnev’s conduct of the war with NATO began. To say the atmosphere was tense would be a hopelessly inadequate description of what it was like inside the CPSU chambers; nearly every publicly available account of the session mentions the use of obscenities by most of the men in attendance, and there are persistent rumors to this day of at least one fistfight erupting outside the chambers during a pause in the proceedings. Brezhnev himself was certainly no shrinking violet— he berated his critics with a torrent of verbal abuse reminiscent of his political mentor Joseph Stalin. He accused those questioning his wartime policies of everything short of first-degree murder, and he might have charged them with that too if the committee session had gone on long enough. But if he’d thought sheer bluster would be enough to retrieve his political irons from the fire, he would soon get a
rude awakening; Alexei Kosygin, the second highest-ranking man in the CPSU political leadership from the earliest days of the Brezhnev regime, played Brutus to Brezhnev’s Caesar and verbally eviscerated him with a concise and damning list of the strategic mistakes that had pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of final defeat against NATO.


The session reached its climax around 9:30 as the Central Committee came to a vote on whether Brezhnev should remain as general secretary or be dismissed to make room for a successor. Without hesitation or exception, the committee members agreed Brezhnev's conduct of the war justified his removal from office and Kosygin was duly appointed as new CPSU secretary general; Brezhnev was then escorted out of the Kremlin in a state of shock bordering on catatonia. He would sit out the final days of the Czech War under virtual house arrest in an isolated cottage southeast of Murmansk while Kosygin began the daunting task of trying to put out the geopolitical fires threatening to burn Russia to ashes....
TO BE CONTINUED

That was worth the wait!

Looking forward to Kosygin's efford to save the USSR and possibly end the fighting.

Second that, nice to see a update.

[pats2001]

Hey, party people, thought you might like to know I've just started work on Part 42. 

[lordroel]

Oct 19, 2024 7:15:42 GMT pats2001 said:

Hey, party people, thought you might like to know I've just started work on Part 42. 

Nice, to hear that.

[pats2001]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news-- OK, MORE bad news --but I'm suspending all work on this timeline indefinitely because I'm too traumatized by last night's election results. Not sure when or even if I'll resume.

[575]

Nov 7, 2024 1:06:34 GMT pats2001 said:

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news-- OK, MORE bad news --but I'm suspending all work on this timeline indefinitely because I'm too traumatized by last night's election results. Not sure when or even if I'll resume.

Well I hope it stays a suspention - and yes, unfortunately You aren't the only one of peoples I'm following that have been traumatized. But I'll keep looking up the thread should You resume - won't miss that!

[pats2001]

Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binaries, you'll be glad to know the suspension is over. I've just resumed work on Part 42.