World: WHY DID THEY DO IT?

AH astonishing as the events of the week were, they were no more mysterious than the motives and timing of the men who triggered them in Moscow. One of the real dramas of the invasion of Czechoslovakia took place in the Kremlin, whose leaders have been locked in debate for weeks about whether to strike down Alexander Dubcek's liberal reforms. Why did Russia's leaders finally decide to use fists instead of flexibility?

The answer is that the dangers constituted by Dubcek's Czechoslovakia finally came, in their estimation, to outweigh all the dangerous consequences of invasion. The Kremlin leaders must have come to the conclusion that Czechoslovakia's experiment would sooner or later prove fatal to the system that they had so carefully constructed since World War II. Freedom of speech and of the press, the right of free assembly, criticism both from within the party and political clubs outside it—all threatened to un dermine and eventually destroy Eastern European Communism. Poland, Hungary, East Germany were all susceptible to the Czechoslovak ex ample and in danger of eventually going their own ways.

A Domestic Issue. To the Soviets, that was a threat far more direct than any matter of Marxist orthodoxy or ideology. From Czarist days, the Russians have sought to mold a buffer between themselves and Western Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Czechoslovakia runs like a dagger from Europe into the Soviet Union and sits next door to East Germany, the shield of the Soviet bloc's de fense system. In a sense, Dubcek's growing unruliness—and the invasion of his country to bring it back in line—was a near-domestic issue for Moscow, not an international one. This was all the truer because, inside Russia, the youth and intellectuals—among others—seemed electrified by the spectacle of Czechoslovak reform.

So there was never any argument in the Kremlin over the necessity of bringing the Czechoslovaks to heel, only a dispute about how best to do it. The precedent of Hungary in 1956 provided a proven way, but one that carried opprobrium. Nonetheless, the Soviets took it, well aware that the world was certain to cry shame, and in the full knowledge that it would destroy any chance of the conference of Communist parties scheduled for this winter. In that conference, Moscow had hoped to demonstrate once and for all to Peking its leadership of world Communism.

Western experts have assembled four theories to explain why Russia chose the violent tactic now. One possibility is that the Soviets never considered seriously any other solution to the Czechoslovak problem. The sweet reasonableness at Cierna was all a feint. They could also have come to Cierna in the hope of finding—and aiding—a rebellious rump group in Dubcek's party leadership, and failed. Or they might have decided, after watching post-Cierna Czechoslovakia, that Dubcek simply could not or did not want to deliver on their demands of holding down his reforms. Finally, the invasion could have been a by-product of a power shift inside the Kremlin, an excuse to expose the failure of the current leadership to cope with Russia's problems. If so, the change need not necessarily appear immediately; Brezhnev and Co. might have to repair their mistakes before stepping down.