What Form of Resistance Defeated the Invading Russians in 1968?
by Lorin Peters Mar 28, 2022
Dear Family and Friends,
This essay is part of my one-person campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons. I spend maybe six hours a week sitting in front of local transit stations with a large sign asking different questions, and offering different essays. I get a nice amount of support from people passing by.
Peace, blessing and love
Lorin
Question 8 Is War Necessary to Defend a Country from Invasion?
Military technologies have been escalating for five thousand years – from clubs to stones, to spears, to arrows, to long-bows, to guns, to cannon, to bombs, to missiles, now to nukes, and lethal autonomous weapons systems. Presidents Trump and Putin have demonstrated that nuclear deterrence may no longer protect us - they operate outside the law. Nuclear war risk now stands at 20% per century, which extrapolates to 50% in 300 years (see Question 2). But in nuclear war there can be no winners (see Q4). There is no military defense. There is only nuclear suicide.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this dilemma. It was first proposed by Mohandas Gandhi in 1942, when a Japanese invasion of British India seemed imminent. He called it “shanti sena,” a peace army. A shanti sena practices ‘unarmed civilian defense.’
Q9 What Happened When Russia Invaded Czechoslovakia?
In 1968, Russia threatened to invade Czechoslovakia. The Czech Prime Minister, Dubcek, suggested they resist, not with violence, but with creative nonviolence. The Russians arrived only one week later, giving the people virtually no time to plan or prepare their resistance. So they improvised, brilliantly. They gave wrong directions to the invading troops. They rotated road signs, so Russian troops got lost. Within one week, all of their radio stations went underground with mobile military transmitters. The newspapers also went underground, and were distributed from the trunks of police-cars whenever the Russians were not watching.
When tanks rolled into town, many Czechs offered the Russians flowers, or food and drink, or chocolates, or cigarettes. The young women flirted with the Russians. (I have watched a beautiful Italian peacemaker flirt with a squad of Israeli soldiers. It was like a comedy - all six soldiers immediately forgot what they were sent to do.) Then the Czechs asked the Russians, “Why have you come?
They answered, “To rescue you from your dictatorship.”
The Czechs replied, “We have democratic elections. We have free speech. We like our government.”
Within a week, many Russian soldiers began refusing orders, and had to be rotated home. Actually, they were assigned to Siberia, lest they contaminate European Russia with visions of democracy. This rotation went on, week after week. In the end, the Russians were forced to leave Prime Minister Dubcek in power, and also to compromise on many of their other demands.
Q10 What Form of Resistance Defeated the Invading Russians?
That same year, 1968, Gene Sharp completed his PhD at Oxford University, with his 900 page survey and classification of all the different forms of nonviolence known in the history of humanity, and published it in 1973 as, “The Politics of Nonviolent Action.” In 1985, he wrote his brilliant 160 page analysis and guide to “Making Europe Unconquerable.” His work has been translated into at least 30 languages, and is credited with empowering the color revolutions – in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia – and in the Arab Spring – Tunisia, Egypt, and others. It has also been studied in many other oppressed societies.
Sharp is considered the father of strategic nonviolence, which is premised on the withdrawal of consent to overbearing government, through mass civil disobedience. This “people power” requires only a temporary commitment to nonviolence. It changes the faces in government, but does not change the governing culture.
In contrast, Gandhi is the father of principled nonviolence, which is premised on holding truth, and opening the hearts and minds of oppressors through the suffering of its “satyagrahis” (truth-holders). This “person power” requires a life-long commitment to nonviolence. It works more slowly than strategic nonviolence, but the changes in the governing culture seem to be longer-lasting. (My vigils and conversations here are an attempt to practice a very gentle form of this person power.)
Q11 “Making Europe (and America) Unconquerable”?
What happened when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia is a beginning template for how to make any country unconquerable. In other words, how to deter attack or defend a country (even America) from an invasion, or from a coup, without war.
Gene Sharp begins “Making Europe Unconquerable” by summarizing two improvised struggles against coups (Germany 1920, France 1961), and two improvised struggles against invasions (Germany 1923, Czechoslovakia 1968-69) . Then he develops the concept of “civilian(-based) defense,” and proposes refinements through research, policy studies, feasibility studies, contingency planning, preparations, and training. Such civilian defense can be applied as a supplement to military methods, or against a coup d’état, or after military defeat, or as a permanent and complete nonviolent defense policy.
This deterrence and defense are accomplished by social, economic, political, and psychological struggle, including noncooperation, strikes, boycotts, protests, civil disobedience, disruptions and interventions. These are used to wage widespread noncooperation and to offer massive public defiance. They aim to deny the objectives of the invaders, and to make their society politically indigestible and ungovernable by the invaders. They also aim to subvert the loyalty of the aggressors’ troops and functionaries, to make them unreliable in carrying out orders and repression, and even to induce them to mutiny.
Sharp’s fundamental insight is that violence is not the source of power in politics. Rather its source is the cooperation of people and human institutions … which can be refused. Nonviolent struggle can generally wield great power, even against ruthless rulers and regimes, because it attacks the most vulnerable characteristic of all hierarchical institutions: dependence on the submission and cooperation of the governed. Sharp also offers many helpful suggestions for how to help a nation work through many of their reservations about civilian defense.
Imagine our world without war
Lorin Peters
In 1884 my great grandfather immigrated from “South Russia” (now known as Ukraine) to Kansas. In 1955 he told me the story of loading his wheat crop in an ox-cart, and riding three or four days each way to sell it in the port of Berdyansk. Recently, when President Putin invaded Ukraine, the people of Berdyansk “organized peace rallies and convinced the Russian military to get out” (Yuri Sheliazhenko, Democracy Now, 2022 Mar 1).
Sadly, the leadership of Ukraine seems to be unaware of what recent historians have discovered about the results of resisting invasions and occupations in the 20th Century. Nonviolent campaigns have been successful in 54% of all their cases, while only 25% of violent campaigns have succeeded. Conversely, violent campaigns have been unsuccessful 62% of the time, while nonviolent campaigns have not succeeded only 22% of the time. (The remaining campaigns have been partially, but not fully, successful.) ("Why Civil Resistance Works," Chenoweth and Stephan, p 9).
These four questions are part of a series of 11 questions.
Questions 1-4 explore the probability and the consequences of nuclear war.
Questions 5-7 explore the reasons we keep our nuclear weapons.
Questions 8-11 explore some ways of defending our country without nuclear weapons, or war itself.
I have written, and am handing out, this summary in hope for my grandchildren, and everyone’s grandchildren, and in solidarity with my good Jesuit friend, Steve Kelly, who has done 12 years in prison for repeatedly attempting to disarm nuclear missiles. You are welcome to email me, and I will try to respond helpfully.