The Brezhnev Doctrine sounds like an idea, but it was actually a name given to a practice that had been going on for fifteen years. The Soviet Union had used military force in Eastern Europe in 1953 (East Germany), 1956 (Hungary), and August 1968 (Czechoslovakia) before Leonid Brezhnev gave a speech to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party on November 12, 1968 codifying the principle: the Soviet Union had the right to intervene in any socialist state moving away from Marxism-Leninism. The doctrine ruled Eastern Europe for two decades until Mikhail Gorbachev repudiated it in 1989.
The doctrine was not a new ideology so much as a public summary of practice. The Soviet Union had used military force in Eastern Europe in 1953 (East Germany), 1956 (Hungary), and now 1968 (Czechoslovakia). After the third intervention, Brezhnev’s task was to give the policy a name. The speech to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party, on November 12, 1968, was the canonical statement.
The argument ran in three steps. First, that the establishment of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe after the war was “a lawful result of the social-political development of each state” and therefore “irreversible.” Second, that each socialist state was part of a single “socialist commonwealth” with shared interests that superseded its own sovereignty. Third, that “an action encroaching on socialism in one country” threatened the security of the whole commonwealth, and was therefore a matter of “common concern.”
The doctrine was applied explicitly to the situation in Czechoslovakia. Within Czechoslovakia itself, the regime of Gustáv Husák invoked it to justify the purges of reformers that followed the 1968 invasion. In Poland, it was the background to the Soviet pressure on Solidarity in 1980–81 — pressure that succeeded only in part, because Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law on his own rather than accept a Soviet invasion.
The doctrine ended, in practice, in 1989. Gorbachev’s policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of the bloc — labeled the Sinatra Doctrine by the Soviet foreign ministry’s Georgy Arbatov, since each country could do it “its way” — made the Brezhnev Doctrine obsolete. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that gave the doctrine its occasion is treated in the dedicated article.