n official stamp in late 1989 once Communism had
             dissolved in Eastern Europe. Soon after the “velvet revolution”
             engulfed Czechoslovakia in November 1989, the five states that
             took part in the 1968 invasion—the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary,
             East Germany, and Bulgaria—issued a collective statement
             denouncing the invasion and repudiating the Brezhnev Doctrine. In
             addition, the Soviet Union released its own declaration of regret
             over the “erroneous” decision to intervene in 1968.1
             Curiously, though, Gorbachev was much less willing to proceed
             with a reevaluation of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November
             1956. Not until October 1991, two months after the aborted coup in
             Moscow had severely weakened the Soviet regime, did Gorbachev
             finally provide an official apology for the 1956 invasion.2 Until
             that time, official judgments about Soviet actions in 1956 had been
             left primarily to Soviet military officers, who routinely glorified the
             invasion of Hungary as an example of “the international defense of
             socialist gains” and of “transforming socialist internationalism into
             action.”3 A senior officer on the Soviet General Staff argued in
             1987 that the “suppression of counterrevolutionary rebellion,” as in
             Hungary in 1956, should still be among the chief military missions
             of the Warsaw Pact.4 The same theme was expressed the following
             year in a Soviet book about the “Military Policy of the CPSU,”
             which received admiring reviews in Soviet military journals and
             When political reforms began to sweep through Hungary and
             Poland in late 1988 and 1989, signs of unease soon cropped up in
             Soviet military writings. In September 1989, a prominent article by
             one of the top Soviet commanders in Hungary in October-November
             1956, Army-General Pyotr Lashchenko, offered extravagant praise
             for the Sovie...