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.

Rendering unto Moscow. The most telling clue lies not in what the Russians did bring with them to Czechoslovakia but what they did not: a new government. Had the political decision to bring Dubcek under control or to oust him outright been in readiness long, the Soviets would have followed up their efficient military takeover with an equally efficient installation of a ruling order more to their liking. Instead, they placed the country in a state of suspended political animation, letting a surrounded Parliament continue to meet, permitting "detained" leaders to go on bargaining. Having gone all the way militarily, the Russians then hesitated politically. Having forcibly grasped their victim, the Russians seemed to be trying to bring off a rape with consent.

The caution evident politically last week would seem to suggest that the Russian leaders had approached their dramatic meeting with Dubcek at Cierna with the hope of regaining sway over Czechoslovakia nonforcibly, if not amicably. It is quite likely that they expected to find a clique of dissidents in Dubcek's entourage through whom they could work for subversion. Dubcek. however, was able to draw the line so clearly between the right of Czechoslovaks to run their own na tional affairs and Russia's in ternational claims as bloc lead er that just before the conference opened he won a unanimous vote of committee confidence. To the Russians' chagrin, the entire Czechoslovak delegation came to Cierna determined to render unto Moscow only what was Moscow's. Two weeks later, East Germany's Walter Ulbricht journeyed to Karlovy Vary and presumably reported to Moscow that the Czechoslo vaks had been completely unchastened by Cierna, that the contagion of reform was sure to spread, both within and without Czechoslovakia.

The theory that a new, hard-line group has gained ascendancy in the Kremlin's labyrinthine power politics is intriguing, but far from demonstrable. As the theory goes, Russia's ruling troika--Kosygin, Brezhnev and Pod gorny--were called back from their Black Sea vacations by the party's new upper hand and presented with the decision to invade as a fait accompli. Aleksandr Shelepin, former chief of secret police and a longtime Brezhnev rival, is rumored to have put together the new alliance, which would probably include army leaders and militant young technocrats.

At any rate, the Soviets pounced, and now must try to translate their military takeover of Czechoslovakia into a realization of the political ends that inspired it. It will not be easy. At best, the invasion was too clumsy and too late to rescue a vacillating policy. At worst, it may prove a disaster destroying forever Moscow's claim to leadership in the Communist world. It may temporarily halt the trend toward more freedom in Eastern Europe and shore up Russia's buffer against the outside world for a little longer. But ultimately, the invasion can only serve to encourage the strong forces of nationalism and liberalization that are at work throughout the former Soviet empire.

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