TIME
A Prague newspaper reported this week that former Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis was under “house arrest.” He had been missing for a month, and friends assumed that he had tried to flee to the West (TIME, Feb. 12).
A few days before, President Klement Gottwald, speaking to the Communist Party Central Committee, had charged that the party had been riddled with plotters for five years. In addition to Clementis, he named Marie Svermova, onetime second deputy secretary-general of the Czech party, and Otto Sling, former party political secretary for the Brno region.
Said Gottwald: “On the whole, we can say that the Sling conspiracy has been liquidated . . . Czechoslovakia will not be a second Yugoslavia.”
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