Czechoslovakia: Playing Out of Tune

Communist Czechoslovakia’s new leaders published detailed blueprints last week for their own “road to Socialism.” Debated for weeks in camera, the action program drawn up by new Party Boss Alexander Dubček stressed the country’s development through a combination of “broad democracy with a scientific and highly qualified management.” It stopped short of the outright democratization that many Czechoslovaks are clamoring for, and made abundantly clear the Communist Party’s unwillingness to permit challenges as yet to its dominant political role. Nonetheless, the remarkable document officially retired many bits of Marxist dogma and dealt a staggering blow to the institutions of the police state.

“Monopoly Position,” Dubček’s program downgrades the dread State Security Service, or secret police, by depriving it of its ordinary police powers and confining its activities to counterespionage. The program asks for the rewriting of legal codes to assure “better and more consistent” protection of such rights as freedom of assembly and speech, envisions the proliferation of “specialinterest associations” and a strengthened role for non-Communist political parties. It also exhorts the Communist Party not to interfere in the work of the courts and judges.

In no uncertain terms, Dubček’s program plots a return to the economic reforms designed by Economist Ota Šik, who has been nominated for one of five Deputy Premier posts in the new government. Slowed down under the regime of ex-Party Boss Antonín Novotný, the reforms place faith in market determination of prices, competition among enterprises, more incentives for workers and less bureaucratic control. The program proclaims that inefficient workers and factories will not be rewarded and that the consumer must be protected against high prices and inferior goods caused by “the monopoly position” of state enterprises.

To carry through such reforms, the country’s new Premier, Oldřich Černík, 46, organized a new Cabinet of forward-looking moderates who are unlikely to revert to the old ways. Among the members are such men as Interior Minister Josef Pavel, 59, and Defense Minister Martin Dzur, 48. Both of these new ministers were purged in the past and served stiff prison terms. The new Minister of Culture and Information, urbane, polished former Editor Miroslav Galuška, 45, is a favorite of the country’s liberal writers, who were the catalysts of reform.

Socialist Orchestra. Along with the action program, other promises of liberalization were presented. The Czech News Agency reported that the party is about to restore to good grace Novelist Ladislav Mňačko, who fled to exile in Israel, and to publish in Czechoslovakia his book about the disintegration of a Communist head of state, A Taste of Power. Using an unusually mellifluous metaphor, the Slovak newspaper Pravda also promised some changes in foreign policy. “We do not wish to be either the drummer or the first violinist in the orchestra of the Socialist countries, or to sing in unison,” said the article. “Czechoslovak foreign policy will play in polyphony, according to its own score.” The details of that score, said Pravda, are about to be released by new Foreign Minister Jiří Hájek.

Even while moving ahead with the reforms, Dubček expressed concern that the people’s demands may be outracing them. In the newspaper RudéPrávo, he complained of the “one-sidedness” of press and TV coverage of his reforms and warned of the danger of anarchy. But Dubček is under pressure from his people to restore genuine democracy to the country. “It is not the facts in Czechoslovakia that have changed, but the possibilities,” says one of the most outspoken liberals, Professor Ivan Sviták of the Institute of Philosophy. Men like Sviták are determined to exploit those possibilities. “Where must we go?” he asks. “From a totalitarian society to an open society. With whom must we go? With the workers, the students, the intellectuals and without the party apparatchiki.” Despite the promise of his program, neither Party Boss Dubček nor the other leaders are willing at present to go that far.