Czechoslovakia: Debate on the Future

Russia’s sudden occupation and gradually tightening grip on Czechoslovakia have made it clear that freedom is a losing proposition in the country. Yet Czechoslovak leaders and citizens have desperately debated and defined each successive loss to the occupiers, yielding no more of the liberties recently won under Alexander Dubček’s reformist regime than absolutely necessary to satisfy Russian demands. Last week the first full-dress debate on Czechoslovakia’s prospects took place at a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee. Much of the agenda came straight from Moscow, but that did not stop every pressure group in the country from a final burst of effort aimed at affecting the committee’s decisions.

The jockeying began with a rare and unpopular demonstration of pro-Soviet support, staged in a downtown Prague meeting hall by the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Society. It drew some 3,000 middle-aged and elderly citizens, the rank and file of a hard-line group sometimes called the Novotný Orphans, in honor of Stalinist ex-Party Boss Antonin Novotný. With some 20 Soviet officers seated on stage, the crowd applauded wildly as Novotný’s former foreign minister, Vaclav David, called for “an open fight against antisocialist forces.” Meanwhile, outside the hall, some 500 younger Czechoslovaks waited. As the crowd walked out of the door, it was greeted with hoots of “collaborators!” and “shame!” Soon fists were flying. It took several busloads of police, who waded into the crowd with rubber truncheons to restore order.

Angry Jangles. The clash outside Lucerna Hall was the kind of public protest that has put Party Chief Alexander Dubček under increasing pressures. Those pressures start, of course, with the Russians. Time and again during the recent demonstrations, the hot-line telephone on Dubček’s desk jangled with angry calls from Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev, who warned that the Russian army was capable of controlling the streets if Dubček was not. Dubček summoned student leaders to his office and sternly warned that the party would not tolerate any more anti-Soviet dissent. Later, as Prague grew tenser by the minute, he underscored the warning. At week’s end the 6,000-man Prague garrison was placed on alert, and military policemen patrolled the streets carrying submachine guns. Though student leaders promised not to march in the streets, many led pro-Dubček sit-ins and announced they would join workers in special “Dubček shifts” at factories.

Dubček also radically curtailed one of the most popular freedoms of his administration—foreign travel—by invalidating all current exit visas and passports. That move will undoubtedly make leaving the country difficult for all but officials, but it may also discourage the thousands of Czechoslovaks now abroad from ever going home.

In the inner circle of party leaders, Dubček was also caught between factions in conflict. His own centrist group, which includes President Ludvik Svoboda, Premier Oldfich Cernik and a majority on the Central Committee, still dreams of salvaging the pieces, however small, of his liberalization program. Though all are still loyal to Dubček personally, their political allegiances are increasingly divided between the idealists, who would hold on to basic liberal tenets at any cost, and a growing number of more pliant careerists. Against them are poised the conservatives—a few holdover members of Novotný’s pro-Russian group and a larger band of hardliners—who want to wipe all of Dubček’s reforms off the books and return to full Communist orthodoxy. The Russians would have been only too happy for the conservatives to win the day, but so far Dubček’s large committee majority has made that impossible.

Dubček drove unsmilingly to the Hradčany’s Spanish Hall for the Central Committee meeting. He arrived in the season’s first snowstorm, a wintry prelude to the business of the day: the “little action program,” so wryly nicknamed by Czechoslovaks who fear many of the freedoms of the pre-invasion action program will have been lopped off by the Soviets. Though its full text had not been released by week’s end, there was little doubt that the document would do just that. Dubček again held out the promise that “the positive aspects of the post-January policy” would be carried out, but he quickly added qualifiers. “The future course of our party is based,” he said, “on the proclamation of Bratislava and the Moscow protocol.” Both agreements affirm loyalty to Moscow, and the latter was signed while Dubček was a prisoner in the Russian capital.