When Alexander Dubček was sent off to Ankara two months ago as Czechoslovakia's Ambassador to Turkey, it appeared that he had been saved from the full wrath of the Communist Party's ultraconservatives. The "ultras" wanted to try Dubček, hero of the liberalizing "Prague spring" of 1968, for his ideological sins. The man who replaced him as party boss, Gustav Husák, pledged repeatedly that there would be no retributions. Husák, after all, spent nine years in prison in the 1950s as the victim of a Stalinist purge.
It seems all too clear, however, that...
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