Controlling Czech Liberalism

...it must compete for the confidence of the whole nation...

...We thought it was time to honor T. G. and Jan Masaryk," Tous told me above the brass of a Dixieland band at the Moldau student club...

...Wage increases, when they were granted at all, were too low...

...All the old rumors —that he was pushed out of his window by Russian or Czech Communists, that he was shot, or tortured until he killed himself—have reappeared in public discussion and in print...

...If there is to be a really independent foreign policy, it is being argued, then Czechoslovakia should become friendlier with the West...

...Nevertheless, it is a long way from democracy as it is practiced in the West, or indeed as it was practiced in Czechoslovakia itself during the days of the First Republic...

...Dubcek, his new Premier, Old-rich Cernik, and his other advisers —Smrkovsky, Goldstuecker, Cisar, and the liberal economist Dr...

...Until March, a guardhouse at the cemetery gate kept visitors away from the simple granite gravestones...

...At the [Hradcany] Castle they'll be able to get along without him...

...This was the pressure of necessity...

...The Strahov march and the writers' protests of last summer were the two important turning points of the campaign against Novotny...

...I am not for installing two Communist parties," he said...

...They did play a big role...

...The system is an improvement over the 99.9 per cent Novotny majorities, of course...

...Students' motorcycle headlights iUurninated the scene as Dubcek spoke, his broad face cast in a permanent grin, his words interrupted by a thousand voices chanting "Doob-check, Doob-check...

...The cause seemed trivial: management's decision to stop making pushbutton switches, an item that earned easy production bonuses...

...Now, however, students at Strahov wonder about the future...

...Cestmir Cisar, the former Minister of Education, to replace Donald R. Shanor, a previous contributor, reports on East European affairs for the Chicago Daily News...

...At the head of this group stands the Masaryk family...

...Biographer of Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, he is the Karlovy University's leading Germanist...

...Its leading role should not yet be put to the test of really free elections...

...Dubcek's problem is how to permit the freedoms yet avoid the final consequences...

...For all the reformers' talk about democratic socialism, and for all then-references to the democratic traditions of Czechoslovakia since the Masaryk era, genuine working democracy is only imperfectly understood here...

...We were ashamed we had waited so long...

...There is no question that the workers were abused in the past, and that the old union leadership was one of the instruments that made this possible...

...If abnegation of this kind is unusual in politics, Kucera explained it easily: The Communist party must be "first among equals...

...Most, however, were answered in the peculiar political shorthand so readily understood in Eastern Europe...

...Probably there will have to be two parties to fight each other...

...Is it more dangerous for this country to have too much freedom or too little...

...Walter Ulbricht's ideologist, Professor Kurt Hager, had even attacked the Dubcek reforms as somehow being linked to the West German Imperialists...

...But objectively, it was only a secondary role, a catalyst to speed up the process...

...he said...

...As the most industrially advanced country in the bloc, Czechoslovakia decided it could no longer allow its economy to stagnate under Novotny...

...It wouldn't work here...

...If trade unions really have regained their old independence, there should be strikes...

...No Communist leader had ever been called out of the Central Committee building by demonstrators, but Dubcek responded in good humor...

...Poland had been spared the war, but 12 years later was still fighting free expression with the desperate methods of police power, purges, and anti-Semitism...

...The Communist party is the only power able to guarantee that it will go further...

...They called a strike in an electrical equipment factory, and instead of police supression, the pattern of the past, they got an immediate hearing of their grievances...

...The young manager in Prague was skeptical...

...Then other questions came from the crowd...

...But I would vote for the replacement of the other Party by the freedom of the press, and we are fighting for this freedom...

...The Strahov dormitory city is made up of rows of concrete block buildings on a dusty plateau overlooking the spires of Prague...

...Cisar's own daughter had been arrested for demonstrating two years ago...

...Groups banned or disgraced during the 20 years of Communism, including the Boy Scouts and the Czech Legion of World War I, are again flourishing...

...If there are to be truly free elections, it should be possible to vote out the Communists, even the reform Communists...

...The Party must now formulate its policies to satisfy the demands of the entire people...

...I wrote the way I wanted, and then let them do their work...

...The present bonus system, in which managers get 30 times the premiums of workers, also must be adjusted...

...The students, here as in the West, consider themselves the bottom of the heap...

...If this is so, why worry about weighting lists of candidates or restricting the popularity of other parties...

...On weekends the cemetery is crowded with visitors from Prague, 24 miles away, and from greater distances...

...There was a risk that the police would interfere, but I don't think any of us really cared...

...Bohuslav Kucera...

...We are convinced that the unions will not pose unjust wage demands just because they have been granted more power...

...The practical result of this major limitation is that two candidates can compete for a single post, with secret balloting, but the lists will be weighted to insure that the Communists retain their majority...

...Thus the real danger is not the threat of Soviet tanks rolling onto the cobblestone streets of Prague...

...LUDVIK SVOBODA him...

...But he said he saw no particular advantage in the removal of censorship...

...Zdenek Tous, a tall, bearded philosophy student at the Karlovy University, led a pilgrimage to Lany on a snowy Sunday in March, the 20th anniversary of Jan Masaryk's death...

...The play and many of his other works were written during the period of official literary censorship...

...This sets us apart from some people who misuse the slogan of free criticism, shoot off their mouths, and try to throw dirt on our past," he said...

...At a diplomatic cocktail party in Prague, the young playwright Vaclav Havel discussed the New York premiere of The Memorandum, his satire on bureaucracy...

...The most important step of all has been the rehabilitation of those unjustly imprisoned, executed, or simply mistreated by history...

...It was the students, again, who pushed for the change...

...No one in the crowd needed to be told that Czechoslovakia borders on four Communist countries, each with its own reason for opposing the reforms that began here when Dubcek replaced Novotny as Party chief in January...

...Lany, the Masaryk home village, is hard to find on a road map and impossible to find in a guide book...

...And what Socialist country will they go to...

...Strikes...

...The little Novotnys who had sinecures in every organization, from the trade unions to the front political parties, are out...

...Replying on behalf of the reformers, Weiner argued for a leading Communist role balanced by a kind of constructive opposition...

...Or politically, demanding a foreign policy truly independent of the Soviet Union...

...We think a manager subject to recall would take a short-range view, get out all the profits he could, neglect research and investment...

...To pick Svoboda, who had headed Czechoslovak troops under Soviet Army command in World War II, was a means of soothing them...

...He had to go...

...What started with a student march has ended with an official reinvestigation that is certain to further sour Czechoslovak-Soviet relations, whatever its conclusions...

...Other intellectuals have not fared as well...

...More freedom is thus permissible politically as well as necessary economically...

...They also alienated many loyalists, including Josef Zaruba, a minor Communist functionary at the Ministry of Sport and Physical Culture...

...Every citizen, whether priest, farmer, or steel-worker, has the same stake in the nation, because the means of production belong to all...

...THE TEST FOR DUBCEK Controlling Czech Liberalism By Donald R. Shanor Prague Alexander Dubcek, First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist party, stood on the steps of Central Committee headquarters one sultry spring night recently and demonstrated how a little country bordering the Soviet Union must control its revolution...

...Now the people were moving ahead of the Party in urging liberalization...

...Weiner invited Zaruba to debate him on a later broadcast...

...at least 80 per cent of the population is...

...On top of this came the pressure of the intellectuals, who understandably wanted more freedom...

...To outsiders, it may seem that the whole movement was a result of the ferment among the intellectuals," he said in a talk at the writers' club-rooms...

...But it has universal application...

...They also understand Dubcek's problems of control, and for the most part are willing to exercise controls of their own to prevent this nation from going down the path of Hungary...

...What is more important, Czechs and Slovaks have begun to talk again about Jan Masaryk's death...

...It was to be the first of many such expressions, the most recent ones coming during Dubcek's trip to Moscow in early May, and the return visit of Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin and Defense Minister Andrei A. Grechko toward the end of last month...

...Short, dark, with deep-set eyes, Goldstuecker, has a personal history that mirrors Czechoslovakia's triumphs and tragedies over the past 25 years: London exile government, postwar envoy to Israel, victim of the 1950 anti-Semitic purges, political prisoner from 1951-55...

...When The Memorandum was translated and performed in the West, I was surprised that bureacracy makes the same problems for people everywhere...

...One of these limits, in Goldstuecker's view, overshadows all the others: The Communist party must stay in control...

...There have been many other limited victories since the 15-year dictatorship of Novotny was brought to an end...

...We're offering posts now in our universities to the Polish professors fired for siding with their demonstrating students," a young man from Prague said...

...Today a new stage of the revolution has been reached, the theoreticians believe, and most of the people are behind the Communists...

...The impetus for reform has been the same here as elsewhere in the Soviet bloc: the inability of centralized, totalitarian controls of the Stalin pattern to organize and manage a modern society...

...Hungary had permitted a similar liberalization in 1956 and found it only set the stage for civil war...

...But who defines discipline...

...While there is no question that Dubcek has wider support than any other Communist leader—with the possible exception of Rumania's Nicolae Ceaucescu—the idyllic description of a nation without antagonisms has little relation to reality in Czechoslovakia...

...You are all scoundrels...

...The reformers reject this criticism...

...And what happens when we start demanding something that would really touch their nerve ends, like abolishing the senseless hours we have to spend on Marxism-Leninism lectures...

...The reformers have already constructed theoretical justification for such a policy...

...To pick either Cisar or the other favorite of the liberals, Forestry Minister Josef Smrkovsky, would have been a direct act of defiance to the conservatives in Moscow and East Berlin...

...Nothing must weaken the leading role of the Communist party in our lives...

...The police struck back hard with clubs and tear gas, and what had begun as a spontaneous complaint about facilities quickly turned into a political cause...

...At the time of the confrontation, Dubcek had just returned from a hastily-summoned Dresden meeting, where the Soviets had expressed their concern over developments in Prague...

...Czechs and Slovaks will vote for the Communists, they say, because there are no longer the antagonistic classes here that existed under Masaryk...

...Their biggest asset is their current high popularity, unparalleled in two decades of Communist governments...

...Havel's courage in satirizing the system when it was still dangerous to do so has won him a secure place in the Czechoslovak theater...

...The critical point will come the first time the reformers use the lesson of Hungary, or the threat of Soviet intervention, to stifle a protest or demand that is simply inconvenient or uncomfortable...

...The Party chief answered some of his student questioners directly: "I think every country should solve its own problems and not mix into the affairs of its neighbors...

...Some were funny, some rambled on, but all had the same underlying theme: How far can we go with freedom of expression, genuine elections, an open press, frank criticism of the past, economic reforms, and an independent foreign policy...

...He began by disposing of the Cisar issue...

...A clash was avoided, and Cisar and Smrkovsky were given the more important posts vacated by Novotny on the Presidium and Secretariat of the Central Committee...

...It's acceptable to march in the streets today, if we are disciplined," one Slovak student from Bratislava said...

...Factory workers, students and shop clerks are willing to moderate their demands, stifle their frustrations a little while, as long as the reform wave has momentum and they can see progress being made...

...The time when these policies were decided within a small circle is over...

...There is a ferment of organizational activity all across the country, from genuine farmers' cooperatives in Moravia to an amateur radio olub in Prague...

...There are, at the most, differences in interest and outlook...

...Foreign policy is undergoing reassessment, and diplomatic relations with West Germany and Israel can be expected...

...The revolution must go further," he said...

...Their earlier protests had helped remove the Stalinist Antonin Novotny from the Presidency, and they wanted Dr...

...I never wrote for the censors," he said...

...With such antagonisms crackling within the Party, it is no surprise to find them elsewhere in Czechoslovak society...

...Since then, the Masaryk family plot has never been without fresh flowers and wreaths...

...The Yugoslavs have turned then-plants over to Workers' Councils, elected their own foremen and directors, and all the rest," he said...

...This is not to say that nothing has changed...

...The press and broadcasts are the freest and most uninhibited in Eastern Europe...

...While his appointment as head of the Writers' Union was an important reform victory last winter, Goldstuecker does not overestimate the writers' part in the liberalization...

...But in the future, will Czech professors have to go abroad under these same circumstances...

...His writing cost him his theater job at one point...

...Czechoslovakia could not permit this freedom in the '40s, when the Communists were seizing power, or in the '50s, when they were consolidating it...

...I had conceived of the play as a criticism of our particular system...

...At what point will our sudden rush toward liberalization antagonize the Soviets, our other Communist neighbors, or indeed our own leadership...

...Milan Weiner, foreign editor of Radio Prague—who has traveled the familiar road of political outcast in the '50s, reform leader in the '60s—delivered a series of biting attacks on the Old Guard last winter, which won many listeners to the side of the reformers...

...The manager of one of the leading state industrial trusts poured strong Armenian cognac for his guest and produced pages of production and export figures...

...This, however, is an optical illusion...

...There are still limits, though, for the current process is only a stage in a long revolutionary development, and they have to be carefully marked...

...Many of the students had marched more than a mile to the austere stone building on the Moldau to protest the selection of a 72-year old general, Ludvik Svoboda, as President...

...Then-most articulate spokesman is Professor Eduard Goldstuecker, the 55-year-old head of the Writers' Union...

...The Czechoslovak Socialist party, which has a membership of 11,-500 at present, does not want to become a mass organization, merely a selective one that can influence public opinion by its quality," according to the new chairman, Dr...

...It is that Czechoslovakia's hesitant steps toward democracy will be stoped by the Czech leaders themselves, with the tanks as a pretext...

...As unofficial spokesman for the thousands of Novotny appointees, Zaruba continued his theme of absolute Party loyalty...

...Last October, thousands of students streamed down the hill to protest the lack of heat and light...

...But the workers are behind the reform movement...

...I think the danger is too little...

...Cisar, 48, belonged to the young pragmatists around Dubcek, who is 47...

...For the first time, twice as many candidates are being put up for the June local elections as there are posts to fill...

...High bureaucrats came hurrying down from Prague to settle the dispute...

...In a little walled cemetery there the founder and first President of the Czechoslovak Republic, Thomas G. Masaryk, and his son Jan, foreign minister until the Communist coup, are buried...

...The power of the police and Army has been reduced...

...In Pisek, a medieval town 60 miles south of Prague, workers tested the new power of the unions...

...The choice of Svoboda for President was one of Dubcek's shorthand answers...

...that of the courts and Parliament increased...

...One Weiner attack on Party leaders' abuse of privileges so angered Zaruba that he called the studio to protest: "I want to tell you that you have just now talked like an agent of Imperialism...

...But the underlying issue—the fact that although the workers are supposed to own the means of production, they have no share in the decision-making?was important...

...In a few short weeks, Dubcek and the other Party reformers had cast off the worst features of the totalitarian rule endured by Czechoslovakia for 20 years...

...The antagonisms exist even within the ranks of the Communist party...

...In addition, the other parties—Socialists, Liberals, Catholics—will have to limit their members to keep themselves in the minority...

...Obviously it is not so, as almost every conversation in Prague confirms...

...The great economic reforms simply couldn't be carried out without far-reaching democratization," Gold-stuecker continued...

...Ota Sik—must answer all these questions...

...You're spitting on the Republic and you're spitting on the Party and on everything...

...After his own rehabilitation, he secured the literary rehabilitation of Franz Kafka...

...Will the new status of the unions give them this share...

...This sort of conflict will arise repeadedly in the coming months...

...I shall probably not be able to stay in any Party of which you are a member...

...East Germany had never felt secure enough to permit genuine democratization, and did not want the Czech experience to become a model...

...That was apparent in the struggle to get rid of Novotny, and a remarkable radio debate proved it to millions of Czech listeners in March...

...He's going to have a lot to do here at the Central Committee," he said...