Czechoslovakia: 1918-1968, A Record of National Martyrdom
Clark, Joseph
THE STORY OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA has meaning far beyond the suffering and hopes of its 14 million people. Its establishment in 1918 was a tribute to aspirations for national self-determination...
...disproportionate growth of production investment in heavy industry...
...There were sufficient reasons in Marxist analysis, for the rise of Communism in Czechoslovakia, but oddly, one disadvantage of Czech Communism came from the Marxist fathers themselves...
...By 1963-64 the Soviet and Chinese comrades were at each other with a ferocity paralleled only by the religious wars of the past, and border fighting erupted along the long Soviet-Chinese frontier...
...Sik uses a felicitous Marxist phrase when he discusses "socialist associated labor...
...Year by year," Sik writes, "the technical development of our production lagged further behind the world technical development and did not use sufficiently the newest findings of science and research that had already been applied throughout the industrially advanced world...
...Sik says: "Finally, social production must serve final consumption and its growth, and not `production for production's sake.'" Planning, yes, says Sik, but "development of production forces throughout society cannot be directly managed by a central governmental organization...
...After Soviet Communist leaders inaugurated de-Stalinization at the 20th Congress, Czech Communists warned their people of the limitations that must be observed in eradicating "the cult of personality...
...a continuing inability to apply ingenuity and innovation in those industries and services that provide amenities of life for working people...
...II (International Publishers, 1933...
...Its betrayal by the Western powers in 1938 at Munich was a milestone of Hitler's march to conquer Europe...
...VIII THE FIVE-PARTY LETTER to the Czechs is in direct line of succession to the "21 Conditions...
...13 Ibid...
...Its secretary, D. Slejska, proposed a Gallup-type public opinion poll...
...The Czech economy faces further stagnation, he says, unless it adopts drastic reforms...
...the incantations of Stalin could hardly be a guide for a modem nation...
...And students circulated demands for information about who really owned the Czech uranium mines at Jackymov...
...The "21 Conditions" also made it incumbent on every Communist party, regardless of the situation in their respective lands, that they set up an illegal, underground organization pledged to violent overthrow of all existing social conditions...
...ineffective use of plant and machinery...
...marked decline in the rate of growth of national income...
...You bully those fraternal countries whose economies are less advanced and oppose their policy of industrialization and try to force them to remain agricultural countries and serve as your source of raw materials and as outlets for your goods...
...The Yugoslav Communist newspaper Politika published the five-party Warsaw letter under a headline that said, simply: "Cominform 1968...
...Loeb] could never do in that interminable period before the trial was to sit...
...CZECHOSLOVAKIA II THOUGH the Minister of the Interior in the post-World-War-II Czech government was a Communist, the Minister of Justice was not...
...A basic reason for the stagnation that overtook Czech industry, Sik finds, was an "excessive and ineffective expansion of plant and machinery...
...Literarni Listy of Prague acknowledged that General Yepishev had denied the report...
...By the time the Communist states set up their economic mutual aid organization, Comecon, the Soviets were ready to assign to each nation its specialization for the "common" good...
...In other words, rather than investing for technical innovation and in higher productivity, there was greater and greater investment in more raw materials and more labor, and these were not efficiently used...
...Then he was drugged until he felt as though he were losing his mind...
...Once a country goes Communist, no matter by what means--conquest, election, revolution or putsch—the Soviets have said there can be no turning away...
...Antonov quickly replied and told Eisenhower to withdraw his troops, as he had done just before on the lower Elbe...
...Some background may be helpful...
...How did they get there...
...In the fifties, for example, 10 and 11 per cent annual industrial growth and 7 or 8 per cent increase for national income were not uncommon...
...The actions of the Soviet Union had placed the Communist parties abroad in a completely untenable position...
...within seven months he was expelled from the party, and within a year he was on trial for his life...
...Brezhnev apparently refused to intervene decisively, an early indication that the Soviet party leadership was divided...
...And throughout there was "the knowledge that I was the victim of my own party, for which I had lived and to which I had given all I possessed...
...Benes believed that his people would know that "Communism was a step backward, not forward," because the Czech social and economic structure was "in better balance.1 " Besides, in 1943 Stalin assured Benes that there would be no Soviet interference in Czech affairs...
...Novotny's followers then attempted a military coup...
...2 Ibid...
...We finally discovered, after fifteen minutes on the line, that we were queued up for a new calendar...
...He examined the problem that arises from the conflict between "those who are subjects and 10 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alternative to Partition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965...
...Soviet Communists had adopted rather traditional methods of economic imperialism in their relations with Eastern Europe...
...On June 27 Rude Pravo, the central newspaper of the Czechoslovak Communist party published the results of a poll it had taken among its readers...
...8 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol...
...They denied "any realistic reasons permitting our present situation to be called counterrevolutionary...
...But regardless of the successes and failures of Communist industrialization in other JOSEPH...
...The frontiers of the socialist world have moved to the center of Europe, to the Elbe and the Sumava mountains," the letter says...
...He was sentenced to prison and not released until May 1960...
...Troops were mobilized to pressure the Central Committee, and General Sejna solicited support among the generals for a petition demanding that Novotny be retained...
...The Soviet party leaders had decided upon reconciliation with the Yugoslav Communists...
...While industry faced these growing problems, "unrealistic plans for agriculture had not been carried out for years," Sik writes...
...In retaliation the Novotny leadership expelled three Writers Union members from the party, removed Prochazka from his Central Committee post and closed down the Writers Union newspaper...
...Real wages declined in 1963, as already indicated, but this was even more pronounced for technicians, educators, scientists, and medical personnel...
...Castro and Guevara built plants that turned out goods readily available at less than half the price and twice the quality abroad...
...This annoyed Marx and Engels...
...In fall 1956 came the student-worker rebellion in Hungary and at that time, too, there was the Polish spring in October...
...an increase in the length of time for realizing capital investment...
...In an article published in 1964 in the monthly journal of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, he discussed "Some Problems of Socialist Democracy from the viewpoint of the Citizen's position in our Society...
...8 Ibid...
...CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1918-1968 leadership, rejected notions of Slovak autonomy, declaring, "We follow the directives of the Czechoslovak Central Committee ..: 'a How "smoothly" a totalitarian society legislates is indicated by the fact that from 1948 to 1960 there was not a single dissenting vote in the National Assembly...
...But the regime hit back with ideologist Jiri Hendrych, who declared that the patience of the leadership had ended...
...For a while it seemed that the social earthquakes in Eastern Europe would avoid Czechoslovakia...
...16 Prague students conducted demonstrations at the end of October, including a candlelight parade protesting the lack of light and heat in their dormitories...
...This is not to say that after the death of Stalin the winds of revolt did not blow over that land...
...Huberman and Sweezy urged Castro to follow Stalin's precept of priority for investment in heavy industry—in Cuba...
...3 It was an egregious error, this failure to appreciate the vitality of the national factor in European history...
...The quick, automatic manner with which the Novotny regime obediently took the Arab side against the Israelis in the six-day war elicited an equally quick and profound revulsion among the people...
...Thus, on May 6 Le Monde of Paris quoted Soviet General Alexei Yepishev as saying that the Soviet army was ready to "safeguard socialism" in Czechoslovakia...
...CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1918-1968 cism they were leveling against his leadership...
...per capita food consumption went up along with general industrial production...
...After the decline of production in 1963 there was an increase again in 1964...
...Socialist societies, like others, Lakatos writes, are heterogenous and differentiated...
...a growing share of net investment in national income...
...Cernik soon became Premier of the government...
...Was their dissatisfaction and demand for greater freedom sufficient to move Czech society as deeply as it did this year...
...it admitted the good intentions of the signers and denied that democratization would be halted...
...It never has been so far...
...Has Poland returned to its traditional anti-Semitism...
...Pravda's reply to "The 2,000 Words" was to remind Czechoslovakia of what happened in Hungary in 1956...
...What brought practically the entire Soviet Politburo to Cierna at the end of July...
...But the road to Cierna should be revisited...
...The Russian general warned the Czech soldiers about "negative forces...
...And Neues Deutschland, of the East German CP, explained: "Zionist forces have taken over the leadership" of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia...
...At that congress novelist Ludwik Vaculik attacked the party's ruling caste and said that whatever progress had occurred in the country happened despite those leaders...
...The accused were attacked as "Zionists" although each one had an unwavering record of opposition to Zionism...
...The only trouble with that denial, the Czech paper said on May 30, was that it simultaneously received a letter from a Czech soldier who described an incident that occurred in his barracks on May 12...
...4 Edward Taborsky, Communism in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961) . 5 Ibid...
...The intrigue was organized by Miroslav Mamula, head of the Central Committee's security department, and General Jan Sejna, head of the Party organization in the Defense Ministry...
...Perhaps a centrally directed and planned economy with nationalized industry can be highly successful...
...it carefully avoided any affront to the Soviet Union and affirmed its loyalty to both the Warsaw pact and Comecon...
...Still, long before the 1968 events there were efforts by writers, students, and intellectuals to rectify the injustices...
...THE ORIGINS of Czech Communism are related to the growth of the Left in European socialist movements as a result of Social Democratic support of their respective governments in World War I. A highly industrialized, if small state, Czechoslovakia ex perienced the widespread unemployment and hardships of the depression of the thirties...
...The larger the area for freedom he excavates within himself, the larger the area he wins for it outside also, for his nation, for humanity...
...THE STORY OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA has meaning far beyond the suffering and hopes of its 14 million people...
...The issues raised by the outrageous Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia are worldwide...
...Again and again the name and heritage of Thomas Masaryk was invoked by those seeking a measure of freedom...
...It showed that 90 per cent of its nonparty readers favored the legalization of opposition parties...
...but after the Communist coup she relied to a greater extent on imports...
...17 Ibid...
...Its consequences are already terrible to behold...
...It was a stirring tribute to his role in the fight for national independence and democratic liberties...
...To assure that, no Communist country can permit opposition parties or civil liberties...
...The Soviets were accompanied by Polish troops...
...The crisis that engulfed the Communist world 12 years ago was no transient development, for 1956 inaugurated a permanent crisis of Communism...
...There had been rising output in Czechoslovakia, but without regard for modernization, and heedless of the threat of stagnation...
...the heady wine of free speech and press created an atmosphere that only the older Czechs could remember to have ever experienced...
...It was around this time, too, that the Slovak youth paper Smena published disclosures about the manner in which the Soviet party and secret police supervised the purges that followed the 1948 coup...
...this Khrushchev did, finally, in his speech nine months later...
...In September 1967 Jan Prochazka, a leader of the Writers Union, published an article marking the 30th anniversary of the death of Masaryk...
...Czechoslovakia's short but vibrant existence between the two world wars was very much related to its five centuries of struggle for national self-determination...
...most families do not have refrigerators, and there are very few cars...
...Problems have piled up on top of problems in the Soviet economy...
...Its invasion by the Soviet Union is a sign of both the depth of the crisis gripping Communism and of the grave threat Communist totalitarianism continues to present to the world...
...October 1967 plenary session...
...Hungarians too were dragged along to invade a land they had helped despoil under the old empire...
...Lenin's "21 Conditions" prescribed the kind of organization and program all Communist parties must have...
...disproportionate growth of investment costs...
...Economic failure is endemic to Communism...
...As the war came to an end, Benes began to have misgivings when the Russians insisted that 7 of the 25 Czech ministers should be Communists and that Fierlinger, a nominal socialist but a man completely in tow of the Communists, become Prime Minister...
...The trial itself, Dr...
...10 Czechoslovakia's foreign trade became predominantly dependent on the Soviet Union...
...Sik pays tribute to Marx but hastens to explain that Marx couldn't foresee what would happen under socialism...
...hamstringing of the leading role of the Communist party . . "• • weakening "democratic centralism" which includes, the letter pointedly explains, "transforming the party into...
...While the ferment among students, artists, and intellectuals was an important factor behind the events of 1968, even more basic or pressing forces had to operate in order to motivate a majority of the party leadership to embark on a daring new course...
...The effort to maintain colonialism in Eastern Europe created conflict...
...And then in 1963-64 Rumania, one of the staunchest of Stalinist regimes, took an indepedent path in utter disregard of Moscow's wishes...
...worn-out machinery still in use and little technical change-over to new machinery...
...And the Soviets will brook no "threat" to these regimes even if the "threat" originates within the country itself, "using ways peaceful and non-peaceful, making a gap from the inside or from the outside in the socialist system...
...As the liberalization process swept the land in 1968 the question asked everywhere, before August 20, was whether the Russians would intervene...
...They were pilloried for having their real capital in Jerusalem even though those of Jewish origin had long renounced any kinship with the Jewish people of Czechoslovakia, let alone Israel...
...On January 5 the election of Alexander Dubcek as first secretary was announced...
...For a Communist country it was impossible...
...The Dubcek leadership said in its reply to the FiveParty Letter: "The National Front is now discussing the proposal for its statute which is a binding form of organization insuring the socialist political orientation of all parties and organizations...
...That worse things were happening all about him, Dr...
...in Problems of Communism, January-February 1967...
...Neither "American imperialism" nor "German revanchism" were the targets, only the "threat of democratic change and free expression under Communism...
...This statement is made despite the general impression that Communism is backward only in respect to human freedom and that in economic matters it creates means for rapid industrialization and growth, often far swifter than in capitalist or mixed economies...
...But Sik's comment is Marxist: "we had to export year by year more of our own labor...
...there was an immense rise of material inputs but the national income was about the same in 1964 as the year before...
...These included: a parliament with real power to legislate and, even more important, with opposition parties...
...Police assaulted the students, using clubs and tear gas, and 13 students and three policemen required hospital attention.17 Critics of the Novotny leadership on the Central Committee finally joined in unprecedented debate with that leadership at an 15 New York Times, March 31, 1968...
...It had an advanced and modern economy before the Communists took over...
...It is too easy to interpret them solely as a revolt by intellectuals, students, artists, and writers...
...V IN THE PROTESTS against the Novotny regime and then during the liberalizing process itself, 19 Dr...
...The latter has become an urgent requirement of the economy that was steadily falling behind the industrial nations of the West...
...Totalitarian controls have effectively hampered the economy, in every country that has tried Communism even or especially in Russia, where real and often rapid industrial growth did take place...
...The delegates aren't much different in that respect from most people who have rather vague notions about the history of Eastern Europe...
...The loneliness and powerlessness of the consumer in a Communist country is made amply plain by Sik as he argues for a market mechanism so that people as consumers will feel every decision they made on production...
...General Sejna fled, seeking asylum in the United States...
...Early in July a public statement, which became known as "The 2,000 Words" was issued by a group of 70 prominent Czech intellectuals, Olympic champions, and other public figures...
...a consumer goods sector inferior to that in the backward Western nations...
...This happened after the liberal faction withdrew its first choice, Oldrich Cernik, who had been a leader of the effort to secure economic reforms...
...Revisionist historians of the Cold War might ponder the proclivity of the American military in World War II to let the Red Army have its way, especially when political, rather than military, objectives were involved...
...When Nikita Khrushchev traveled to Belgrade in the late spring of 1955, it was inevitable that all the Communist trials would be exposed as the frame-ups they were...
...The impact of the revelations about the Communist terror cannot be overstated...
...But the condemnation was relatively mild...
...But the economic problems must have had greater impact within the ranks of Communist leadership...
...27 New York Times, June 28, 1968...
...The main burden of the Five-Party Letter is its insistence that changes will never be permitted in Communist countries if those changes come under a Soviet definition of a threat to Communism...
...He would give enterprises investment credits which would be repaid by interest...
...He saw the role that the Czech events played at this juncture of man's march to freedom and wrote: Today the key to a progressive restructuring of the system of government in the interests of mankind lies in intellectual freedom...
...Nor was the comment of Literarni Listy composed in the manner of Schweik's speeches to the Austrian army officers of another war...
...trade unions that stand up for and defend workers' rights and interests...
...Was Hungary the victim of Soviet tanks a dozen years ago...
...Czechs made little secret of their sympathies with the Israelis...
...Polycentrism replaced Moscow's tight control...
...People are grouped according to income, the type of job they have, ethnic origin, etc., and they are frequently in conflict, as he pointed out...
...The striving to attain a measure of pluralism in a society that had been suffocated so long was expressed in striking fashion in the writing of Michael Lakatos, a Slovak legal theorist...
...Playwright Pavel Kohut assailed censorship and read the stirring letter of Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, protesting suppression of freedom in art and society...
...For 20 years, under Masaryk and Benes, and with a National Assembly that legislated for the country, they had their own state...
...It was General Vaclav Prchlik who warned the new leadership about the plot and, logically enough, Dubcek appointed Prchlik to replace Mamula...
...The strenuous efforts of the Dubcek leadership to avoid offense to the Soviets was indicated when General Prchlik was removed from his post for making these moderate suggestions...
...In a measured, conciliatory reply the Czech Communists rejected the major accusations of the Five-Party Letter...
...He was arrested in January 1949...
...But Sik notes that there was 5 per cent less production per unit of industrial means of production than in 1963...
...Extensive rather than intensive economic development brought the following results, according to Sik: • high material inputs...
...These were the CP of Chile...
...The Czech soldier wrote: "We were visited by Soviet army General Zhadov...
...He was "allowed" six hours of sleep, though "every ten minutes the guard pounded on the door, and I had to jump to attention and report: `Detainee 1473 reports: one detainee, everything in order...
...Even more serious, youths were expressing "criticism of the socialist system" and "there is the danger that they will be alienated from it...
...His book, Plan & Market Under Socialism, is a remarkable exposition of how economic failure was impelling Czechoslovakia toward liberalization and reform 23 The ideas of this book were first developed in 1957-58 when Czechoslovakia's command economy was still making progress but already exhibiting the lack of balance and built-in hindrance which brought on the stagnation of the sixties...
...How irritated U.S...
...The letter describes the democratization of 1968 in Czechoslovakia as a threat which "jeopardizes the interests of the entire socialist system...
...Ota Sik, head of the Economic Institute of the Academy of Sciences and Deputy Premier, played a key part in the economic reforms undertaken in 1965...
...countries...
...They pledged fealty to Comecon and the Warsaw Treaty...
...Czech party leader Vaclav Kopecky explained: "The condemnation of the cult of the personality does not mean that the party line has changed...
...But there is an acute housing shortage, Sik adds, and there is little variety of vegetables and fruit...
...Just as the physical sciences are hampered without free inquiry, so too in econom 25 Sik refers to "Peaceful Transition from Socialism to Capitalism...
...Also on the TV screen, Czechs saw a vivid program which contrasted the huge amount of newspaper space devoted to the Slansky trial in 1952 and the tiny, flat announcement of the "rehabilitation" of the trial victims in 1963...
...The prominence of the author, the closely reasoned defense of intellectual freedom, and the strong plea for all other intellectuals and citizens to join the discussion, apparently sent tremors through the Soviet land...
...continuation of a housing shortage so acute that Khrushchev, just a few years ago, promised the Russians that under Communism in 1980 newlyweds would be able to get their own apartments...
...low productivity in agriculture with a far higher use of labor power in the agrarian sector than that in any modem nation of the world, and the chronic absence of fresh vegetables and fruits for a good part of the year...
...Sik gives a Marxist critique of the anarchy of production under capitalism but cautions his countrymen that "even under socialism there are conflicts of people's interests, and hence in their attitudes as well...
...It is much more difficult to create the proper economic incentives . . . or to make complex economic analyses to seek the true reasons for certain negative economic activities...
...And it doesn't matter, the letter explains, whether the threat is domestic or foreign...
...Also, while the Interior Ministry was trying to staff the police force with Communists, the Justice Minister was opposing efforts to imprison non-Communist police officers...
...The underlying sources of the Czech events can be traced to economic failure in the only industrialized nation that has ever been taken down the Communist path...
...some of the victims who had escaped executions were released...
...ls In Czech as in Russian, serving time in prison is "to sit...
...And the Polish party paper, Trybunu Ludu, resumed its antiSemitic campaign with the charge that "Zionists" in Czechoslovakia were responsible for the "real threat of transition from socialism to capitalism...
...Loebl had been an official of the Ministry of Foreign Trade in 1949 and a veteran and loyal Communist...
...Why are the best goods our country produces sold only in the Tuzex stores for foreign currency and not for Czech crowns...
...the half party is that portion of the Greek CP which has its headquarters in East Germany...
...The obscurantism that was encouraged after the 1948 coup served to suppress sociology as an academic discipline...
...absence of ,a modem automobile industry, with the Italians now invited to start them off on passenger car production...
...In his discussion of economics, of peaceful coexistence and especially of civil and intellectual liberty Sakharov paralleled a good deal of the ferment in Czechoslovakia...
...Theirs was the party that had liberated Prague and had been associated with the Soviets, the victors of Stalingrad, whose forces had borne the brunt of the war against Hitler...
...The five parties—Soviet, East German, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian—had met in Warsaw to discuss Czechoslovakia...
...in nationality matters, the Slovaks wanted full equality...
...Guardedly, they referred to "some doubts in the minds of our public" that "occurred only after the repeated changes of the time of departure of the allies' armies from the territory of Czechoslovakia at the end of the exercise...
...Khrushchev, at the 20th Congress, opened up the very fundamentals of Communism for review, at least as something to think about...
...they also required establishment of illegal organizations within the armies of their own countries...
...He even promised the Czech leader that the Czech Communists in Moscow who "wore blinkers" would reform1 2 On May 5 General Patton's troops crossed into Czechoslovakia...
...Gottwald had declared: "You are saying that we are under Moscow's command and that we go there to learn...
...When Eisenhower complied with Antonov's wishes, it was the soldiers of the Red Army who later entered Prague as "Iiberators...
...25 The Chinese and their comrades, Sweezy and Huberman, "preserve and re-enforce the ideological dogmas that arose in the Stalin era of Marxist thinking and do immense harm to the actual development of socialist economics," Sik says...
...For example, in 1966 she had to buy 1.3 million tons of wheat from Russia and 800,000 tons from Canada.24 Sik describes the growing discrepancy between market supplies and demand...
...Nor did progress halt after the takeover...
...permitting "party rank-and-file and leadership" to "second" the "2,000 Words...
...Economic difficulties and the need for reform of the economy are important considerations in evaluating the events of 1968...
...The Social Democrats, however, showed alarming signs of vitality and intelligence...
...Lakatos sought a role for trade unions, youth organizations, professional societies beyond the formal right to ratify what the party had already established as the line.12 Even the official Party paper, Rude Pravo, took worried notice of the consequences of the politics, or rather, the lack of politics that resulted from the controlled society of the regime...
...Successfully resisting the demands of the Soviet and four puppet parties to meet in conference on the internal policies of Czechslovakia, the Czech party agreed to a meeting with the Soviet party...
...They grew in membership and took the unpardonable step of ousting Fierlinger, in order to assure that Social Democrats would be in the leadership of the Social Democratic party...
...Stoutly they defended the measure of freedom that had been attained, but they promised that there would be no multiparty system or legal political opposition...
...This became a factor in its growing economic difficulties...
...Elections "must offer a selection among several candidates," he argued...
...permitting Social Democrats to exist...
...They arranged it so they were not alone as invaders...
...Marx and Engels believed that "the German element in the Slavonic frontier localities" was a bearer of superior culture...
...It was no longer possible to speak of a world communist movement, and the Soviet empire began to fall apart...
...Sik, however much he pays tribute to the "socialism" of the Communist regimes, knows that socialism, in the Marxist sense at least, requires democracy, worker and consumer control and influence, and free, associated labor...
...That meeting held in the little railroad junction town of Cierna, near the border, was preceeded by a most extraordinary exchange between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, joined by four of its more pliant allies...
...There can be none of the freedoms that the French Communist party, for example, has been promising for years they would uphold in France...
...With what wicked irony the Soviet Communists consummated the rape of Czechoslovakia...
...True, the Communists insisted on having their favorite ministries, Interior and Defense...
...In their article "Poles, Czechs, and Germans," published on March 5, 1852, they wrote: But as it often happens, dying Czechian nationality, dying according to every fact known in history for the last four hundred years, made in 1848 a last desperate effort to regain its former vitality—an effort whose failure, independently of all revolutionary contradictions, was to prove that Bohemia could only exist, henceforth, as a portion of Germany, although part of her inhabitants might yet, for some centuries, continue to speak a non-German language...
...That the state can own in JOSEPH CLARK dustry under fascism or even under slavery is often passed over...
...independent courts based on law and not party control...
...There are, he points out further, general economic laws for all economic systems, especially those involving growth, balance, and productivity...
...20 Ibid...
...While refraining from anything as "drastic" as a multiparty system, he urged contested elections...
...All quotes from Sik are from this English translation...
...Why are our prices so high and our wages so low...
...There would be "free price movement" as against "prices by directive" and "market competition" as against monopoly...
...the Communists were becoming nationalists and wouldn't tamper with Czechoslovakia...
...so, they would have to wipe off the slate the "trials" of Rajk, Kostov, Slansky, and others, who, among other imaginative charges, were found guilty of conspiring with the "fascist Tito clique...
...The statement went on to hail the democratic revival since the beginning of the year and it reminded their countrymen and also those abroad, that "It began in the Communist party...
...domestic raw materials were not exploited and "our costs of production were higher than the world level," Sik stresses...
...a continued lack of balance in the economy...
...IV THE START of the liberalization process can be placed in June, 1967, at the Czechoslovak Writers Congress...
...in a few days Jan Masaryk was dead and Czechoslovakia had a totalitarian regime...
...When Rudolf Barak, Minister of the Interior, tried in 1962 to bring about a more complete exoneration of the trial victims, he was slapped down...
...The easing of the terror and concentration camp regime enabled people and viewpoints suppressed for two generations to surface and even to find some mode of expression...
...Loebl describes as Kafkaish, or better still, like the "back "22 stage in a small repertory theater...
...22 Ibid...
...14 For some time before the 1968 events the Novotny regime recognized the need for basic economic reforms...
...Has Germany long been an oppressor of Czechs and Slovaks...
...Jointly with Engels, Marx in Germany: Revolution and Counterrevolution denigrated both Czechs and Slovaks...
...Sik says: "Methods of the `cult' had deleterious effects" on the Czech economy...
...That 1946 poll had been off only 1/2 per cent...
...But Novotny had been, up to his ears, so he jailed Barak for his pains...
...In July, at Cierna it appeared to many observers that a compromise has been reached between the Russians and the Czechs on the question of a free press...
...Evzen Loebl's memoirs of the Slansky trial of which he was a surviving victim...
...failure to suppress the "2,000 Words" and allowing its publication...
...As late as May 17, 1951, Slansky keynoted a special 30th anniversary meeting of the Central Committee...
...an increase in the ineffective use of fixed assets and in unused plant capacity...
...These events are defined as the products of "hostile forces," pushing Czechoslovakia "from the road of socialism" and threatening to sever "Czechoslovakia from the socialist community...
...Provision was made for reducing the gallopping centralization of economic management, and local enterprises were given some authority in managing their affairs...
...The statement called upon the people to apply pressure in localities to secure the resignation of all officials who abused their power in the past and who acted dishonestly and brutally...
...Its efforts to liberalize, and perhaps even democratize, in 1968 gave hope to the people of the Communist countries seeking freedom...
...16 Ibid...
...Thus the Soviet Communists make it clear that they are little concerned with external or military threats to the Communist countries...
...Among other things he told the soldiers assembled there that they did not know the situation in their country fully...
...You were justified in sharing this opinion," Stalin said with disarming candor, as he assured Benes that now things were different...
...He stressed the participatory role of the citizens in a democracy and proposed that the National Assembly, as well as local legislative bodies, "must really, and not only formally, contribute to the forming of the political line...
...DELEGATES at the Republican convention would have been startled to discover that the original Communist wedge in Czechoslovakia was made with an assist from General Eisenhower...
...One count shows that only two-and-a-half parties, outside of Eastern Europe, supported the Russians...
...The long and bitter struggle for exonerating the Czech trial victims became a factor in the events that culminated in the ouster of Antonin Novotny and the 1968 liberaliza JOSEPH..CLARK tion...
...e The poets didn't seem to derive inspiration from Marx...
...In May, when the Czech press was enjoying a freedom not exercised since before the war, Soviet attacks on Czech democratic values did not go unanswered...
...The Czechoslovak state was born after centuries of national oppression by German, Austrian, Hungarian rulers...
...CLARK lands, Czechoslovakia was a special case...
...That kind of planlessness in a centrally planned economy brings to my mind a long queue I once encountered on the way to my flat in Moscow in 1952...
...One branch of sociology that became anathema was the measurement of public opinion, and the Institute for Public Opinion Research was the first to go in 1948...
...Its submersion under Communist control in 1948 intensified the Cold War...
...There was extensive, rather than intensive, development of the economy...
...The Czech Communists revealed the limits which they themselves had placed on democratization...
...The fraternal embraces at Cierna became the convenient backdrop for the speedy, secret, and "successful" preparation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...And do you know what...
...a debating club...
...There was the thaw in literature which enabled poets and novelists to throw off their chains...
...The statement said: The greatest deception perpetrated by the rulers of Stalinist Czechoslovakia was that they presented their arbitrariness as the will of the workers...
...There was less and less secrecy about Soviet military threats before August 20...
...They were assailed as "cosmopolites" although each had remained faithful to the Stalinist definition of internationalism, namely, loyalty to Soviet foreign policy...
...allowing "revisionist forces" to lay hand "on the press, radio and television, making of them a rostrum for attacking the Communist party, disorienting the working class and all working folk...
...He often reminds his readers that the man who influenced the course of the Czech economy was Stalin, not Marx...
...Regardless of where the party might exist, it had to be pledged to violence, to eternal enmity to "bourgeois democracy," Social Democracy, and liberalism...
...This has been understood, in particular, by the Czechoslovaks and there can be no doubt that we should support their bold initiative, which is so valuable for the future of socialism and all mankind...
...The day before, Eisenhower had informed Soviet General Antonov that he was ready to move on Prague from 1 Herbert Feis, Churchill—Roosevelt—Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957...
...But an ordinary worker was interviewed on Prague TV who said: Why is the Czech crown worth so little and foreign currency so much...
...He was accused along with others who had been arrested in 1949, 1950, and 1951...
...On December 21, 1929, Gottwald had risen to reply to taunts that his party was following a Moscow line...
...Belatedly, change was registered and in April 1964 the Czechoslovak Sociological Society was reconstituted...
...The one thing Dr...
...Sik dryly describes the situation in Czechoslovakia, "unconvertible purchasing power, with people losing time...
...In many ways this was an academic question even before the Soviet invasion...
...The national security of the Soviet Union or of its allies has nothing to do with the issues raised during the entire Czech crisis, and this is underlined by the Five-Party Letter...
...He also suggested that a provision should be included in the treaty barring its use for applying political pressure...
...The Soviet Union was in a crisis because of its technological success...
...The Soviet party had shown in the FiveParty Letter that it was concerned about two matters above all others: first, preventing any Communist country from adopting, or even flirting with a multiparty system...
...The Soviet Union and all the other Communist countries have been compelled to devise facsimiles or substitutes for a market mechanism, for profits as success indicators, and material incentives for management and workers in order to overcome stagnation imposed by totalitarian economic controls...
...In a truly Marxian analysis, Sik shows how Stalinist economics became a brake on the development of Czechoslovakia...
...The General concluded, "that the good Communists in our country have no reason to be afraid because a simple call will suffice—the entire Soviet army as well as the armies of friendly nations will be ready...
...Nevertheless, the government set up after the liberation was representative...
...My wife and I joined at the end and then we asked the person standing directly in front of us what the line was for...
...JOSEPH CLARK make political line and those who are primarily objects...
...being put to the threat": interpretations of Marxism-Leninism which the Soviet party doesn't accept...
...In Czechoslovakia the limits of the democratic revival were made clear when the party and government condemned the statement...
...the right of free scholarly inquiry...
...CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1918-1968 a program of democratic demands could be discerned...
...1918-1968 If Moscow had its trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and Bukharin, if Hungary had its Rajk trial and Bulgaria its Kostov trial, Prague had its Slansky trial...
...The support for Czechoslovakia and the criticism of the Soviet invasion by the governments of Yugoslavia and Rumania may be indications of a revived—this time a Communist—" little entente...
...There was a collective shudder in the land when the April issue of the Writers Union paper, Literarni Listy and the May issue of the Reporter carried installments of Dr...
...A profit and market mechanism was introduced to some extent, in an effort to move the economy out of stagnation...
...Ever on the prowl for quislings, the letter calls on "forces that exist in Czechoslovakia" and it defines them as "healthy forces," to struggle against "counterrevolution...
...But for present purposes it suffices to take the year 1956 as the great divide...
...It is an indication of how difficult it is for the Soviet Union, with all its military might, to impose its will on Eastern Europe...
...He suggested the reorganization of the election process to allow for expression and representation of "group interests...
...The Czechs declared there would be no return to Novotny or a Novotny-type regime...
...Overall, Czechoslovakia wanted independence from Soviet domination...
...Four months later Slansky was removed from office...
...It is not amiss to add that on an earlier occasion Huberman and Sweezy had proffered advice on economics to Castro when he was embarked on a Stalinist phase of economic management in Cuba...
...allowing "political organizations and clubs . outside the framework of the National Front...
...VII THE CZECH ciusis which impelled reform in 1968 was a crisis of both freedom and economics...
...He favors planned management, but when he actually describes it, it is surprisingly like a Federal Reserve Board, and the kind of direction that should come from the center, in his view, is from general knowledge and regulation of interest rates...
...But the May 1946 elections in Czechoslovakia were free elections...
...Loebl writes, he knew from "the dead bodies being dragged outside" and the "cries of tortured men and women" that assailed his ears...
...adopting any stand "in opposition to the other socialist countries...
...Novotny himself entered the discussion to warn the writers against voicing the kind of criti 14 Ibid...
...The Soviets bought cheap and sold dear to their allies...
...This set things up for the Chinese party's letter to the Soviet party on February 29, 1964, in which they charged: You infringe the independence and sovereignty of fraternal countries and oppose their efforts to develop their economy on an inde 9 Richard F. Star, The Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967...
...Then he drops a comment that is probably the most devastating criticism of the type of economics that Communists have persisted in calling "socialist...
...and second, eliminating free press, speech, and assemblage whenever these dragons raise their heads JOSEPH CLARK in any Communist country...
...an end to censorship...
...Then, in September 1963, some Party Presidium members who had been deeply implicated in the Slansky trial were removed, including Viliam Siroky and Karol Bacilek...
...Caute felt that this was mainly a middle-class revolution...
...On television, too, newsworthy and dramatic 18 Ibid...
...Their salaries were relatively lower than ever before and the leveling of incomes, Sik says, was hampering scientific and industrial development...
...1e In June 1967 another event had a powerful influence on the course of events in Czechoslovakia...
...The means proposed to apply such pressure were quite unexceptional for any democratic country— resolutions, demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts...
...Dr...
...Meanwhile, on May 5 the people of Prague, led by the underground, with Josef Smrkovsky as a leader, liberated Prague...
...523 JOSEPH CLARK the Pilsen area...
...Novotny, Gottwald's successor as Stalin's proconsul, had been deeply involved in the Slansky trial...
...It was a poll, again, as in 1948, which revealed the enormous gap between official policy and the opinions of the people...
...pendent basis in accordance with their own needs and potentialities...
...The Five-Party-Letter and the invasion of Czechoslovakia proclaimed the doctrine of the irreversibility of history under Communism...
...For five centuries their oppressors were primarily Germanic...
...by Huberman and Sweezy, Monthly Review, March 1964...
...they secured raw materials at prices that suited their needs, whether uranium from Czechoslovakia or oil from Rumania...
...He said he didn't know nor did the two or three persons in front of him...
...He proposed a rotation of command instead of always having a Soviet commander...
...attempting to reverse our road to socialism...
...In July General Vaclav Prchlik, then the Czech party's chief spokesman in the army, suggested that the Warsaw pact would be strengthened if it were controlled jointly by all its members and not just by one...
...On the other hand they also proclaimed "the abolition of censorship in our country and the enactment of freedom of expression and of the press...
...But how difficult was it for our country to support Czechoslovakia since we had so tarnished and undermined our position in world affairs by military intervention in another little country, Vietnam...
...In many ways the Five-Party Letter was an explosion of brutal frankness...
...In December Novotny felt himself so threatened he asked the Soviets for help and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet party secretary, paid a surprise visit to Czechoslovakia...
...13 To the demands for pluralism and the right of opposition there was the answer of the regime, expressed, for example, by Ota Brozek in the organ of the Writers Union, Reporter: "The basic line is binding for the National Assembly, for the government, and for the ministries," he warned...
...Throughout the staging of the trial, Loebl wrote, everything had to be translated into Russian for the "teachers...
...But in the sixties accumulated problems brought stagnation and decline to the economy, and the comments of the Czech economists are a helpful guide to why this happened...
...David Caute in the June 21 issue of the London New Statesman reported how "an utterly conventional Communist lady told me that Novotny was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, having been the first surgeon to transplant the heart of a nation into the arsehole of the Soviet Union...
...He was General Secretary of the Czech party and second only to Gottwald in the hierarchy...
...Barak himself had not been directly involved in the Slansky trial...
...The Russians never forgave Smrkovsky, who became chairman of the National Assembly during the brief liberalization, that the Czechs, not the Red Army, accepted the German surrender in Prague...
...III A MODERN INDUSTRIAL STATE needs scholars and scholarship...
...Again, without naming the Soviet Union, which controlled both the kind of foreign trade and its proportions, Sik argues that the Czech economy would have done much better exporting more consumer goods and importing new machinery...
...In April 1955 Czech writers and students demanded restitution of the rights of victims of the Stalinist terror...
...slowing down of the growth of labor productivity...
...In 1963 Czechoslovakia had a rather unhappy distinction—it was the only industrial country in the world with an absolute decline in industrial output, national income, and real wages...
...a constantly growing volume of construction started but not completed...
...let us mention some of these accumulated disadvantages: • the absence of a meaningful service sector of the economy...
...Though Novotny remained in his post, the meeting was a prelude to the changes effected in December and January...
...The economic failures of all the Communist regimes are inseparable from the destruction of freedom...
...With all the disadvantages noted, the Czech people were not going hungry...
...In the exchange of Chinese and Soviet recriminations, considerable truth could be gleaned...
...He argued that public opinion must play a role in the direction of society...
...Sik carefully avoids discussion of Soviet domination of Czechoslovak foreign trade...
...The Czech soldier who wrote that letter was certainly no "good soldier Schweik...
...In economic matters the major demand was for a socialist structure combined with a free market as a regulator and aid to consumer needs...
...Three currents merged in this attack—those seeking liberalization, those pressing for more consistent and far-reaching economic reforms, and Slovaks striving for greater autonomy for their 30 per cent of the nation...
...It is very easy, Sik says, "to pronounce political appeals, slogans, moral entreaties...
...CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1918-1968 ics the exposition of conflicting views becomes an essential condition for arriving at meaningful theories and plans...
...Belatedly, the Czech party leaders had taken mincing steps toward the admission that the Slansky trial was completely contrived...
...Goods that were needed were often not produced and other goods that were produced were not needed...
...By the end of 1947 that created problems...
...We might add from another source that up to World War II industrialized Czechoslovakia was also practically self-sufficient in food...
...Pictures of Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes suddenly appeared...
...The Communists emerged as the single largest party with 38 per cent of the vote...
...Correspondents used the word "euphoria" to describe the atmosphere created in the country as liberalization took place...
...And an absolute majority of the party members also supported the creation of a multiparty system...
...JOSEPH CLARK programs were broadcast...
...This never should have happened, according to Karl Marx...
...Novotny was still the chief when the Czech party plenum of January 1965 approved a "new economic model...
...the lack of a modem highway system...
...dicated the magnanimity of the regime when he explained that in the "application" of the line, citizens were allowed to be frank...
...Klement Gottwald became Premier...
...Indirectly the Russians were also admitting that the Moscow trials were frame-ups...
...Surprisingly, the poet Jaroslav Seifert quoted John Stuart Mill on liberty...
...At successive December and January sessions the Central Committee ousted Novotny from leadership...
...27 The popularity of Masaryk among the Czech people was an indication of the value they placed on national independence and parliamentary democracy...
...If the General does not know that our road to socialism will be decided by ourselves," the paper declared, "by our elected organs and not by `the good Communists,' and still less by foreign military forces—then it is in the interest of our alliance with the Soviet Union to tell him so simply and firmly...
...Seemingly out of nowhere there were demonstrations in June 1953 in Pilsen and other cities, demanding free elections--of all things...
...21 Ibid...
...In the eyes of the Marxian founders, the Germans were destined for supremacy in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia...
...Sik describes some of the problems: 23 Ota Sik, Plan and Market Under Socialism (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Science Press, 1967...
...Furthermore, the crisis of freedom and of economics is very much related...
...The Russians have told them in just so many words, nonsense, we won't per 538 mit it if it's within the grasp of our armed force...
...He distinguished sharply between "those who rule and those who are manipulated...
...4 In February 1948 the Communists fulfilled a pledge they had made 18 years earlier in the Czech parliament...
...And then, in November 1947, came the unkindest cut of all...
...But he in 12 Morton Schwartz, "Czechoslovakia: Toward One-Party Pluralism...
...The Dubcek leadership went along partway with this program...
...In 1962-63, he writes, "there was a general stagnation of economic activity...
...Thus, when the Soviet press car 20 East Europe, July 1968...
...Only for a very brief interval was the Czech press allowed to print some of the facts about the Soviet role in establishing and maintaining the terror under Gottwald and Novotny...
...Too many students of Marxism have accepted a non-Marxist and false definition of socialism, as simply nationalized industry...
...Now the tanks that rumble into Prague belong to a Russian empire...
...His discussion of "group interests" was especially important as a critique of the mythology of a harmonious, classless society...
...But the East Germans and Poles had their revenge when they were awarded a place of honor in the invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...The plants lacked raw materials to keep them running and they would have run the country into the Caribbean if Castro had continued to take the advice of his "advisers...
...Twenty years of Stalinism had not washed the real meaning of democracy out of the minds of the Czech people...
...While industrial output continued to grow in the fifties, there was a drastic decline in the growth rate during the sixties...
...I had to stand during the examinations, and I was not allowed to sit down in the cell...
...As an exposition of current Soviet doctrine the Five-Party Letter contains a clear message...
...The consequences soon made their disastrous impact...
...These are glaring examples of failure in the ambience of considerable progress in space, atomic science, military achievement, and a generally high level of industrial production that places the Soviet Union second in gross industrial production in the world...
...26 For more than five centuries Czechs and Slovaks have striven to establish their own state...
...Sik describes the achievements as well as the failures of the economy...
...But that kind of framework has never been available for a centrally directed economy with nationalized industry...
...the CP of the U.S.A...
...free speech, press, and assemblage...
...Slansky's widow made a dramatic appearance on Prague television and told the country how she couldn't even recover her husband's ashes...
...While Novotny was paying lip service to the working class as the "elite" of Czech society, "average nominal wages," Sik says, "declined in the 1960-64 period to a level that no longer provided sufficient wage-incentive for an increase in productivity of labor...
...The poet Frantisek Hrubin told the Second Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers Union: "The poet hollows out within himself the biggest possible space for freedom...
...The revival of scholarly research became a factor that made the continuation of the Novotny rule more and more incompatible with the development of Czech society...
...He was interrogated for 16 hours a day and had to stand 18 hours a day...
...On May 6, 1966, the paper complained that "the majority of young people are hardly active politically...
...7 Ibid...
...Their letter to the Czechs, released on July 18, was surely one of the most important documents issued by a top Communist authority since the "21 Conditions" drawn up by Lenin in 1920 and adopted by the Communist International...
...The Hussite wars intermingled social and national aims as did the long period of struggle against Germans and Austrians—and now against the Russians...
...The Yugoslav Communists saw it as CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1918-1968 a succession from another chapter of Communist history, more directly related to them...
...The Minister of Justice uncovered plots to murder Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, Deputy Premier Petr Zenkl, and himself, Justice Minister Prokop Drtina...
...JOSEPH CLARK ried a scurrilous criticism of Masaryk a number of Czech papers quickly replied and rose to his defense...
...voices are heard demanding a revision of our common coordinated policy as regards the Federal Republic of Germany...
...There were the convenient Warsaw pact maneuvers and the slow-motion "withdrawal" of Soviet troops...
...Of the 14 leading Communists on trial 11 were Jewish and never had a Communist regime used open anti-Semitism as blatantly as this one now...
...The final threat came from a Gallup-type poll...
...It was Slovak party leader Alexander Dubcek who seconded the motion of expulsion...
...21 All this appears under the heading "Why I confessed" and one recalls with shame and revulsion discussions in the thirties, of "Why did they confess...
...military figures, from Marshall to Eisenhower, became when Churchill suggested that Communist military moves had political and territorial overtones...
...7 Novotny gave the official answer to rising demands for a free press: "Independence of the press from the party and its ideas we have always rejected and will continue to do so.8 Even Dubcek, while still party leader in " Slovakia, and still obedient to the Novotny 6 Hubert Ripka, Eastern Europe in the Postwar World (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961...
...The revolutionary events of 1848 were accompanied by a revival of Czech liberation struggles...
...We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to break your necks, you patriots.5 So they now proceeded to break " the necks of all opposition...
...after the arrest of Slansky, Loebl was charged with belonging to that "antistate conspiratorial center...
...More than half a millenium has gone by since Jan Hus proclaimed that "Truth will Prevail...
...In January 1948 the Institute for Public Opinion Research conducted a survey which showed that the CP vote would go down to 28 per cent from the 38 per cent it had in the 1946 elections...
...Evzen Loebl, "Why I Confessed," in East Europe, July 1968...
...Ever since the rebellion of Jan Hus, Czechs and Slovaks have been compelled to fight for national freedom...
...The first and to me major fact, established by Loebl's memoirs, is that the Russian secret police inspired and directed the Slansky trial, the Czech prison system, the torture and the entire Nazi-type "justice" which was the rule in Communist countries...
...The Communists had been building up their "own" Social Democrat, Fierlinger, in order to assure a united front dominated by Communists...
...looking for various types of goods...
...The minutes of that meeting record that Slansky was interrupted 19 times by "stormy and long standing applause...
...VI CZECH FOREIGN TRADE resembled the domestic turnover because goods did not correspond to demands of the world market...
...What the Russians really fear was indicated by the appearance of an essay—made public in July—entitled "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom," by the noted Soviet physicist, Andrei D. Sakharov...
...At the close of his book, Sik reproves the Chinese "economists" and their American friends whom he names, Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, who have criticized "the ideas of socialist commodity relations" alleging that these "would finally lead to a revival of capitalism...
...Such an economy might succeed if it were given a democratic framework that encouraged innovation, promoted talent, provided proper success indicators, spurred research and development, and created incentives for efficient work and inventiveness...
...Hopefully, time moves faster in the last third of the 20th century...
...Though the Dubcek leadership could not speak its mind on the paramount issue of independence from the Soviet Union, it is all too clear that this is the one that has to be resolved for the future of Czechoslovakia...
...That was achieved, it must be added, despite Czech wages, which were lower than those of any of the Western 24 Star, op...
...Considerable attention has been paid to the support the Czechs have received from foreign Communists...
...It was only two weeks later that demonstrations broke out in East Germany...
...11 Edward Taborsky, "Sociology in Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia," in Problems of Communism, January-February 1965...
...In March 1945, two months before V-E day, Stalin declared at a dinner for Benes that the latter had been justified in his previous fears that the Communists intended to bolshevize Europe, including Czechoslovakia...
...Sik points out that merely continuing to increase gross production in an industrialized country is far from sufficient...
...Its establishment in 1918 was a tribute to aspirations for national self-determination and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe...
...If we wanted to believe this deception we would now have to blame the workers for the decline of our economy, for the crimes against innocent people, for the introduction of censorshop which made it impossible for all this to be written about...
...They set up joint corporations in which the Soviets were invariably the senior partners...
...It is difficult to say which had a greater direct influence on the course of events...
...Also abolished was the Masaryk Sociological Society...
...All of this, he notes, brought a greater rise of production costs than of social production CZECHOSLOVAKIA: 1918-1968 and of the input-output ratio...
...We too owe the Czechs our support...
...The Czech press quickly blossomed out with accounts of General Sejna's record of corruption, smuggling, profiteering, and an exceedingly varied sex life, as well as details about the attempted military plot.ls The people of Czechoslovakia were now enjoying their newspapers as never before...
...The central planning institutions can have knowledge and "indirectly guide the development of the productive forces," but the specifics have to be "ascertained concretely in the enterprises °" Despite the utopia described in Lenin's State and Revolution and in Bukharin's and Preobrazhensky's ABC of Communism, Sik gently reminds his readers that even under communism it will still "be necessary for one group of people to give orders to another group...
...But it was typical of the Novotny leadership that it prevented a public review of the trial...
...Sakharov named the foremost tyrannies of our time, those which threaten civilization itself-Stalin's, Hitler's, and Mao Tse-tong's...
...The need for market relations, to allow the laws of supply and demand to function, "arises from the conflicts of interest objectively caused by the development of productive forces," according to Sik...
...Eduard Benes, colleague of the founder of the Czechoslovak republic, Thomas Masaryk, and later Masaryk's successor, felt confident during the early years of World War II that the Soviet Union would not threaten his country's freedom...
...In a final appeal for rational economic development Sik reminds his readers that dogmatists prefer to offer people "moral stimuli" of the type that Stalin and Mao put forth...
...The Soviets took along their East Germans...
...20 He was " awakened 30 or 40 times each night and when the knocking on the door at ten-minute intervals didn't wake him, he was kicked awake by the guard...
...IF WE WANTED to go back far enough in a search for the origins and roots of the 1968 Czech events we would have to return to Jan Hus...
...Bluntly the Soviets say: "This is something more than your cause...
...The Letter then makes a long list of the admittedly peaceful changes in Czechoslovakia and, the Soviet party says, "we shall never agree...
...In 1956-57 the Soviet-Chinese cleavage indicated that a new era of conflicts among Communist nations had begun...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
