Prague One Year Later
SHANOR, DONALD R.
AN UNCERTAIN ANNIVERSARY Prague One Year Later By Donald R. Shanor As the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion approaches, it has become increasingly apparent that Dr. Gustav Husak's attempt...
...Still, the regime has not been stripped of all its weapons...
...that all the maneuvering in the months between had been diversionary games tolerated by the Russians...
...One indication that the use of fear as a weapon is under consideration was the arrest of 19 persons, most of them youths, in the North Bohemian city of Teplice, in connection with the anti-Soviet rioting that followed the Czechoslovak hockey victory over the Russians at the end of March...
...The feeling was widespread that the real effects of the August 21, 1968, invasion were finally being felt...
...Last April, when Husak replaced Alexander Dubcek as First Secretary of the Communist party, his system for restoring order seemed so simple and effective that some people wondered why the Russians had not thought of it sooner...
...That, the 56-year-old lawyer and Party veteran had demonstrated in his eight months as Slovak Party chief, meant realizing the Soviets have five or six troop divisions in this small country and it would not be wise to oppose them too vigorously...
...A long letter he wrote to former President Antonin Novotny in those days had much the same rebellious significance as the current Kriegel speech...
...The later Kriegel meetings and the solidarity strikes with the students further confirmed this change...
...The optimists like to cite the case of Hungary's Janos Kadar, who was put in office by the Soviets but has given his people a more liberal regime than any other outside Czechoslovakia...
...Despite what must have been considerable pressure, he did not justify the invasion and even went so far as to tell the forum that the Soviet action was based in part on faulty information about conditions in the other Parties...
...Another possible straw in the wind was a recent tough statement by Interior Minister Jan Pelnar against liberals, which evoked memories of the days when the Party leaderships equated any form of criticism with treason...
...Husak observed...
...The regime branded these gatherings "anarchistic" and said they were based on false information...
...Of course, this would mean an end to Husak's promises of not returning to the methods of the '50s...
...Gustav Husak's attempt to pacify Czechoslovakia with a policy of Realismus is beginning to yield diminishing returns...
...But of late the reformers have been cheering up...
...There's no atmosphere of fear like there used to be...
...Kriegel had been chairman of the National Front before the invasion and was one of the negotiators of the Moscow agreement in August...
...Both the pessimists and the optimists felt that Husak's performance at the recent Moscow meeting of world Communist leaders proved their point...
...The pessimists use as their example Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka, who changed from the reformer of 1956 to the orthodox Party chieftain of 1969...
...More than 5,000 victims of that period have applied for rehabilitation proceedings, and every week the press has a few lines noting the annulment of a sentence against someone found—too often, "in memoriam"—to have been involved in yet another rigged trial...
...All the editors, I was told, were enjoying the long weekend...
...But it may be his only way of dealing with the unions...
...Opposition in the trade unions, meanwhile, has proved much harder to deal with...
...Yes, we had enough strength...
...Over the May Day holiday I called on the editors of Nova Svoboda, the Party journal in the grimy industrial city of Ostrava in Northern Moravia...
...Once law and order is restored and criticism silenced, it was implied, the nation would be able to pursue the reformist goals of the halcyon period...
...It, too, was circulated in typescript in the factories...
...If Husak wants meek and complacent unions again, there are plenty of unemployed former union leaders who would be glad to get their old posts back...
...When the nation returned to work, neither liberal editor in chief Ladislav Bub-lik nor his leading staff members were at their desks...
...Nevertheless, when the Bohemian and Moravian Students' Union refused to join the National Front and thus submit to Party discipline, it was declared illegal and replaced by a new rump organization formed, among other purposes, to pay off the $400,000 debt incurred after government support was cut off...
...Again, personal and political considerations must have had an influence on Husak's decision...
...In Pelnar's view, the designs of native anti-Party forces are "almost identical" to Western intelligence plans "to disintegrate the unity of the Socialist camp...
...The pessimists pointed to his lavish and frequent praise of the USSR as "the main pillar of the Socialist camp and of the international Communist movement...
...First the unions circulated the defiant speech of Fran-tisek Kriegel, who was dismissed from both Central Committee and Party last May for opposing the Husak line...
...The effect of this was immediately noticeable at the trade-union congress held early this spring...
...It was at this point that Husak acted against the students...
...A skilled politician, he has included the chairman of the national union organization, Karel Polacek, in the Party presidium in the hope of controlling his liberal inclinations...
...His resistance to the Soviets was so open and frank, though, that he was not permitted to sign that document...
...Where his popular predecessor had wavered and compromised in an attempt to save what he could of the progressive platform, Husak began at once to apply "realism" in every field...
...Husak's initial success in imposing controls on journalists, writers, students and the Party's lower echelons put the liberals in a mood of despair...
...In public meeting after public meeting, the old bureaucrats were voted out of office and new slates put in...
...Husak's repressive actions, they now realize, were taken in situations where it was easy for him to overcome opposition...
...If he has forgotten this, which is unlikely, some of his aides have not...
...The fact that Husak has chosen to allow the rehabilitations to continue—one of the very few of the Dubcek programs he has kept— is considered a good sign by those who think he will deal with his opposition without the use or threat of terror...
...Yet the change would involve another series of public meetings and an open vote, and it is likely that most of the progressives would be confirmed in their present jobs—or that if they were forced to bow to government pressure, the popular outcry would be worse for Husak than the present opposition...
...The battles he has yet to win involve much more complex power relations, and there are even some institutional safeguards on the side of the progressives...
...Soon afterward, his picture disappeared from the capital, the Party ouster being merely the delayed end of his career...
...It is but a short step from such accusations to charges of treason, as many thousands of Czechs and Slovaks can testify from their own experiences at the trials of the late '40s and '50s...
...The fact that 150 witnesses are scheduled to be called at the trial or trials points to maximum publicity and may mean that the fate of the defendants is intended to serve as an example to other unruly elements...
...It was simple, for example, to systematically purge those regional Party secretaries and presidium members who were too strongly identified with Dubcek and refused to recant after Husak came to power...
...For in the nine months between the advent of the Dubcek reforms and the Soviet invasion, almost every factory in the country took advantage of the new freedom and replaced its entire union leadership...
...Donald R. Shanor, a previous contributor, reports on East European affairs for the Chicago Daily News...
...Of course, there are many examples in the Communist movement of men who repudiated their earlier positions and allies to change their course...
...No one is afraid to speak out...
...The students proved more intractable...
...Whatever the ultimate outcome, the congress showed labor's power as well as its determination to quit playing the traditional role of transmission belt for official policy...
...The question now is whether he will respond to opposition from the unions, intellectuals and liberal Communists with conciliation or with an even tougher line...
...Again there were recriminations, but no decisive action by the government...
...The optimists' argument was more subtle, being based on what the Party Secretary did not say...
...Husak can oust regional leaders, change entire editorial staffs, and cut off student subsidies, but he knows he cannot jail or expel the tens of thousands of defiant workers who have taken part in these meetings...
...Union members in five plants in the Prague area reacted with 15-minute strikes...
...He charged that progressives who have left the country, including Professor Ivan Svitak, now at Columbia, "keep in touch with persons having the same objectives and who remained in Czechoslovakia...
...Another good omen, they feel, is Husak's own record as a political prisoner in the '50s and his struggle to obtain rehabilitation...
...But a purge cannot reach down to the local level without causing grave political damage to Husak and the Russians...
...We are often asked the question: Did we have sufficient inner strength to defend Socialist achievements...
...Justification of the Soviet action would have had the most serious consequences here...
...It would have given the Russians the proof they want: branding those who were running the government at the time, along with the editors of the clandestine newspapers and the broadcasters at the secret radio stations, as genuine counterrevolutionaries...
...They had been replaced overnight by a group of apparatchiks with no known journalistic experience but with safe political views...
...Indeed, he used the media in his power struggle against the collaborationist former Slovak leader Vasil Bilak...
...Typewritten copies of Kriegel's speech were subsequently read at meetings in the big plants in Ostrava and around Prague, however, and packed as much anti-Husak punch as his original delivery...
...It is still being pushed back and forth in the government and will probably be either rejected or weakened beyond recognition...
...If opposition gets worse, the labor leader and his lieutenants can be fired...
...A union official in one of the plants on the outskirts of Prague discussed one type of action it could take against the labor reformers: "They're going to have to make a couple of arrests in the factories...
...A draft bill giving the workers far-reaching control in management and production decisions was passed...
...In the space of a few weeks, no less than 37 presidium members were ousted, including the powerful Moravian chief, Josef Spacek, who along with Josef Smrkovsky lost his post on the national presidium in the same plenum that demoted Dubcek...
...After all, he was one of the most important speakers on the rebel Bratislava stations, and, as newly elected Slovak Party chief, one of the most quoted officials in the clandestine press...
...The contradiction here, of course, is that one of the main objectives of the progressives was freedom to dissent from official policies and to express their criticism openly in free speech and a free press...
...The assembled delegates demanded not only an economic but a political role for labor, and refused to subordinate the movement's power to the Communist party...
...There was a parallel weeding out at the regional Party newspapers...
Vol. 52 • July 1969 • No. 14
