Correspondents' Correspondence New Prague Purge

...The dissidents believe the second set was disseminated by "former employs of State Security and other instruments of oppression in the '50s " In their view, these Stalinist officials realize they cannot regain power so long as Husk and Pressdent Lodi Svoboda retain a semblance of legality and refrain from staging mass political trials Thus their leaflets attack Husk for his "benevolence" toward Dubcek's chief of staff, former Parliament President Josef Smrkovsky, and other alleged "agents of imperialism " Repeating charges against Smrkovsky dating back to the grim purges of the '50s, they demand that he be tried anew...

...his briefcase Evidence against the others was gleaned from tapped telephones and opened letters This group of prominent liberals is expected to be tried for political offenses Since many of them signed the 1969 "Open Letter" protesting the occupation, it seems likely that writers Lodi Vouch and Vaclav Havel, who initiated the letter, will be implicated in the trial...

...The latest arrests were made around January 8 and for the first time involved foreign newsmen, among them the Italian radio cone-pendent Vale no Cochiti He was detained at the airport while on a private visit and found to have "materials that could harm Czechoslovak interests " The Czech journalist Karle Kink was also apprehended, along with national chess champion Lode Packman, who had been freed from an earlier prison term in 1970 because of illness...

...The second wave, beginning the day after Christmas, was much broader in scale...

...The most prominent January victim was Milan Hub, a liberal history professor who served on the Central Committee and Presidium under Dubcek Following his dismissal m 1969, he was unable to find even a laborer's job and his family lived on his wife's wages as a cleaning woman Shortly before his arrest, Hub had been permitted to take a job as straw boss on a suburban Prague housing project...

...New Prague Purge New York??Three waves of mass arrests have taken place in Czechoslovakia since last November's elections, disproving Gustav Husk??s claim that the nation stands nearly 100 per cent behind him, and revealing how hard the "realist" Party Chief is being pressed by both his rivals on the ultra-Left and the Soviets on the Right Information received here last week from reliable dissidents inside Czechoslovakia also tells of two kinds of leaflets currently being circulated One set, produced illegally by liberals to mark the fourth anniversary of Aleksandra Dubcek's accession, calls for at least a partial return to his progressive policies, the other, equally illegal, since only the Party and the government are authorized to issue printed material, demands that Husk get tougher or get out...

...The case illustrates the Party Chiefs dilemma Hub had led the fight for Husk??s rehabilitation during the nearly 10 years the Stalinists held him in prison as a "bourgeois nationalist" Husk??s personal experiences with persecution and imprisonment were long considered a guarantee that, once in power, he would not inflict the same injustices on his enemies A former lawyer, he had said as much in his speeches pledging "legality" But the hundreds of arrests over the past three months show that legality, past persecution and old friendships count for little against the realities of Soviet and domestic Stalinism ?Donald R Sharon...

...This might be dismissed as the lobbying of an unimportant minority were it not for the parallel pressures being applied by the Kremlin, despite its public praise for the way Husk has subordinated his country's interests to Russia's during the nearly three years since he replaced Dubcek In recent months, the Czechoslovak sources say, there has been a steady flow of visitors from Moscow, including delegations from the Soviet Committee on State Security and the Office of the Public Prosecutor All these officials are apparently asking the same question of the Prague regime How is it possible that you have labeled so many of the 1968 leaders, from Dubcek and Smrkovsky on down, as counter revolutionaries, but have failed to take the next logical step of trying them for this serious crime and putting them in prison7 The recent series of mass arrests was Husk??s answer Though the three operations were carried out m secrecy, a few fragmentary accounts appeared in the Western press, forcing the official Chetek agency to issue a brief announcement This declared that those arrested had "formed illegal, antistatic and anti-Soviet organizations Working together with emigrants and with foreign centers, [they] tried to thwart the government's efforts at consolidation ". According to my informants, 95 persons were rounded up in the first action, which came during and after the national elections of November 26-27 Brno, the Moravian industrial center, was the major target, with more than 40 persons arrested, mainly on charges of distributing dissident leaflets Among them was Yaroslavl Sabbath, a former professor and provincial party secretary who was a delegate to the emergency Party Congress held in Prague's CKD works in the days following the Soviet invasion He made himself particularly unpopular by denouncing Husk??s capitulationism speech of August 31, 1968 For this and other heresies, he lost his university post and was forced to work as a construction laborer Now not only Sabbath but his two sons, daughter and daughter-in-law have been imprisoned, his wife escaped on grounds of illness...

...reportedly, hundreds were arrested for having made "insulting remarks about the policies of the Czechoslovak government and its allies " Included were Protestant church officials, the historian Jan Tsar, and the outspoken Slovak editor, Josef Bloch, who was unlucky enough to have been carrying a copy of Smrkovsky's interview with an Italian Communist paper in...