World: SHOWDOWN IN EASTERN EUROPE

CZECHOSLOVAKIA has twice been in need of the world’s help when threatened by the aggressiveness of its neighbors. Help did not come when Hitler dismembered the country in 1938 or when the Russians organized a Communist coup in 1948. Last week Czechoslovakia’s 14,300,000 citizens found themselves in a desperate situation once again, faced with a massive threat to their independence from the Soviet Union and its hard-lining allies. Despite verbal pledges of support from some of its Communist neighbors and muted cheers from the West, the country knew from experience that, whatever happened, it could expect no real help from the outside. In a moment of peril, it could rely only on its own political acumen, patience and resourcefulness as a nation.

Those qualities saw Czechoslovakia through an extraordinary week of showdown with the Soviet Union. With mounting pressures, including a virtual ultimatum to the Czechoslovak nation, Russia did everything that it could, short of sending tanks to halt and reverse the reform program led by Party Boss Alexander Dubček. At week’s end, armed intervention was still a possibility. But under Dubček’s shrewd direction, little Czechoslovakia stood up and talked back, reaffirming its commitment to a new form of democracy-cum-socialism and defiantly refusing to retreat. If Czechoslovakia gets away with it, Communism in Europe—and perhaps elsewhere as well—may become even more diverse, nationalistic and liberalized. Said West Germany’s influential Die Zeit: “After the Second World War, we witnessed the Communization of the Balkans. Today we witness the Balkanization of Communism.”

Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev imperiously summoned Dubček to the Soviet Union for a face-to-face meeting. Radio Prague reported that Dubček would not go until some 16,000 Soviet troops remaining on Czechoslovak soil leave the country. Whether or not Dubček eventually decides to meet Brezhnev, however, he emerged from last week’s events with the most powerful backing he has had since he took over from the deposed Antonin Novotny almost seven months ago. The fight may have just begun, and Dubček could still be knocked out by the Russians. But he is clearly the winner of the first round.

No Retreat. Besieged all week by harsh notes, threats and warnings from the Soviet Union and its followers—and pressured further by the continued presence of the Russian troops—Dubček took to national TV to rally his people around him. He talked as no Communist leader had ever dared to do before. Czechoslovakia, he pledged, would “not make the slightest retreat from the path that we took up in January.” He called upon all Czechoslovaks to press forward to “develop socialism into a free, modern and profoundly humane society. Since the party cannot change the people, it must itself change.” Then he made an open plea to the people: “What we need most now is the support of all of you at this critical moment.”

Later in the week, Dubček also accomplished what many had regarded as virtually impossible: at a special meeting in Hradcany Castle, he won the unanimous support of the 107-member Central Committee, including some 20 conservatives, for his leadership and policies. Dubček had shrewdly convened the special plenum on short notice in order to give the opponents little time to organize. He also invited as observers 55 liberal delegates recently elected to attend a special party congress in September, thus putting pressure on the conservatives.

By making the proceedings as public as possible, he turned the meeting into a test of patriotism, in effect asking for a vote for Czechoslovak independence in the face of Soviet attempts to turn the country into a castrated satellite. Mobs of people climbed Hradcany Hill high above Prague to await the results of the session, and Dubček even arranged for some to be admitted to the castle’s Spanish Hall during the six-hour session.

In the end, the 88 members of the Central Committee present voted by “unanimous approval without reservations” for Dubček’s policy. Cheers went up from the crowd outside when one of the first committee members to emerge made a thumbs-up gesture and shouted: “The resolution is O.K.” As word of the unanimous vote spread, crowds mobbed the departing committeemen, applauding and cheering. “The Russians? Who are they?” said one plenum member cockily. In Prague, a holiday atmosphere pervaded the streets, and people jammed around portable radios to hear the latest news.

People, Do Something! In fact, Russia’s crude pressure tactics had rallied the Czechoslovak people around its leader as no Communist nation has ever done before. Thousands upon thousands of Czechoslovaks flooded news papers and TV stations with letters supporting Dubček. Nearly 2,000 separate resolutions and declarations of support came from every conceivable kind of organization, representing millions of people. The newspaper Zemedelske Noviny cried: “People, do something! We cannot be betrayed! Nation, stay awake!” The country’s small Socialist Party declared that “Czechs and Slovaks stand firmly united in this historic moment.” Even the Czechoslovak army weighed in with a pledge of backing for Dubček.

Support for Dubček and his reforms also came from some other Communist states in Eastern Europe, thus exposing a growing schism between the more liberal “revisionist” Communist states and the orthodox diehards loyal to Moscow in Poland and East Germany. Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito and Rumania’s Nicolae Ceausescu both promised to fly to Prague on three hours’ notice if Dubček needed them for a show of solidarity. Said Ceausescu about the Prague reformers: “I wish them well from the bottom of my heart.” Even Janos Kádár, the Hungarian party chief, who is generally pro-Moscow, gave some support to the Czechoslovaks; two weeks ago, before attending the Warsaw summit that intensified the pressures on Czechoslovakia, he secretly came to a small villa outside Bratislava, near the Hungarian border, to huddle with Dubček. Several national Communist parties in Western Europe, including the French, Italian and British, came out for Dubček. French Communist Boss Waldeck Rochet flew to Moscow and then to Prague to try to dampen the crisis.

Both East Germany and Poland, however, have kept up steady attacks on the Czechoslovak reform movement, urging the Soviet Union on to ever sterner measures. Military sources reported that East Germany had massed some of its own troops along the Czechoslovak border and demanded the permanent stationing of Soviet troops in Bohemia. “Czechoslovakia,” said a top East German official in Berlin last week, “is our Cuba.” But, justifying Walter Ulbricht’s worst fears that Czechoslovakia’s experiment could infect his domain, East German Scientist Robert Havemann, who is considered a political maverick in a country where not many of that breed survive, said of the Czechoslovak experiment: “For the first time, fascination emanates from a socialist state that could especially affect restless youth throughout the world.”

Papal Bull. There was little doubt among Dubček’s reformers that a recent swing toward them in almost every region of Czechoslovakia was the reason behind the panic summit in Warsaw. The Russians and the hard-liners were upset by the so-called “2,000 Words,” a declaration from some 70 prominent Czechoslovaks urging direct action to oust conservative followers of deposed Party Boss Novotn. They were even more upset by Dubček’s plan to purge the 40 or so Novotny partisans on the Central Committee at a special party congress called for Sept. 9. In district party elections this month and last, local party units—voting by secret ballot for the first time—had chosen a large majority of delegates to the congress who favor both the reform and the purge plans. The Soviets and their allies, seeing that time was running out, decided to try to intimidate the Prague leadership, encourage the conservatives to assert themselves and try to topple Dubček from power before they are dumped in September.

The communiqué from the Warsaw conference was unremarkable enough, but a letter sent to Prague from the five and released 48 hours after the meeting ended was a shocker. Nothing less than an ultimatum, it reminded Czechoslovaks of the stern papal bulls that the Vatican often sent to the country’s Hussite reformers in the 15th century. It asked for the abandonment of the reforms, including renewed banning of “antisocialist” political activity and a return to censorship. Calling Dubček’s course “absolutely unacceptable,” it charged that he had done nothing to rebuff reactionaries. “This is no longer your affair alone,” said the letter ominously. “We are convinced that a situation has arisen that endangers the foundations of socialism in Czechoslovakia and threatens the vital common interests of other socialist countries. The people of other countries would never forgive us our indifference and carelessness in the face of such danger.”

Despite its restraint, the reply of the Czechoslovak party Presidium sounded like a Communist Magna Carta. It declared that in Czechoslovakia “the strength of the Communist Party depends on its reform” and on “the voluntary support of the people.” Any effort to reimpose Novotny’s harsh rule, it said, would “create a wave of resistance among an overwhelming majority of workers, farmers and intelligentsia.” The party would then be helpless to prevent “a real conflict of power.”

Premature Celebration. That did not sit well with the Russians, and they were soon back with a demand that Dubček and the ten other members of the Czechoslovak Presidium meet with Brezhnev and the full Soviet Politburo. In a telephone call to Brezhnev, with whom he is on first-name terms, Dubček proposed that the meeting take place in Košice, Czechoslovakia, about 40 miles from the Russian border, but declined to bring the full Presidium. It was clear to him that the Russians hoped to use the Presidium, which is evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, to bend him to their will. Brezhnev insisted that they meet in either Moscow, Kiev, Lvov or Uzhgord, and that the full Presidium attend.

At one point, when Soviet Ambassador Stepan Chervonenko arrived at a meeting of Dubček and his top aides with a more conciliatory letter from Brezhnev, National Assembly President Josef Smrkovsky emerged to cry triumphantly: “Victory!” The 15 assembled party leaders, feeling that Brezhnev was caving in, broke out some Russian cognac. Dubček, who is said to have lost 25 lbs. in recent weeks, drank two quick cognacs, then left the room and told bystanders: “It is hard to repair the errors of 20 years.” The others finished off three bottles of cognac.

The celebration was premature. The Russians not only kept up their demand for a meeting on Soviet soil but stepped up the attack. In Moscow, President Nikolai Podgorny promised “all-round assistance and support” for Czechoslovaks who opposed Dubček’s reforms—an open invitation to treason. In East Germany, Walter Ulbricht’s regime exhorted conservatives in Czechoslovakia to “boldly counterattack the revisionist and antisocialist forces.” When an arms cache that included U.S.-made automatic rifles and machine guns was found near the West German border, the Russians seized on the discovery as a possible pretext for a military intervention. Pravda spoke darkly of plots by NATO and the CIA, and of “an insurrection”—much as Russia had done just before invading Hungary. At week’s end the Soviet army paper Red Star reported that Soviet soldiers were deeply worried about the activities of antisocialist forces in Czechoslovakia, concluding that they were ready to defend socialism anywhere. Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko suddenly flew home from a visit to Algeria.

Most observers believe that the Soviets would invade Czechoslovakia only as a last resort, considering the enormous cost of such a move. But their hand could be forced if Czechoslovakia tries to pull out of the Warsaw Pact—a move Dubček shows no signs of wanting to make—or if the Communist Party were to lose control in Prague. Unless Dubček encourages genuine opposition parties in Czechoslovakia or openly defies the Russians in some other major way, the Kremlin will probably rely on continued political and psychological pressure to keep the reform within bounds.

Disguised as Tourists. The psychological pressure includes a display of military might to frighten the Czechoslovaks. Though Warsaw Pact maneuvers ended a month ago, Soviet troops have tarried in Czechoslovakia in large numbers and at week’s end had hardly begun to leave, despite many promises to do so. Czechoslovak agents who have been scouring the countryside for Russian troops have unexpectedly come across whole encampments in the Bohemian forests. Lieut. General Václav Prchlík, the Czechoslovak army’s chief of security, intimated that members of the state security had failed to keep the government informed about the full extent of Russian troop movements into the country; 29 high officers of the state security have been fired in the past two weeks. All last week the Czechoslovaks claimed that Russian soldiers disguised as tourists were entering the country on public buses as well as on Aeroflot jetliners from Moscow. There were also reports that more than 5,000 Volga autos had crossed the border from neighboring Communist states, all equipped with police radios with a range of about 60 miles.

At a briefing for selected Czechoslovak journalists, General Prchlík reported that the Russians had set up radio transmitters within Czechoslovakia with which they could either jam all Czechoslovak broadcasts or beam their own propaganda into the country’s homes. They had also, reported Prchlík, invited ex-Party Boss Novotny to Moscow to broadcast a plea for Dubček’s overthrow via their network. (Last week Novotny was waiting things out at a country villa at Rokycany, about nine miles from Pilsen, where he was under close surveillance.) The Russian embassy in Prague contains a printing plant that has been turning out a stream of antireform leaflets.

Rare Moment. At week’s end the Czech poet Miroslav Holub compared the Soviet attitude to that of the medieval Popes who denied that the earth moves around the sun. “This country is in the position of Giordano Bruno,”* wrote Holub in the journal Literárni Listy. “We are supposed to deny everything that we know to be true. We are to admit that the sun is revolving, and that we are facing a counter-revolution.” Czechoslovakia is obviously unwilling to do so. “Rarely are there moments,” concluded Holub, “when a people is as certain as we are that the will of the nation is identical with the will of its leaders.”

*The Italian philosopher who was burned to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for propagating the Copernican theory that the earth revolves around the sun.