Czechoslovakia: Another Purge, Another Premier

Five purges have rocked the Czechoslovak Communist Party in less than a year. In the latest, down went two Deputy Premiers, the Ministers of Finance, Food, Transport and Fuel—and Premier Viliam Siroky, 61. Siroky, announced the regime of Red President Antonin Novotny, was guilty of “shortcomings in his work” and “certain mistakes in his past political activity.”

Siroky’s biggest mistake, it seemed, was to help topple Rudolf Slansky, the party leader who was hanged in 1952 along with ten other Reds on trumped-up charges of espionage and treason. This was irony indeed, since Novotny himself was a ringleader in the 1952 blood bath. Old Stalinist Novotny could not shrug off his own guilt so easily, nor could he escape blame for the country’s current economic woes. In the prevailing mood of cautious destalinization among Czech comrades, Novotny himself might be the next to go. For the first time he had a serious rival. Replacing Siroky as Premier was Josef Lenart, 40, a wartime underground leader with no embarrassing Stalinist history. Moreover, Lenart’s diploma came from Moscow’s own Central Committee training school, where he studied from 1953 until 1956. Last week when the new Premier took office, he got a congratulatory message from the school’s old headmaster himself, Nikita Khrushchev.