CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Docile & Grey

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CZECHOSLOVAKIA Docile & Grey Twenty-four hours after President Antonin Zapotocky, dead of a heart attack, was buried with full Communist honors, the Czech National Assembly last week smoothly elected his successor by a unanimous show of 353 hands. The new President: Antonin Novotny, 52. the onetime locksmith who has been First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party since 1953. In a departure from the post-Stalin taboo against party leaders' taking government posts, Novotny kept his party job. But, like all the other changes inflicted on the nation by the Communists since the 1948 Putsch, this one caused hardly a ripple in docile, beaten Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia is the most prosperous of Russia's satellites. Prague has more cars on its streets than any other satellite capital. Its shop windows are aglitter with goods, its services and amenities rival a city of the West. Yet it is a grey city, devoid of progress and hope. "Caution" is the national byword.

Czech Red leaders speak more of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution than of the man of the moment in the Kremlin. They have not yet fully recognized the Soviet Party Congress or rehabilitated one victim of Stalinism. Party newspapers shy away from Moscow's struggles. They are always ready to jump either way.

The ordinary citizen has long since silenced his talk of freedom, placidly accepted the status quo. Whispers a worker: "We get along on $40 a month, plus C.U.—the initials of co ukradnete (what you can steal). This cheating, chiefly from government warehouses or government stores, and what the regime calls hooliganism" are the only emotional outlets. Teen-agers annoy old ladies in movies, wind up hard-drinking rock-'n'-roll sessions by jeering at, sometimes battling, cops in the street. The stirrings of intellectuals and the riots of youths have flowered into rebellion in Hungary and a fight for freedom in Poland. But Czechs, subject to foreigners for much of their history, have no tradition of rebellion (their state was handed to them at Versailles when Czechoslovakia was carved by the Allies out of remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire). They have plastered more and bigger Red stars on their buses and trains than any other satellite, but for a characteristic reason. Explained one Czech: "Perhaps we do have more Red stars than the Poles and Hungarians, but what are a few Red stars compared to having the Red army?"