Czechoslovakia: An Eminence from Moscow

Invited, unexpected and unwelcome all at the same time, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin flew into Prague last week to have a look for himself at what is going on in Czechoslovakia.

Only three days before, the liberalizing regime of Alexander Dubcek had announced that Kosygin would not be accepting any time soon its invitation to him to visit Czechoslovakia.

Plainly taken aback by his decision to come, the Czechoslovaks at first announced that Kosygin, as though he were any idle jet-setter, had merely slipped into town for a "short holiday" and a dip in the healing waters of the local spas. They had to admit soon enough that Kosygin really had come for "a continuation of an exchange of views" on Czechoslovak matters. At the first exchange with Dubcek, President Ludvik Svoboda and other officials, Kosygin reported that their reforms were "meeting with understanding" in Moscow—presumably a reassurance.

Clumsy Canard. Kosygin arrived at a time of rising anti-Soviet feeling in Czechoslovakia. Earlier in the week, that feeling had been exacerbated by an article in Moscow's Sovietskaya Rossiya that called Dr. Thomas G. Masaryk, founder of the Czechoslovak republic and the country's most revered historical figure, an "absolute scoundrel." The journal charged that Masaryk in 1918 paid a Russian terrorist named Boris Savinkov 200,000 rubles (then worth some $10,000) to kill Lenin. Masaryk's memory is enjoying a fresh outpouring of honor and homage in the wave of current reform, and Czechoslovakia's press reacted angrily to the Soviet charge. "An insult without parallel," said the newspaper Práce. Lidová Demokracie called the story "a gross falsification of our history" and "slander."

The Soviet charge was based on the confession, probably obtained after torture, of Savinkov at his 1924 trial that Masaryk had given him 200,000 rubles. Historians accept the fact that Masaryk gave money to a number of Russians for a number of reasons: to help them escape to freedom in Western Europe; or for cultural purposes; or to help get Czech troops out of Russia to continue the fight against Germany after the Bolsheviks opted out of World War I. At his trial, Savinkov himself testified that he did not know exactly what the money was to be used for, and even the official Soviet history of Czechoslovakia published in 1960 did not accuse Masaryk, a gentle, scholarly man, of plotting to kill Lenin. The charge was clearly a clumsy canard thrown in to aid Moscow's psychological warfare being waged against the Dubcek regime.