World: RUSSIANS GO HOME!

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New Business. As Moscow undoubtedly knew, Dubcek's Presidium was assembled in the yellow stucco headquarters of the Communist Central Com mittee at the very moment the invasion began. It met regularly on Tuesday evenings, a circumstance that saved the Soviets the trouble of tracking the Czechoslovak leaders to their homes to arrest them. On the agenda of the session was the special party congress due to be held on Sept. 9, at which Dubcek and his colleagues dedicated to reform and liberalization intended to oust the last of the hard-core conservatives on the Central Committee, among them Presidium Members Alois Indra, Dra-homir Kolder and Vasil Bilak. Kolder and Indra brought to the session a memorandum stating that the party was losing control of the country and that something had to be done. Dubcek's majority on the Presidium rejected it.

There was pressing new business as well. The Kremlin, after a two-week truce following the reformers' triumph at the Cierna summit with the Soviet Politburo, was talking tough again. An editorial in Pravda two days before had accused the Czechoslovaks of "or ganized persecution" of pro-Soviet workers and renewed the Kremlin com plaint that Prague was failing to control anti-Communist "reactionary" forces in the country. Also, Dubcek had just received a letter from Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev warning that he had not lived up to his agreements at Cierna. In the midst of the dis cussion, a Czechoslovak military officer telephoned the news that the Soviets had invaded. Premier Oldfich Cernik took the call. "This is impossible," he said. When Defense Minister Martin Dzur in a second call insisted that it was all too possible, Cernik hung up with a hoarse cry: "Treason, betrayal!"

"How could they do this to me?" asked a dazed Dubcek. "I have served the cause of the Soviet Union and Com munism all of my life." Only Indra, Kolder and Bilak seemed unsurprised by the invasion, raising the suspicion that it was they who had provided Moscow with the slim pretext for the invasion. That pretext, as described by Tass, was "that party and government leaders" of Czechoslovakia "have asked the Soviet Union and other allied states to render the fraternal Czechoslovak people urgent assistance, including assistance with armed forces."

Bilak, in fact, admitted as much and, along with Kolder, urged the Presidium to cooperate with the Russians. But the reformers were adamant. National Assembly President Josef Smrkovsky hastened off to convene an emergency session. He was arrested there, but the Assembly continued to meet throughout the week, with 169 of its 300 Deputies in defiant session. Cer-nik left to rally the government, and was taken into custody at his office. Dubcek refused to try to escape and, with other Presidium members, waited for the Russian troops to ring the building; he was seized by 15 Soviet officers and plainclothesmen in his office.