World: HISTORIC QUEST FOR FREEDOM

Love the Truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.

Those words of Czechoslovakia's national hero, Jan Hus, are en graved on the base of his statue in Prague. Last week, as Soviet tanks clanked into the capital, someone limned the graven letters in red chalk so that they stood out sharply on the grey granite. The words were spoken 550 years ago, at a time when the Bo hemians, who now are known as Czechs, were trying to win a measure of re ligious and national autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire. But they remain a poignant reminder of a de termined people's long search for freedom.

"Whoever is master of Bohemia is master of Europe," declared Bis marck. Between periods of self-rule, Bohemia fell to the Avars in the 5th century, later to the German emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and finally to the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Czechs and the Slovaks were perhaps the first people in Central Europe to develop a sort of natural identity, and their first weapon was religion. They won from Rome the right to conduct their religious services in Slavonic in the 9th century. Partially as a result of this independence, the Czechs started the Reformation 100 years before Luther. The revolt was led by Jan Hus, who called for a reform of the Catholic Church and encouraged laymen to participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic. Taking the chalice as their symbol, his followers founded the Hussite sect, which was based on secular religion and nationalism. In 1618, after Emperor Matthias tried to check the growth of Protestantism, Czech patriots in Prague tossed two imperial officials from the windows of Hradcany Castle. In retaliation, the Habsburg armies crushed the Hussites, executed their leaders, burned Czech Bibles and outlawed the language. Though overwhelmed, the Czechs and Slovaks waged a passive resistance. As Friedrich Schiller later reflected:

This Bohemian land for which we fight has

no love for its master, who conquered it

only by force of arms and not by common consent.

It seethes against the tyranny of faith.

Even so, the land passed into 300 years of Habsburg domination. In hope of quelling the country's continuous unrest, Joseph II in 1781 granted an Edict of Toleration, an agreement that gave the people the right to speak their language and to have a measure of autonomy under Bohemian kings. A flowering of art and literature followed. Czech national feelings reached a high pitch in the 19th century, encouraged by a historian named Frantisek Palacky, who emphasized his people's identity by writing about their long struggle for freedom. "The Hussite war," Palacky wrote, "is the first war in history that was fought not for material interests but for intellectual ones—for ideals."