Czechoslovakia: Into Unexplored Terrain

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

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Up the winding road to Hradčany Castle, which broods above Prague's Baroque towers and its wide, grey Vltava River, came a steady stream of Tatra limousines. As they had many times before, they bore the rulers of Communist Czechoslovakia to a meeting of the Central Committee, usually the most remote and tightly guarded of affairs. On this spring morning, however, the atmosphere on Hradčany Hill was more like the opening of a fair. The usual security guards were absent, and crowds of people wandered unhindered through the castle's many courtyards. As the Communist leaders arrived, they were greeted by whirring TV cameras, popping flashbulbs, microphones thrust into their surprised faces and reporters firing bold questions.

Last week's meeting was not only different; it was far and away the most historic meeting in the Central Committee's history—and a turning point for modern Czechoslovakia. Amid a display of press freedom and accessibility more familiar to Western politicians than Communist leaders, the party's top brass assembled to consider an "action program" for a democratic reform of Czechoslovakia that has been brewing during three stormy months of nationwide debates and mounting pressures. The reform harks back half a century in spirit to 1918, when Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points proclaimed the self-determination of peoples and enabled Czechoslovakia to be born as an independent state. This time, Czechoslovakia was announcing its own self-determination—a determination to regain control of its destiny and shuck off the worst features of an alien Communist system.

Wearing dark business suits and sober expressions despite the warm weather, the party leaders marched up the red-carpeted stairs in twos and threes and made their way inside to the massive Spanish Hall, with its high ceiling and Bohemian crystal chandeliers. When the tall, blue-eyed boss of the Czechoslovak Communist Party got out of his car, the crowd pressed closer for a better look and reporters broke into applause. Unaccustomed to such public displays, Alexander Dubček, 46, merely tipped his grey fedora, smiled hesitantly and strode briskly inside. More than any other man in Czechoslovakia, Dubček has planned, pleaded for and nurtured the sweeping changes that promise to alter the temper and quality of Czechoslovak life, and perhaps the nature of Communism in the rest of Eastern Europe as well.

Dramatic Changes. The vision of Czechoslovakia's future that Dubček (pronounced doob-check) laid before his colleagues, in the form of a bulky, 70-page draft, calls for dozens of dramatic changes, including a major shrinkage in the Communist Party's own powers. Several weeks in the making, the draft would give real legislative powers to the National Assembly, which has long been merely a party echo, and even permit votes of no confidence in the government. Dubček asked the Central Committee to rewrite Czechoslovakia's laws to assure everything from free speech and secret balloting to the right to emigrate and travel freely abroad. He urged a speedy return to a liberalized economy, greater independence from the state for industrial enterprises and a federal system that would give the country's Slovaks more power to run their own affairs. Within the Communist Party itself,