Czechoslovakia: Into Unexplored Terrain

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dissenting factions would be allowed to develop and contest the leadership's views. Such national groups as student associations, farmers and unions would be freed of party ties and allowed to argue for their interests.

During his first 100 days in power, Dubček has offered the 14,300,000 Czechoslovaks a bright and beckoning vision of how to take their own special road to socialism. In a country where for 20 years civil and personal liberties had been mercilessly squashed, almost total freedom of expression now reigns, the police have been put in harness and demonstrations of every sort can take place. Dubček, who threw out the hardlining Antonín Novotný as party boss in January and as President in March, has transformed Czechoslovakia into the most liberal of Communist states. Hardly anything in Czechoslovakia is any longer so sacred that it cannot be questioned and, if necessary, changed. And the entire transformation has been worked without bloodshed or disorder.

Resolution to Reform. Censorship has been almost entirely lifted, and the press, television and radio have exploded in an orgy of free expression. Long-banned films, plays and books are blossoming into production. The country's judiciary has undertaken to review all cases heard in the 1950s in an effort to right legal injustices, and a special commission has been established to rehabilitate the thousands of victims of the Stalinist purge trials of that period. Church and clergy are fast being freed of restraints, and the Communists' phony religious front organization, called the "Peace Priests," is disintegrating. Last week the Czechoslovaks even had their first strike under Communism. Workers at an electrical-appliance factory in Pisek walked out in complaint against management—and did not come back until the manager signed a resolution to reform.

Police will now be required to wear numbered badges for identification. The party Presidium has even decided to postpone the planned May elections for local, regional and municipal offices until the end of June to give the authorities more time to liberalize the election laws. Novotnýites are falling right and left, quickly to be replaced by younger, more pragmatic men. Last week three top secretaries of the central Trade Union Council were forced to quit, the Czechoslovak Women's Union bounced its boss, the director of the secretariat for church affairs was ousted, and the Minister of Health was asked to quit his post.

Comradely Compromise. Relatively few men could have brought oft such changes with such calm and order. A tall, mannerly man with a receding blond hairline, Dubček would be an unlikely choice for the task if only because he is a Slovak—the first ever to be entrusted with the most powerful office in the land. Though he has spent most of his adult life as a Communist apparatchik, he has none of the iron rigidity of that breed. Polite and softspoken, he is a master of restraint and poise, dislikes both dogmatism and pyrotechnics. A persuader rather than a strong-arm man, he consults colleagues before acting, feels that changes within the party should be worked out by comradely compromise rather than by dictation from the top.

Dubček also believes that the party should win support among the people for its ideas; he seems genuinely to want his countrymen to have a