Czechoslovakia: Into Unexplored Terrain

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he was elected by the National Assembly, but his selection did not please everyone. Thousands of students conducted street rallies in Prague in support of their own candidate, a liberal intellectual named Cestmir Cisar, 48, who was until recently Ambassador to Rumania. Czechoslovakia's liberals, who earlier feared that Dubček might have given in to the Russians at Dresden, also resented Svoboda's election as a sop to the Russians.

To Russia & Back. Czechoslovakia's whole history has been a fight to decide its own future, free from the oppression of the other powerful forces that have dominated its land. In the 9th century, when the Greek Apostles Cyril and Methodius spread Christianity among them in their vernacular, the Czechs and Slovaks were united in the powerful Moravian Empire. Later divided, they were ruled first by the Hungarians and the Holy Roman Empire, and then by the Habsburgs, who razed Bohemia's cities, slaughtered its landowners and persecuted the Hussites in a series of religious wars that plagued the country for 300 years.

The Czech revival began only in the late 19th century, thanks largely to the industrialization that developed in Bohemia and Moravia to a far greater degree than elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the empire was carved up after World War I, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, a tolerant and tenacious philosophy professor who had worked for years for Czech independence, talked the victors into creating Czechoslovakia as an independent state. Between the wars, Czechoslovakia was the only state in central Europe that consistently maintained a parliamentary democratic form of government.

It was during those years that a Slovak emigrant to the U.S., dissatisfied with his lot as a carpenter in America and attracted by the prospects of the new united Czechoslovakia, returned to his native land. He was Alexander Dubček's father, Stefan Dubček, and his return meant that his son missed becoming a U.S. citizen by a matter of months. Shortly after Alexander's birth in the Slovakian village of Uhrovec, the elder Dubček, embittered by the difficult conditions that persisted in Slovakia, became a pioneer member of the newly formed Czechoslovak Communist Party. In 1925, following an appeal to help build the first socialist state, he uprooted his family once more and moved to the Soviet Union, where he founded a cooperative in Russian Asia with 300 other Czech Communists.

Alexander Dubček grew up practically on the Chinese border, went to high school in Frunze. When he was 17, his father was kicked out of Russia during the Stalinist purges, and the family returned to Slovakia. There young Alexander joined the outlawed Communist Party and went to work as an apprentice machine locksmith at the Skoda munitions factory.

Police Terror. Dubček was still there when Czechoslovakia's fledgling experiment in parliamentary democracy was ended by the Munich pact of 1938, which enabled Hitler to march into Czechoslovakia while the Western powers looked the other way. The Czechoslovaks justly felt betrayed by the West, but they put up little resistance at the takeover or during the occupation. One exception was the Slovak uprising of 1944, in which both Alexander Dubček and his brother Julius fought the Germans in the mountains; Julius was killed and Alexander was wounded in the