Czechoslovakia: Into Unexplored Terrain

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the monumental statue of Stalin removed, was also forced to drop some of the more notorious Stalinists from Czechoslovakia's Communist leadership.

One such vacated post went to Alexander Dubček. Shortly after the Communist takeover by Gottwald, Dubček had become a full-time apparatchik, a professional Communist Party functionary. He was too junior an official to be seriously affected by the Stalinist purges of Gottwald and successfully es caped too close an association with the early repressions of the Novotný regime by spending three years—from 1955 to 1958—at Moscow's party political college. On his return to Slovakia, he was made regional secretary for the capital of Bratislava, and in 1960 he moved to Prague as secretary of the Czechoslovak Central Committee. Two years later, at the age of 40, he be came one of the chosen ten on the party Presidium. When Novotný was forced to drop the Slovak secretary, an arch-Stalinist, the highest post in the Slovak party went to Dubček.

Once in a position of real power, Dubček almost immediately began to distance himself from Novotný's line. One of his first actions as leader was to strike a truce with the Slovak writers and intellectuals, who thenceforth had wide freedom of expression. He also identified himself with the new economic theories that had begun to be proposed in Czechoslovakia by Professor Ota Sik (TIME, Nov. 11, 1966) and his colleagues at about the same time as, or even before, Evsei Liberman took up the cudgels for economic reform in Russia. As time went by, the quiet Slovak grew more confident and self-assertive and slowly emerged as a strong critic of Novotný's policy.

Pressured on all sides for reform and liberalization, Novotný adopted a carrot-and-stick technique. He gave ground to his critics when the pressure seemed irresistible, then unhesitatingly reached for the stick when he felt that things had gone far enough. He thus permitted a sudden flowering of imagination in Czechoslovak art and literature, allowing Franz Kafka's work to be published again, films to portray romantic love and other "bourgeois" themes and biting satire and protest to appear in literary journals. But he continued to make intermittent crackdowns on writers and intellectuals, banning books, films and magazines that dis pleased him. He also gave Ota Sik the green light to put some of his reforms into effect—including a greater stress on profits and bonuses and other incentives for workers—but hampered and slowed them down before they could really do any good.

Worst Insult. The disaffection with Novotny came to a head in the sum mer and fall of 1967. At a congress of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union, 11beral writers rose one after the other to denounce the regime for impoverishing the country's literature through censor ship and for brazenly rewriting its his tory Novotný struck back by banning the liberal journal Literdrni Noviny and blocking the election of liberals to the Writers' Union governing board. Even worse, he incurred the enmity of the students by sending his police to break up a march of 1,500 students complaining about a power failure at Prague's Technical Institute. The brutality brought out other students, and a series of demonstrations and repressions followed.

Against this background of