Czechoslovakia: Into Unexplored Terrain

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swirling unrest, Alexander Dubček entered the fray, carrying the banner of Slovak nationalism. As party boss of Slovakia, he rose at a Central Committee meeting in October and launched a fiery polemic against Novotný for breaking his promises and neglecting the development of Slovakia. In a highly heated exchange, Novotný called Dubček a "bourgeois nationalist," one of the worst insults in the Communist lexicon. Dubček began working behind the scenes to oust Novotný from party leadership, gradually bringing together dissident Slovak leaders, university officials, economists and other liberals. When Novotný went to Moscow in November for the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary, he peevishly excluded Dubček from his official party. It was a major mistake. Left at home with all the dissidents, Dubček whipped them into a unified opposition. When Novotný returned home, they felt strong enough to demand his resignation.

Novotný tried to relieve Dubček of his Slovak post, but the Slovaks would have none of it. Finally, after Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev flew into Prague in a belated attempt to save him, Novotný resigned the party job in January, and Dubček was elected to replace him. Even then, Novotný did not completely give up. His allies in the Defense and Interior ministries put to gether desperate plans for a coup, and at least one tank battalion was ready to roll into Prague on Novotný's behalf. But the coup fizzled when other commanders demanded written orders from the Central Committee before moving. (Major General Jan Sejna, then one of the architects of the coup, defected to the U.S.) By the time the party leaders gathered in Prague for festivities marking their 20th year of power in February, a public drive to force Novotný's resignation as President had already sealed his fate.

Butterflies as Bras. While it took a hardheaded politician like Alexander Dubček to push through reform, it was Czechoslovakia's writers and artists who created the climate for it. Through 20 years of Communist rule, they had been more daring and less puritanical than their Communist colleagues almost anywhere else. Many of them enjoyed the privileges offered them by the party—free tickets on the national railways, for example—and went on paying homage to the approved art form of socialist realism. But Czechoslovak intellectuals have a long tradition of fighting political authority, and even under Novotný they constantly pushed to extend the bounds of the permissible. They succeeded in getting a surprising number of their works published, but for the most part they wrote secretly, kept a rich lode of manuscripts in their desk drawers. Currently, the intellectuals are celebrating Dubček's promise to prevent any future censorship by taking them out again. "It is the end of an era," says Novelist Ludvik Vačulik, an editor of the journal Literární Listy, the liberated successor to the banned Literdrni Noviny.

Also despite Communist rule, Czechoslovakia managed to produce a wealth of talent in film making. The country's "New Wave" of directors flows out of the FAMU academy in Prague, one of the best and toughest schools for cinema art in the world. Among the most audacious of the school's products is Director