World: BACK INTO THE DARKNESS

ONE by one, Czechoslovakia's faint remaining hopes for freedom last week flickered up, then died in the darkness of a new Soviet tyranny. Party Leader Alexander Dubček and his government returned from Moscow alive and intact, only to be forced to dismantle their democratic reforms. The tanks pulled back out of sight from the centers of Czechoslovakia's cities, only to be replaced by hundreds of grim, brutal KGB (secret police) agents flown in from Moscow to manage and monitor the country's life. Liberal Czechoslovak officials were soon being removed from their posts, and from Moscow Pravda demanded the "liquidation" of 40,000 "counter-revolutionaries."

The free radio stations that had sustained the Czechoslovaks in the first days of invasion and uncertainty faded out, and state censorship was reimposed. Tourists and foreign correspondents were turned back at the borders. A great exodus began, as thousands of the country's ablest professors, artists, writers and journalists fled to freedom in the West. Gradually, inexorably, the little country that for eight months gave promise of showing Communism the way into the modern world—and for eight days dared defy its oppressors—slipped back into the dark age of a Stalinist-style police state.

Cut and Faint. As the leader of his country's experiment to infuse Communism with humanism and democracy, Dubček was the symbol and hero of Czechoslovakia's will to be free. The circumstances of his arrival last week in Prague, after three days of negotiations in Moscow, illustrated the unyielding grip in which the Soviets and their hard-lining East Bloc allies now hold his land. Dubček's plane landed in secret at dawn. Bulgarian troops and tanks guarded the field, and Soviet secret police whisked him and his fellow reformist leaders in official Soviet autos to a temporary government headquarters in Hradčany Castle. Dubček's forehead was marked by a deep cut. His face was haggard with fatigue and despair. On arrival at the castle, he collapsed in a faint.

The Czechoslovak people were aware of little of this at first. They knew only that the Soviets had arrested Dubček as a traitor the week before and spirited him away. Then, in what looked like an astounding turnabout, the Soviet leaders had him flown to Moscow, where they confirmed his status as continuing chief of the Czechoslovak party. Czechoslovaks joyously seized on his return to Prague as evidence that they had somehow prevailed in their improbable contest of national determination against Soviet force. That belief was buttressed by the fact that during the hours before Dubček's arrival, Soviet armor withdrew from the central part of Czechoslovak cities.

Music dramatized the mood of hope. For hours, as tension and expectations rose, Radio Free Prague played over and over Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, whose stirring strains once served to rally Czechoslovakia's wartime resistance movement against the Germans. Then, in midafternoon, one of the leaders finally spoke. It was President Ludvik Svoboda, and when he finished, Radio Free Prague played a dirge.