World: A TIGHTER VISE ON CZECHOSLOVAKIA

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The day of the anniversary itself began calmly. In peaceful protest, all but a few Czechoslovaks refused to ride the public transport, and boycotted shops and restaurants. In Prague, more than 300 bouquets were piled on the grave of Jan Palach, the 21-year-old student who last January burned himself to death in a protest against the continued Soviet occupation. At noon, to the cacophony of auto horns and factory whistles, traffic braked to a halt and many of the 50,000 people who jammed Wenceslas Square raised their fingers in the victory sign. In a show of defiance, Czechoslovakia stood still for 15 minutes.

Emboldened, the crowd in Wenceslas began shouting, "Husák is a traitor, Husák is a traitor!" In response, police lobbed tear-gas grenades. As people fled the square, the side streets were quickly blocked by troops. Bands of helmeted police waded into the fleeing demonstrators, indiscriminately clubbing young and old alike.

Tighter Controls. Upending newspaper kiosks and pulling down scaffolding from buildings, the demonstrators hastily erected barricades, but the police called in army tanks whose steel treads effortlessly crushed the barriers. Police with dogs moved in to seize the demonstrators; in Prague alone, 1,377 were arrested.

Elsewhere in Czechoslovakia, there were both peaceful protests and violent riots. The situation was relatively calm in Bratislava, the scene of severe fighting in 1968, because police allowed the inhabitants to place flowers on the spots where a young Slovak had been killed by the invading Soviet tanks. In Brno, however, two consecutive nights of skirmishes left three demonstrators dead and at least 30 gravely injured.

At week's end, as an uneasy calm settled on Brno and the rest of Czechoslovakia, the government began to clamp tighter controls on the country. To justify the crackdown, Rude Prdvo, the Communist Party's paper, said that the riots were evidence of "counterrevolutionary activity as was known in Hungary in 1956." Many Czechoslovaks feared that the statement might presage mass political arrests and trials.

The party's eleven-man Presidium did nothing to calm those fears. Meeting at its heavily guarded Prague headquarters last week, it announced a number of repressive new decrees. One prescribed jail sentences of up to three months for anyone who defames a Czechoslovak leader or fails to obey police orders. Another gives the government power to fire teachers who fail to instruct their pupils in accordance with the principles of Socialist society.

In part, the severity of the crackdown is a reflection of the intensity of a power struggle that pits Husák against Lubomir Strougal, 44, the deputy party leader, who has recently emerged as the No. 2 man in the country's hierarchy. Though demonstrators scrawled the words HUSÁK-RUSÁK (Husák the Russian) on walls, the fact is that the Russians do not entirely trust Husák. He is in an unenviable position: rejected by the reformers because he replaced Dubček, disliked by the Czech majority because he is a Slovak and hated by the orthodox pro-Soviet elements (who imprisoned him for eight years) because he is a nationalist who believes in limited reforms.