Czechoslovakia: Closer to Normal

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For weeks, newspapers and radio broadcasts were filled with vituperation against Alexander Dubcek and the rest of Czechoslovakia's liberals. Ever since the Soviet invasion 13 months ago, the country's progressive leaders have had their influence stripped away gradually.

Now, plainly, the regime's conservative rulers were ready for the step that they had delayed for fear of popular reaction — a wholesale purge. When the 180 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party assembled last week in the ornate baroque Spanish Hall overlooking Prague, the whole country knew that their first order of business was to pronounce sentence against the men who had sought to give Czechoslovak Communism a human face. The only question was how se vere the sentences would be.

Neo-Stalinist Label. The first signs were anything but optimistic. At week's end Premier Oldfich Cernik's entire 29-man Cabinet was dissolved. Cernik, one of the first of Dubćek's allies to make amends with pro-Moscow conservatives after the invasion, was ordered by the Central Committee to form a new government. Its membership, announced this week, reflected the hardliners' virtually total control. The purge extended to the local political level; the Prague city party committee was stripped of every remaining Dubćek loyalist. Five more liberals "resigned" from the Czech National Council, and the parliamentary immunity of a sixth, Rudolph Vattek, was lifted, apparently to open the way for his trial for "attacking the policy of the socialist state."

The fate of the topmost liberal leaders, including Dubćek, hung at least partially on a debate between two factions of the ultraconservative majority on the eleven-man Presidium that runs the country. One group, reportedly led by Deputy First Secretary Lubomir Strougal, a ruthless pro-Moscow loyalist, urged that Dubćek and other liberals be placed on trial, perhaps even on charges of treason. The second group, headed by Party Secretary Alois Indra, apparently objected that such kangaroo-court sessions would saddle the regime with a neo-Stalinist label. Ludvik Svoboda, the popular President and elder statesman of Czechoslovakia, reacted to the suggestion of trials by proclaiming: "As long as I am President, there will be no trials."