Czechoslovakia: Not Far from Novotný

In the face of Czechoslovakia's steadily sagging economy and its even limper national morale, Communist Party Boss Gustav Husak last week decided that the time was ripe for a good pep talk. Before 700 workers at the Skoda auto works in Pilsen, he admitted: "Quite a lot of people are falling into some sort of depression. They are spreading panicky moods, as if our state and all of our society were facing some sort of bankruptcy from which there is no way out." Husak thereupon assured his listeners that he would be better for them than either of his predecessors, Stalinist Antonin Novotny or Reformer Alexander Dubcek. "We do not want to return either to the Novotny bureaucracy or the Dubcek anarchy," he said.

There is, of course, little likelihood that Moscow will allow Czechoslovakia to return to the liberalizing route charted by Dubcek before the Russian invasion of 1968. The oppressive days of Novotny, on the other hand, suddenly do not seem quite so distant. A nationalist at heart, Husak may very well try to steer a middle course, but for the time being the ultraconservatives, backed by the country's Soviet occupiers, are dominant. Late last month, they engineered the firing of 29 liberals and moderates from key posts in the government and party. Last week they claimed a host of new purge victims and continued to hack away at Czechoslovakia's few remnants of freedom.

The day before Husak addressed the Skoda workers, their boss, Plant Manager Jan Martinak, lost his job in the purge. He had been chosen before the invasion by one of the workers' councils created under Dubcek's program of partial self-management for industry. The councils are now "under analysis" by the government and are no longer active. Josef Pavel, Interior Minister under Dubcek and a main force behind the reforms, was "suspended" from the Communist Party—one step from expulsion. Ota Sik, architect of last year's economic reforms, was kicked out of the party. His fate was hardly surprising, since he is now teaching in Switzerland and said in a recent speech that Prague's party spokesmen make Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels "look like an altar boy."

Dubcek himself was formally sacked as chairman of the Federal Assembly and replaced by Lawyer Dalibor Hanes, a political tide-rider. Josef Smrkovsky, Dubcek's most loyal lieutenant, was officially removed from the Assembly's deputy chairmanship. His successor is a photogenic if not a political improvement. She is Sonia Pennigerova, a 41-year-old pediatrician, whose brunette good looks make her Eastern Europe's prettiest national officeholder.

Under its new leadership, the Assembly voted to strip itself of some of its already minute powers. It approved a government decision to postpone parliamentary elections, originally scheduled for last fall, for at least two more years. Following party instructions, it also approved a law empowering it to replace its members summarily, without voter approval.