editorial asked: "Does he understand what he must do now?"
All the top officials linked with the army conspiracy are under heavy fire. Colonel General Vladimir Janko, a deputy defense minister, committed suicide March 14, twenty-four hours after the cabinet had discussed his involvement in Sejna's defection. The next day the government ordered the resignations of Interior Minister Jan Kudrna, director of the secret police, and State Attorney-General Jan Batusek after the presidium of parliament condemned their "illegal activities." Both men may face legal proceedings for their frame-ups of innocent victims.
Janko's superior, Defense Minister Bohumir Lomsky, appears on the way out. The Communist party organization of teachers at the Klement Gottwald militarypolitical academy called for his resignation, charging that "in our opinion you were subordinating yourself in full to the will of Antonin Novotny and his apparatus."
The sentiment for Novotny's removal from the presidency was nationwide. At a meeting of students at the Prague School of Law, Professor Ota Sik, leader of the economic reform program, declared, to ringing applause, that those who have lost the trust of the people must be driven from positions of trust. Deputy Premier Oldrich Cernik made a similar demand in a question-and-answer session with coal miners.
A tumultuous rally of Communist students and young workers with a sprinkling of soldiers present culminated in the presentation of a resolution for Novotny's immediate ouster. It took an inploring appeal from Josef Smrkovsky, a member of the presidium, before an amendment was carried requesting Smrkovsky to bring the demand to the Central Committee's attention.
The meeting also adopted without dissent and to cheers a motion of support for the Warsaw students who are demonstrating against the censorship and repressions of Gomulka's regime. In obvious alarm Smrkovsky appealed to the audience to control themselves during the next few days. "We have the duty to see that nothing happens that affects our country, that nothing happens that would lead to disaster," he declared. Events like the student actions in Warsaw would be a “blow to our work," he said.
For the first time since February 1948 the Czechoslovak press, radio and television are free from effective censorship and the reformers now control all the mass media. Television officials have been in the forefront of the critics of Novotny.
In a further move toward democratization, the Justice Ministry passed a resolution calling for “immediate examination of the rights -- and especially the independence -- of the courts." The need for rehabilitation of and restitution to many people unjustly convicted and jailed in the past is frequently discussed in the press, radio and television. The president of the Supreme Court, Dr. Josef Litera, announced that his court planned to proceed with the needed rehabilitation and would amend the criminal law to insure the correction of judicial errors. These include the proposed establishment of an Institute of Complaints to which accused persons can turn for help.
Sharp debates between defenders and opponents of Novotny and his Old Guard featured many of the sixty-seven regional and local Communist party conferences held throughout the country March 10-11. in a major departure, most of the party meetings held secret ballots and elected new slates of officers for the party units involved.
At one of these conferences that was televised, Ladislav Kapek, director of Prague's largest factory and a leading conservative, revealed some hitherto unknown facts about the momentous December and January meeting of the Central Committee. He stated that the presidium at first appeared evenly divided between the two factions and then individuals changed sides according to which group they thought would win. He said people like himself have been “surprised and terrified" by the demands for change conming from people who have sat silently for years while the crisis that the committee meeting faced was building up.
Despite their-disarray, the Novotny forces are attempting to counterattack. On March 10 one of his defenders, Martin Vaculik, leader of the Communist party of Prague, called on Novotny to appear before the people and ask for an expression of confidence. Vaculik charged that he himself had been silenced in recent weeks by the press and radio. In reply the chief editor of Czechoslovak television invited him to state his views the following night on television. There Vaculik denied that™ his leadership was conservative but argued that he was opposed to radical and extreme statements.
Novotny's partisans are visiting factories, seeking to line up the workers on their behalf by playing upon fears that the economic reforms will worsen their standards of living. There is an element of validity in their demagogy since the relaxed control over the play of economic forces stemming from the economic reforms may well bring unemployment and growing inequality of incomes in Czechoslovakia as they have done in Yugoslavia.
However, Prace, the trade-union paper, is firmly with the anti-Novotny camp. Alluding to demands for his resignation, it wrote: "Few people know how to leave in time. This art is mastered by most athletes but not by politicians."
Under pressure of the campaign against Novotny's supporters in high places, three leaders of the trade unions, its chairman, Miroslav Pastyrik, and two secretaries were forced to resign March 12. It is reported that Pastyrik would be placed on trial on grounds of misfeasance.
Newspapers have published numerous resolutions from local and regional trade-
union bodies criticizing national leaders for their failure to give prompt and enthusiastic backing to the new course adopted at last January's Central Committee meeting.
Most significant was the joint statement of solidarity with Dubcek and his new Central Committee majority issued after a combined meeting of the Communist party works committees at two of the biggest and most politically important industrial centers in the country: the mines at Kladno and the CKD Sokolov machine plant in Prague.
The latter was one of the factories visited by Novotny in his earlier efforts to stir up support and sympathy among the workers. (See: "New Concessions to Demands for Liberalization in Czechoslovakia" by George Novack, World Outlook, March 15, pp. 226-27.)
The statement indicted Novotny along with other senior government officials for refusing to come out openly and admit errors and abuses of the past. The joint meeting wound up with a three-point demand. (1) An early meeting of the Cen- ‘tral Committee to adopt the democratic "action program" on which the whole future of the country could depend. (2) The early dismissal of those "unfit for office." (4) A thorough analysis of the causes which allowed the outrages of the past in order to ensure that the "process of democratization become a permanent feature in the development of the party and of the whole of society."
The liberalizers are clearly in the ascendant and on the offensive. Thus, Jan Prochazka, who has come forward as one of their most trenchant. spokesmen, wrote in the newspaper Mlada Fronta: "In those days (before Dubcek's election) many people did not dare use the telephone openly and they are still not sure they can. Silent fingers reach for your correspondence. Watchful eyes follow everywhere. It was better to avoid some people because they served more than one employer. "We have often heard the word ‘democratization' in the past years and it was always described as a gift from above. It was never a real democracy. It was only an adaptation of the length of the reins."
This widespread fear that the present phase "may just be a thaw between two winters" strengthens the determination to prevent any reversion to -tthe Stalinist past.
Replying to pro-Novotny complaints against “extremists" who disparage the past too much, Milan Weiner, a radio conmmentator, stated that the nation's future must be decided by the entire population, not just Communists. He asserted that at the fateful Central Committee meeting last December and January, "not much was needed for the other side to have had the majority."
If this had happened, he added, Czechoslovakia would have been thrown back to the totalitarian atmosphere of the 1950s. In preparation for such retrogression, Mr. Weiner said, "I have been told that the police had already been alerted and warrants for arrests prepared and I have no reason not to believe this."
Other political tendencies are beginning to come to life. The employees of the publishing house of the Socialist party, which has been a puppet of the CP, printed a resolution calling for different parties to be given a "democratically open chance to win support." A demonstration of political significance took place at the grave of Jan Masaryk, the bourgeois-—democratic foreign minister, whose unexplained death coincided with the assumption of power by the Stalinist regime in February 1948.
While rejecting the idea of unlimited freedom to form political parties, Josef Boruska, a new member of the presidium, indicated that a program of action under consideration by the Central Committee would include provision for a wider role for other parties. (The National Front now includes two other parties besides the ruling Communist party together with their Slovak counterparts ).
The Dubcek leadership is trying to establish a new balance of forces between the government and the people which would facilitate and consolidate the shift of power from the old-line Stalinist diehards to the new team of technocrats and permit the graduated introduction and application of the proposed reforms. But it is experiencing great difficulties in arriving at such an equilibrium.
The New York Times correspondent observed on March 9 that "in recent days there have been signs that Czechoslovakia's quiet revolution was moving too fast for Mr. Dubcek and some of his ‘progressive backers.'" Despite the refusal of the Old Guard to disarm, Dubcek appears reluctant to engage in a thoroughgoing cleanup of the apparatchiks who will not admit defeat. Meanwhile, he must keep one eye cocked on Moscow's reaction to his course and the other upon a restless population which is elated with its new-found freedom of expression.
When the gigantic statue of Stalin overlooking Prague was torn down, its base was left standing. Will this incompleted job of demolition be equally symbolic of the Dubcek regime?
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