Beetles & Banishment

It was back in 1949, as every good Communist knows, that those wicked Americans dropped the first Colorado beetles on Czechoslovakia's burgeoning potato fields. The diligent, hardheaded commissars of Horazdovice district were not panicked by the sly American trick. At the first notice of potato bugs in their district, they sent for a young local plant pathologist named Cestmir Novacek and ordered him to liquidate the nasty, crawling little capitalists. For five years everything went fine, and the "invasion" took little toll of Horazdovice's potatoes. This year, however, the potato harvest in the Pilsen area was a bust. The fact that it could all be blamed on the weather did not satisfy the Communists. Again the commissars sent for Pathologist Novacek.

Last week, in a Pilsen court, Cestmir solemnly told his story: instead of destroying the beetles, he had made pets of them. "I intended," he said, "to trace their biological development, but when the larvae became beetles, I got the idea of performing an antistate act. I stopped in a slope under Vlkovec Hill, opened my box and threw my beetles into a potato field. I hated the people's democratic regime because the working class had nationalized my sandstone pits."

Sentence: Twenty years in prison and banishment from the profession of plant pathology "forever."

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