Churning Ahead

"Don't lie to us!" they shouted. "An swer the questions!" Packed into a Prague ballroom for a rally of the Communist Youth League, the audience was in a belligerent mood. For more than five hours, about 2,000 people grilled leading Communist officials and writers, hooted and stamped their feet when the responses were not to their liking.

At 66 district party meetings across Czechoslovakia, other comrades hissed the speakers, clamored to be heard and demanded to know the names of those who had opposed reforms within the party. Throughout the country last week, the tides of liberalization churned ahead with torrential force.

Most of the criticism was aimed at Antonin Novotny, 63, who lost his job as party boss to Alexander Dubcek in January but is still Czechoslovakia's President. Dubcek's supporters believe that they will not be able to carry out all the reforms they want, especially in the stagnant economy, until Novotny and his apparatchik cronies are uprooted from the government. Other Czechoslovaks simply want to banish the remaining vestiges of what had been a humorless and, at times, brutal regime. "Those who have lost the trust of the people," says Professor Ota Sik, author of the economic reforms that Novotny opposed, "must be driven from positions of trust."

The Novotnyites quickly got the point. When some tried to resign, their subordinates demanded that they be fired instead. That was the fate of Miroslav Pastyrik, chief of the Council of Trade Unions, and Michal Chudik, president of the Slovak National Council.

Other apparatchiki, like Prague Party Boss Martin Vaculik, reduced themselves to apologetic jelly, went on TV to profess support of Dubcek and to deny past errors.

Deputy Defense Minister Vladimir Janko, 50, made a particularly dramatic departure. Accused of having had a role in trying to organize a coup in Novotny's behalf last January, Janko shot himself to death in the back seat of his chauffeured Tatra while on the way to answer the charges before the Czechoslovak Cabinet. In an effort to save his own scalp, Novotny himself was forced to fire two of his most loyal men--Interior Minister Josef Kudrna and State Attorney General Jan Bartuska. The Cabinet linked both men to the army coup attempt and, further, accused them of blocking efforts to clear the names of persons wrongly imprisoned or executed in the past.

Extraordinary Events. As the country's leaders continued to examine their own consciences, some extraordinary events were occurring. The Czechoslovak Supreme Court decided to review all cases heard in the 1950s in a search for those who may have been falsely accused and unjustly convicted. After five days of meetings, reported the newspaper Rude Pravo, party watchdogs in the Foreign Ministry "demanded that the foreign policy of Czechoslovakia have a new face." Strangest of all, the party censors in the Interior Ministry announced that they wanted to go out of business. "We have reached the conclusion," they said, "that preventive political censorship should be abolished at the present state of development." The mood of the people was euphoric --and solemn. More than 3,000 workers and students trekked in driving snow to the village of Lany outside Prague to visit the grave of ex-Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who jumped or was pushed from a window to his death in 1948. The Communists, who have worked ceaselessly to obliterate the democratic patriot's memory, had kept crowds away from the grave for years. While a girl student played a folk melody on a flute, a bearded youth read a eulogy that urged Czechoslovaks to remember Masaryk "in these crucial times, when we hope that men of his quality will lead our nation."

Last Perch. Dubcek's men warned the people against going too far too fast with liberalization. Perhaps mindful of the 20 Russian divisions poised across the border in East Germany, even the most outspoken reformers stopped short of suggesting any break with the Soviet Union. The press did, however, give surprisingly frank coverage of last week's riots in Poland, which were partly sparked by the events in Czechoslovakia.

At week's end, Dubcek announced that the party Central Committee would gather next week to discuss more "personnel changes." As for Novotny, he continued to tour factories, where he no doubt tried to win worker support by predicting unemployment, inflation and other hardships from Dubcek's reforms. It seemed clear, however, that the party was about to nudge Novotny off his last perch in the government. Already three men were mentioned to succeed him as President: Minister of Forestry Josef Smrkovsky, 61, General Ludvik Svoboda, 61, and Deputy Prime Minister Oldrich Cernik, 46. fA are liberals of the Dubcek stripe.

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