LIFE UNDER "LIBERAL COMMUNISM'

IN Prague's baroque Lesser Town, 500 people gather in a square, and a young man mounts a box to unfurl a banner reading: DEMOCRATIZATION MUST BECOME DEMOCRACY. Everyone starts cheering wildly. Along the glittering Vltava River, bearded young men and miniskirted girls collect signatures on a petition demanding that the government resume diplomatic relations with Israel; after they have collected 30,000 signatures, they are invited to the office of the foreign ministry to have tea and cake--and discuss government policy. At a meeting in the city of Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovak intellectuals face an audience of workers and their families for a political debate. A miner shouts: "Wasn't there anything good in the past?" More timidly, but no less urgently, a bespectacled young girl rises to ask: "Why can't we see the film Doctor Zhivago?"

Only a few months ago, such scenes would have been almost unthinkable in Czechoslovakia, where questioning and dissent were rigidly suppressed by the strict, doctrinaire regime of Antonin Novotny. Today, under the new reforms of Alexander Dubcek, they are commonplace. Life in Czechoslovakia rings with the sounds of freedom. Despite a constant threat of reprisals from the Soviet Union, the political change has not only transformed public life but worked a captivating magic on the people's mood. It has made Czechoslovakia the most contagiously exciting country in Eastern Europe--and perhaps in all of Europe.

Cheered & Booed. From Prague to the High Tatra Mountains, reports TIME Correspondent Peter Forbath, who spent several weeks traveling through Czechoslovakia, the hostility, suspicion and dreariness associated with other Communist states has all but vanished. Unlike Communist bosses elsewhere, the country's leaders make frequent public appearances, are often cheered, booed, photographed and chased for autographs. At the borders, customs officers dutifully glance into the car trunks of foreign visitors, but do not even bother to open their luggage before waving them through. Traffic the other way is heavy too; suddenly able to get passports and visas after years of restricted travel, Czechoslovak citizens are jamming border points on their way to vacations in Western Europe.

The country's police are now obliged to wear identification badges, the only cops in any Communist country to do so. Political debate breaks out almost anywhere, in cafes, restaurants, offices and even on streetcars, where passengers eagerly share newspapers containing the latest revelations of past evils and argue over them with strangers.

Musical Satires. Many people have moved their dinner back an hour so that they will not miss the latest exposes about the Novotny era on the 7 p.m. television news. One listener recently complained to Radio Prague about government jamming of Western broadcasts. In no time at all, the station produced the apologetic voice of the Minister of Culture, Miroslav Galuska, who announced that the government planned to abolish jamming. At the Semafor, a cellar theater in Prague, S.R.O. crowds gather three nights a week to laugh and cry out in shocked surprise at a musical satire, The Last Stop. In two hours of leggy displays, big-beat tunes, psychedelic lights and slapstick chases, the production fearlessly dissects the incompetence and corruption of the old set of Communist leaders and even lampoons the new set a bit.

Another major sign of how much life has changed is the outpouring of honors for Thomas Masaryk, the country's first President, and his son, the late Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who was probably murdered by the Communists. The very existence of both men was officially erased during the Novotny period. Now, at the graves of the two patriots in the village of Lany, small green shrubs have been planted to form letters that spell the presidential motto, "Truth Prevails." Schools in Prague and Bratislava have been renamed after both men. And some mornings, as the train pulls into Prague Central Station, an exuberant conductor may call out, "Masaryk Station!"--its name before the Communists took over and changed it.

Opening Old Wounds. The political transformation has altered many lives. Some have benefited from it; others have come to grief. Everywhere, people talk endlessly about the past and compare their sufferings, opening old wounds and cursing those responsible for them. "People must talk about these things and keep talking," says Museum Clerk Karel Nigrin, 64, who spent eight years in solitary and seven at hard labor as a political prisoner. "This regime has allowed them to talk like no other Communist regime ever has."

Among those who have lost their jobs in the nationwide shake-up are the "peace priests," who were induced by Novotny to break with the Vatican and run the country's Roman Catholic churches. The old Communists had demanded that all clergy swear allegiance to the government, and arrested those who refused. But now thousands of priests who were forced to work in factories and on farms have returned to their flocks. A certain amount of private business is tolerated. Jerry Herdglotz, 47, for example, now drives his own Opel Olympia sedan as a private entrepreneur, makes $250 a month v, $150 that he used to earn working for the state cab company.

Many of the country's cinema artists, who travel abroad a good deal, now find that they can feel at home in their own country for the first time. One of them is Actress Sylva Danickova, the lovely hostess at her country's Kinoautomat success at Expo 67. "I was always traveling abroad talking about politics, art, love--anything--critically, angrily and happily, however I felt," says Miss Danickova. "But when I came home, it was silence. You couldn't really participate in the life of your country. Now you can." Another Czechoslovak who found that he could come home again is Author Ladislav Mriacko, who went into exile last summer in protest over his government's pro-Arab policy. Mnacko is back in Prague, where his biting novel about a Communist leader's downfall, The Taste of Power, has just been published for the first time.

12,000 Secrets. Antonin Liehm, the bubbly editor of the journal Literarni Listy, speaks of the atmosphere as "a lovely dream from which we never want to wake." The dream, however, does have its limitations. Most of them are the result of the Dubcek regime's fear of going too far too fast and perhaps allowing the reforms to get out of hand. Though the government has formally abolished censorship, for example, it asks editors not to write about some 12,000 items on a list of "state secrets." The list includes such seemingly harmless subjects as the price of veal and the cost of spinning yarn; to many editors, it is censorship in another form.

Above all, the reformist leadership has so far refused to permit the emergence of a genuine opposition party to the Communists. A political organization of liberal nonCommunists, K.A.N., has already signed up more than 20,000 members but takes care to describe it self as a club rather than a party. K.A.N.'s rallies at times take place despite police bans, but the club's sober leaders know that if they overstep the bounds, they may force the government to crack down.

More Cautious. Despite these drawbacks, the Czechoslovaks have quickly grown accustomed to their freedom. Perhaps because of their democratic tradition, they regard it as something owed them, a birthright. People now tune in their radio and TV sets and expect to hear real news and not propaganda. They expect their leaders to be responsive to their questions and petitions, and to give them action. The Hungarian rebellion of 1956 was loaded with drama and tragic heroism. What has happened in Czechoslovakia has been more cautious, deliberate and evolutionary; it is an attempt at the marriage of Communism and democracy that is taking place under the disapproving parental gaze of the Kremlin. If the liberalization wrought by Alexander Dubcek has lost some of its drama as it proceeds, perhaps that will be its greatest strength--and the best assurance that it has a chance, in the end, of success.

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