Closer to "Normal"

For weeks, newspapers and radio broadcasts were filled with vituperation against Alexander Dubcek and the rest of Czechoslovakia's liberals. Ever since the Soviet invasion 13 months ago, the country's progressive leaders have had their influence stripped away gradually.

Now, plainly, the regime's conservative rulers were ready for the step that they had delayed for fear of popular reaction -- a wholesale purge. When the 180 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party assembled last week in the ornate baroque Spanish Hall overlooking Prague, the whole country knew that their first order of business was to pronounce sentence against the men who had sought to give Czechoslovak Communism a human face. The only question was how se vere the sentences would be.

Neo-Stalinist Label. The first signs were anything but optimistic. At week's end Premier Oldfich Cernik's entire 29-man Cabinet was dissolved. Cernik, one of the first of Dubcek's allies to make amends with pro-Moscow conservatives after the invasion, was ordered by the Central Committee to form a new government. Its membership, announced this week, reflected the hardliners' virtually total control. The purge extended to the local political level; the Prague city party committee was stripped of every remaining Dubcek loyalist. Five more liberals "resigned" from the Czech National Council, and the parliamentary immunity of a sixth, Rudolph Vattek, was lifted, apparently to open the way for his trial for "attacking the policy of the socialist state."

The fate of the topmost liberal leaders, including Dubcek, hung at least partially on a debate between two factions of the ultraconservative majority on the eleven-man Presidium that runs the country. One group, reportedly led by Deputy First Secretary Lubomir Strougal, a ruthless pro-Moscow loyalist, urged that Dubcek and other liberals be placed on trial, perhaps even on charges of treason. The second group, headed by Party Secretary Alois Indra, apparently objected that such kangaroo-court sessions would saddle the regime with a neo-Stalinist label. Ludvik Svoboda, the popular President and elder statesman of Czechoslovakia, reacted to the suggestion of trials by proclaiming: "As long as I am President, there will be no trials."

Whether trials are ordered or not, it was clear that the conservatives were determined to oust virtually every liberal from the all-important Presidium and the Central Committee. To justify the firings, First Secretary Gustav Husak prepared a report detailing the reformers' mistakes, but that was mere window-dressing. At the beginning of this week, the party released its purge list. As expected, it was a long one. Dubcek was fired from the Presidium and from his showpiece post as President of the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament. He was allowed, however, to keep his seat on the Central Committee--a sop to the liberal sentiments that still move countless Czechoslovaks. Josef Smrkovsky, one of Dubcek's closest allies, was kicked off the Central Committee and lost his job as Vice President of the Czechoslovak Parliament. All told, 29 progressives were forced off the Central Committee. Of those, 19 resigned under intense pressure and ten were fired outright. Plainly, it was a major step toward the Moscow-inspired "normalization" of Czechoslovakia.

So far, the chief effect of this normalization has been to make Czechoslovaks yearn for the heady abnormalities of last year's "Prague spring." Slowdowns and sabotage have hurt the economy. In Prague alone, 260 people arrested during the demonstrations that swept the country on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion are still in jail. Czechoslovaks are fearful that even muted dissent might bring swift arrest under the decrees enacted at the time of the anniversary. Only one step is lacking to complete Czechoslovakia's reversion to the bad old Stalinist days--political show trials, and they might be in the cards.

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