Prosperity and Despair

Four years after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, the Russian presence still dominates the country, in sometimes unexpected ways. Fully 60,000 Soviet troops are stationed there, but Moscow has also poured an estimated $1 billion in aid into Czechoslovakia, in an obvious attempt to buy civil peace, if not the loyalty of the country's citizens. As a result, a surface prosperity prevails in Prague that contrasts curiously with the mood of Czechoslovaks; as a nation they remain gripped by apathy and despair. TIME'S Chief European Correspondent William Rademaekers, who covered Czechoslovakia before the invasion, returned there recently to file this report:

Prague is beginning to glitter again after a massive campaign to restore and regild its splendid baroque churches and monuments. Its shop windows are filled with consumer goods imported from the capitalist West as well as from the Communist East. No fewer than 7,000,000 tourists from East Germany and other Soviet-bloc countries swarmed into Czechoslovakia this year in pursuit of luxuries not readily available at home. These include Spanish bananas and oranges, Italian shoes, Camembert cheese and Beaujolais from France, and Czechoslovak brassieres and girdles that, at long last, are beginning to encase Russian and East European flab in tough new elastic.

One million private cars, including even French-made Simcas as well as Czechoslovakia's own Skoda, jam the streets and roads of this small nation of 14 million people. Restaurants are packed with Czechoslovak and foreign tourists, swigging Pilsen beer and devouring pork-and fruit-filled dumplings. Perhaps as a result, the Czechoslovaks are now on a physical-fitness kick. One Prague sporting-goods store is doing a thriving business in exercise machines.

At the same time, a palpable sense of collective despair permeates the country. The reason is not hard to divine. From all indications, the Russians are there to stay. The Soviets have built permanent barracks for their soldiers, apartment houses for their officers and wives, and schools for Russian children. Certain choice seats are reserved for them at the National Theater and several concert halls. Understandably, the Soviet occupiers avoid mingling with the local population, preferring to cluster together in public places, often talking in whispers to one another. Even in civilian clothes, Russian soldiers are easily recognized by their crude serge suits, heavily starched shirts and close-cropped hair.

Their presence enforces a policy of repression in Czechoslovakia known as "consolidation"; it has been carried out with a thoroughness reminiscent of the Stalinist purges of the 1950s. Although people do not simply disappear any more, and the wide-scale arrests that were anticipated after the invasion have not taken place, 46 liberals were tried and sentenced this year, and more are under detention. Party Chief Gustav Husak, himself a purge victim during Czechoslovakia's Stalin era, has "consolidated" the Communist Party, cutting back its membership by almost one-half, to a total of 1,000,000. Communists thus expelled have usually lost their jobs, together with their party cards. Former Party Chief Alexander Dubcek now works as a clerk in the Slovak forestry department, but he earns more than twice as much as hundreds of thousands of minor officials who were ousted with him. Dubcek recently wrote to a friend: "If I am getting paid for what I know about this job, then 3,200 crowns [about $230] a month is too much."

Frozen Intellectuals. The intellectual atmosphere in Prague is as barren as are the prospects for Soviet departure. The famous avant-garde Theater Behind the Gates has been closed down, and the political cabarets that flourished in the late 1960s have disappeared. Such well-known Czechoslovak film directors as Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde) and Jan Kadar (The Shop on Main Street) are now working in the West, while others who stayed home are banned from their profession. "The pressures are too great," one Czechoslovak intellectual explained. "It's all right if you are simply an actor, a singer or a stage designer, but not if you are a playwright or a novelist. We are frozen."

While contemporary political subjects are taboo in the arts, sex is an acceptable theme. The National Theater's current production of Bizet's Carmen must certainly rank as one of the most erotic of versions. In one scene of the opera, Carmen does a striptease, then lolls on a bed in her underwear, grabbing at Don Jose. Later the couple fall into bed and, through some miraculous exercise of lung power, manage to sing their love duet while they are passionately embracing.

Czechoslovakia's enforced return to political orthodoxy has not changed Moscow's uneasiness about the country's future. It is doubtful that the Russians would unilaterally pull out their troops, no matter how compliant the Czechoslovaks appear. Paradoxically, Czechoslovakia's main hope of getting out from under Soviet occupation may lie in the possibility of some broad East-West agreement to legitimize Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Some officials in Prague have expressed hope that the 33-nation European Security Conference, scheduled for early 1973, might ultimately result in reductions of both Soviet and NATO forces in Europe, including the withdrawal of Russian troops. But that day is a long way off.

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