Repression in Prague
How many private tragedies have been caused by the past week's wave of arrests in Czechoslovakia can only be guessed at. The Czech authorities alone know the full number of those who have been arrested, and how many of these have been sent to forced labour, tortured or " liquidated" ; in due course, no doubt, garbled figures and garbled excuses for the purge will be offered to a sceptical world, but at present all that can be safely said is that this has been the most thorough drive against the non-Communist opposition to be made since last year's coup &hat, and that on this occasion' the *cope of the arrests appears to have been wider than befoied., It is believed that those seized include many members of the Coin-4 munist Party, as well as the Communists' traditional victims-4 professional men, shopkeepers, Christians and so on. The main question still in doubt is whether any open gesture of hostility to the Communist regime gave the signal for the purge ; whether, in fact, the conspiracy which will inevitably be produced as justifi- cation for repression ever bad any reality or not. If there was such a conspiracy it would be far from surprising, for no govern- ment in the world today is so intensely unpopular as that of Czechoslovakia, but the difficulty of combined action in a police State makes it unlikely that the separate strands of opposition had been co-ordinated. The clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, have every reason to resist the new church law which comes into opera- tion on November 1st, and which would convert them into the paid servants of an atheist State ; they are not accepting this decree without protest, and their congregations have frequently given them vigorous backing. But the most problematical aspect of the purge is the evidence it provides of a split among the Czech Com- munists along the now familiar East-West lines ; this is not the same as saying that any of them have been flirting with the West, or have ambitions to become Czech Titos (though sympathy with Tito is notoriously widespread), but it is evidence of Moscow's suspicion that in the higher ranks of the Czech party the germ of discontent may have taken root.
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