Dubcek's trump

CZECHOSLOVAKIA-1 TOM STACEY

Prague—It seems you can't beat the Czechs for sang-froid. A week ago they were looking at the

Russians with a strained tolerance, then it

turned into a passive regret; now it has become a pained dismay that anybody could comport

themselves with such crass obtuseness, even the masters of the Kremlin whom they know so \ken. There has been a total absence of panic in Prague, a contrary refusal to react to the elaborate and enormously extensive military dashings about along their borders, and all the artificially induced mouthings from the press of the Soviet Union, East Germany and (to a lesser extent) Hungary.

Rightly or wrongly the Czechs feel they have one card which the Russians cannot trump,

whatever course they may decide upon follow-

ing the summit of praesidiums at Cierna nad Tisou. That is that the freedom, which has now belonged to the Czechs for six months, has taken such firm root among the whole popula- tion that no force on earth can take it away from them. The Czechs believe that they have resumed the democratic role they played up to 1938, and for the first time in thirty years they feel normal again.

Today on the bookstalls in Hradcany Palace you can buy no less than ten different postcard portraits of Jan Masaryk, the Czech Foreign Minister, whose murder and defenestration in 1948 opened the way to the full Communist takeover, and of his father, Thomas Masaryk, founder of the Democratic Czech Republic in 1918. Right alongside are sets of postcards of today's First Party Secretary, Dubcek, and President Svoboda, 'whose name,' says the official guide, 'means liberty, which he has helped to bring to us.'

'All the important dates,' the lady guide of the state tourist agency, CEDOK, tells visitors from western and communist countries alike, 'end in "8"-1648, 1918, 1948, and now' (preg- nant pause) '1968.' The tourists snigger. 'That,' she says, indicating the partition in the library of the Strahov monastery, where the forbidden books were locked away, 'is how they prevented the monks from reading what they were not allowed to read—just as we have been prevented from reading many books for twenty years.'

The impressive quality the Czechs have shown to those such as myself who had come to believe that a generation of meticulous ideological tyranny had removed the faculty among eastern European people to think for themselves is the ease with which they have recovered their ability to act and plan as free people. In these last few months of Dubcek they have been picking up the threads of 'normal' life as if the successive nightmares of nazism and of Stalinist-Novotnyite communism had never happened. The same journalists who a year ago ‘sere writing their turgid commentaries, picking their words in the minefield of restrictions in the 600-page government document listing what should be written (and how) and what should not be written are today writing fluent and easy prose on a whole range of subjects that closely bear upon the very core of the communist ethic. On the train to Pilsen, which goes on to cross the border into West Germany, I found young couples nipping across to the free world for a holiday of a tew days to taste a little highlife in Nuremburg or Stuttgart, or to window-shop at the mini-skirts or drop into the clubs where the new beat groups play, just as if there had never been an iron curtain.

It is impossible to exaggerate the depth to which the assumption of this root freedom has gone. But as this week of talks and bitter con- ference dragged on, the inward exhilaration has slowly turned to an animal possessiveness of all that has been gained these past few months.

Dubcek himself has been working subtly to ensure that no reconstituted Moscow-orientated government in Prague, no back-tracking Com- munist party leadership, no crude chest-beating by the Russians, will now trick the Czechs into accepting anything less than what they have so astonishingly recovered under his brave hand.

These past couple of weeks Dubcek has quietly emphasised the strength of the one card he holds. In two broadcasts he has obliquely asked for the silent and unemotional demon- strations of public support represented by the signing of petitions in the arcades off Wenceslas Square and in Prikope Street, where people have been swarming in trams and on foot to add their names and their addresses and some- times a personal exclamation of support.

The Czechs' hard-learned instinct of never going too far has been his standby. And this week Dubcek has been softly providing himself with the proof that the Russians might well need that he is indeed in control of the normal- ity he has allowed to flower. He has restricted the powers of General Prchlik (and, in the same stroke, it should be noted, abolished the depart- ment responsible for political control of the army which no traditional communist could regard as anything less than essential), and has also slipped in a (much milder) thirty-live-page document to the press on subjects that are still better left alone even in mid-1968.

This must be said this week : the Czechs' talent for compromise and phlegm can be over- stated. Their internal unanimity seems complete. Diehards down the ranks have made good use of the past seven months to return to the fold of human kind. But there is just beginning to emerge a certain ferocity in their determination 'The oecumenical movement seems to be suffer- ing front coitus interruptus: to give nothing back to Moscow. Amid the knots of discussion around the petition-signing tables in the streets I have heard them talking of an invitation to the self-exiled Czech Cardinal Biran to return to his homeland. Here and there appears the slogan 'We shall not deviate from this path alive.' And in telling me of the grotesque Stalin statue, then the largest in eastern Europe, that used to gesture across the Vlata River in the centre of Prague. it was explained with some satisfaction that the sculptor of this 'expensive monstrosity' had sub- sequently committed suicide.

Unlike the Russians, the Czechs do know what real life is like. Unlike Hungary, twelve years ago, they have had time to grow back into the shape of ordinary humanity. Let us hope that the confidence this restored physique has given them is unbeatable.