New Tenant

Strakova Akademie in Prague's sleepy, baroque Mala Strana (Little Town) had been a school for young nobles under the Habsburgs and a Gestapo court under the Nazis. Last week it had a new tenant. Out of its modernized office suites walked mousy-looking Social Democrat Premier Zdenek Fierlinger, to be Vice Premier of Czechoslovakia. In came tough-looking Communist Vice Premier Klement Gottwald to be Premier.

A self-educated farmer's son (who has a vast repertory of Czech folk songs, wears caps instead of hats and loves his family), Gottwald had worked and waited for this moment. There was no doubt about how the new tenant would like to run things. Communist Gottwald's philosophy of politics might well have been inspired by the words of St. Clement (Rome's fourth Pope), after whom his pious family had named him: "Discipline and subordination are necessary as in an army . . . for man is nothing."

But Comrade Gottwald would have to go a little easy. Although in the new Cabinet the Communists kept their old key posts of Interior, Information and Labor, in addition to the premiership, their only new portfolios were Finance and Internal Commerce, two difficult spots in view of Czechoslovakia's strained economic situation. Middle-of-the-road National Socialists remained strong partly because President Eduard Benes, grand, not very old (62) man of Czechoslovakia, belongs to their party. Jan Masaryk, an Independent, keeps the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Another National Socialist, grey, diminutive Jaroslav Stransky, was awarded the important Education Ministry, formerly held by the Reds. An ex-professor of criminal law and a newspaper editor with iron nerves, he was unlikely to let the Communists push him around. To illustrate the Stransky calm, friends tell how he took the fall of Paris in 1940. During the mad scramble of flight, he went for a quiet stroll along the Champs-Elysees, where he ran into the well-known Czech pianist, Rudolf Firkusny. Stransky said he had wanted to ask Firkusny's advice on a problem that had been on his mind for a long time. Was it too late in life for him to learn to play the piano? And where could he find a good teacher in Paris these days?

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