A Nervous Reaction

"I believe that the citizen is extinct in our country. We are joined by the most despicable of ties: a common frustration. I see a return to the bad old days as a permanent danger. Why can't we live where we want? What use is it that we have been given the publishing house and the journals? Behind all this is the threat that they will take it back if we are unruly."

Novelist Ludvik Vaculik, who shook a recent congress of the Czech Writers' Union with these angry words, was proved right sooner than he thought; he was forthwith fired from his post as an alternate member of the union's central committee and roundly denounced by the government. Czechoslovakia's Communist regime, which for a time was Eastern Europe's most tolerant in permitting liberalization to flourish, has recently returned to a pattern of repression. It is preparing not only to discipline Czechoslovakia's "unruly" writers, but also to take back a good deal of what it has conceded in other fields as well. In one of his harshest speeches in years, President Antonin Novotny recently warned that the party would not tolerate "the spread of liberalism, pacifism, recklessness and frivolity." Toughening Up. Last week Novotny's regime moved to take away some of the prerogatives that it had granted Czechoslovakian industries earlier this year. By giving factory managers the power to reinvest their profits--rather than having the government do it--and by allowing prices for wholesale goods to rise, the regime had hoped to encourage more efficient investment and make the economy more responsive to consumer demand. But prices soared far above the anticipated levels, and industry made profits a bit too easily. The economy thus suffered, and the regime got scared at what it had wrought. Now it has restored many of the restrictions.

Oddly enough, while the government has lately gone all out to attract tourists to Czechoslovakia, it has detained more than 60 Western tourists in the past year, many of them for minor traffic violations or petty smuggling charges. It has yet to explain the mysterious death of Charles Jordan, vice chairman of the American Joint Distribution Committee, whose body was found in the Vltava River in August. Another sign of a less permissive policy: Czech border guards have opened fire on fugitives from Communism, in the past two months killing two and wounding three others who were trying to cross the border into Austria.

Bell-Bottom Trousers. The 14 million Czechs, who thought that the recent reforms might eventually better their standard of living, are not likely to take the new repression lying down. Once one of the more submissive Communist peoples, the Czechs are now among the most demanding and least obedient. To other Communists, their capital of Prague has become the swinging city of Eastern Europe, where miniskirts are modish, teen-agers dance to a Western beat and long hair flows from the scalps of young men in flowery sport shirts and bell-bottom trousers.

The regime seems nervous and uncertain about just where to bend and where to bristle, and the result is an unevenness in both the progress and the retrogression. Because of censorship, Czechs never get to see some of the best movies turned out by their talented directors; among the films that have not yet been screened in Czechoslovakia are Vera Chytilova's audacious Daisies (TIME, June 23) and Antonin Masa's Hotel for Foreigners. Few Czechs have been permitted out of the country to see their highly touted pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.

This month the regime surprised everyone when it permitted the journal Literdrni Noviny to pay tribute to Thomas Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's first President, on the 30th anniversary of his death; to the Communists, Masaryk had previously been an unperson. The party has been far less gracious toward writers like Ladisla Mnacko, author of the novel The Taste of Power. It took away Mnacko's Czechoslovakian citizenship when he dared to go to Israel in protest against the government's pro-Arab policy in the recent Middle Eastern war.

The party's cultural watchdog, Jiri Hendrych, warned the restless writers last week that the regime cannot be indifferent to "attempts to abuse the ideological and creative movement on the cultural front." What that means is that when the Central Committee of the Communist Party convenes next week, it will probably take away some more of the privileges that Czechoslovakia's writers have recently gained.

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