Besieged Reformer

The most powerful Communist in Czechoslovakia was suddenly besieged in downtown Prague last week by a pack of long-haired flower children. Carrying assorted objects that ranged from badminton rackets to open umbrellas, wearing bright colors and strung with beads, Prague's hippies thrust bunches of carnations and tulips into Party Boss Alexander Dubcek's hands during a May Day parade singularly devoid of the polemics heard elsewhere in the Communist world. Dubcek smiled with pleasure at the unusual sign of support for his reformist regime, signed autographs and accepted sandwiches and cake offered him from the crowd. But not all was flowers and cake for Dubcek last week, and hippies were not the only ones besieging him.

On the one hand, the Soviet Union was pressuring him to slow down his reforms; Pravda spoke ominously of "subversive activities, antipopular forces, anti-Communist hysteria and anarchy" in Czechoslovakia. To soothe the Russians, Dubcek, accompanied by Premier Oldrich Cernik, flew to Moscow for talks with Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev. Even as they went, however, increasingly vocal liberals in Czechoslovakia were demanding nothing less than full democracy.

"Rabbits Long Enough." In Prague's Old Town Square, students organized the most anti-Communist rally yet of the four-month-old "socialist renaissance." Assembling at the statue of the 15th century reformist theologian Jan Hus, thousands of people heard speakers call upon Dubcek to permit opposition political parties and to rid the government of old-line party men who still hold office. "We have been rabbits long enough!" shouted Engineering Student Josef Vavelda. "We hear we should be grateful to the Communist Party," said another speaker. "Yes, we are very grateful for inadequate housing, grateful for bad worker morale, grateful for legal insecurity."

The Russians are worried about the increasingly anti-Soviet tone of Dubcek's liberalization. Czechoslovak news papers, for example, openly accused the Russian secret police of engineering the forced confessions and show trials of the 1950s. In fact, the onetime state prosecutor at those trials, Karol Bacilek, charged last week that the man who came to Prague to force Czechoslovak Communists to conduct the purge was none other than Anastas Mikoyan, later the Soviet President.

The Russians also fear that Dubcek will turn to the West for the economic aid that he badly needs. Thus a prime topic of conversation during Dubcek's visit to Moscow was an unusual Soviet offer of $300 million or more worth of credit in hard currency. Dubcek will no doubt gladly take the money, but he is also eager to make sure that the Russians do not revert from the carrot to the stick and cut off the oil and raw-material shipments upon which his country depends. As a hedge against any loss of Soviet oil, for example, he is reportedly negotiating with Iran for millions of tons of oil.

Not in a Hurry. The U.S. has kept meticulously silent over events in Czechoslovakia for fear of further embarrassing Dubcek before his Communist neighbors. Last week, though, the State Department said that it was watching the liberalization with "interest and sympathy," even expressed willingness to reopen talks about $20 million worth of Czechoslovak gold confiscated from the Nazis toward the end of World War II. The U.S. has refused to return the bullion without some compensation for $72 million in American properties that the Communists nationalized in 1948. At week's end, the Dubcek regime rebuffed the offer of new talks, attacking as "irresponsible" a compromise that the U.S. has proposed. It thus served notice that it is not, at the moment, in any hurry to draw closer to the U.S.

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