HISTORIC QUEST FOR FREEDOM

Love the Truth. Let others have their truth, and the truth will prevail.

Those words of Czechoslovakia's national hero, Jan Hus, are en graved on the base of his statue in Prague. Last week, as Soviet tanks clanked into the capital, someone limned the graven letters in red chalk so that they stood out sharply on the grey granite. The words were spoken 550 years ago, at a time when the Bo hemians, who now are known as Czechs, were trying to win a measure of re ligious and national autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire. But they remain a poignant reminder of a de termined people's long search for freedom.

"Whoever is master of Bohemia is master of Europe," declared Bis marck. Between periods of self-rule, Bohemia fell to the Avars in the 5th century, later to the German emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and finally to the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Czechs and the Slovaks were perhaps the first people in Central Europe to develop a sort of natural identity, and their first weapon was religion. They won from Rome the right to conduct their religious services in Slavonic in the 9th century. Partially as a result of this independence, the Czechs started the Reformation 100 years before Luther. The revolt was led by Jan Hus, who called for a reform of the Catholic Church and encouraged laymen to participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic. Taking the chalice as their symbol, his followers founded the Hussite sect, which was based on secular religion and nationalism. In 1618, after Emperor Matthias tried to check the growth of Protestantism, Czech patriots in Prague tossed two imperial officials from the windows of Hradcany Castle. In retaliation, the Habsburg armies crushed the Hussites, executed their leaders, burned Czech Bibles and outlawed the language. Though overwhelmed, the Czechs and Slovaks waged a passive resistance. As Friedrich Schiller later reflected:

This Bohemian land for which we fight has

no love for its master, who conquered it

only by force of arms and not by common consent.

It seethes against the tyranny of faith.

Even so, the land passed into 300 years of Habsburg domination. In hope of quelling the country's continuous unrest, Joseph II in 1781 granted an Edict of Toleration, an agreement that gave the people the right to speak their language and to have a measure of autonomy under Bohemian kings. A flowering of art and literature followed. Czech national feelings reached a high pitch in the 19th century, encouraged by a historian named Frantisek Palacky, who emphasized his people's identity by writing about their long struggle for freedom. "The Hussite war," Palacky wrote, "is the first war in history that was fought not for material interests but for intellectual ones--for ideals."

Despite such long strivings, Czechoslovakia is, politically speaking, a young country that did not gain its independence until 50 years ago. Even then, it took World War I and two remarkable men to achieve that. They were Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, a philosophy professor, and his colleague and ultimate successor, Eduard Benes, who had been one of his students at Prague. When the war broke out, they slipped out of their homeland to work abroad for Czechoslovak freedom. A master of public persuasion, Masaryk traveled to the U.S. and argued the case for his country's freedom so well that President Wilson included autonomy for the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire among his 14 points for a peace settlement in Europe.

In 1918, as the German and Austro-Hungarian empires crumbled in defeat, Masaryk and Benes went home to put their concepts of freedom into practice. From the first, the Czechoslovaks proved that they could indeed govern themselves. During the turbulent 1920s and early 1930s, while democratic governments gave way to dictatorships in neighboring countries, the Czechoslovaks retained a parliamentary government, pursued moderate policies and enjoyed relative economic stability. Ethnically, however, the nation was a melange of peoples--the dominant Czechs, restive Slovaks and some 3,000,000 Germans who wanted to be united with the Reich.

As Hitler rose to power in Germany, the Germans in Czechoslovakia saw a redeemer who would bring them home. Hitler was delighted to oblige. He charged that the country's citizens of German origin were being mistreated and must have his protection. Benes, who by then had succeeded Masaryk as President, needed international support in order to stand up to Hitler.

But the mood in Europe was one of appeasement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain observed that he did not see why England should go to war "because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."

At the Munich Conference in 1938, France and Britain forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany its western border areas, the Sudetenland where most of the Ger man-speaking population lived. In return, Hitler promised to make no more territorial demands in Europe. Six months later, however, German tanks stormed into Prague without warning, and Nazi Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels read Hitler's decree to stunned Czechoslovak radio listeners: "Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!" Benes, who fled abroad, tried to make people outside his country see that what had happened there soon would be repeated elsewhere. Soon enough, all the world realized that he was right.

Feeling guilty about the Czechoslovaks, the British allowed Benes to form a wartime exile government in London. Meanwhile, though they had offered no resistance at the time of the German in vasion, the Czechoslovaks waged an underground war against the occupiers. In one of their retaliation moves, the Germans wiped out the entire village of Lidice. After Germany's defeat, Benes took his regime to Prague and started anew. He faced tremendous obstacles. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill acceded to Stalin's demand that Czechoslovakia fall into his sphere of influence after the war. As a result, when General George Patton's tanks prepared to liberate Prague in the war's closing days, orders came from Allied headquarters to halt. The Russians got the honor of freeing the capital. In their wake came cadres of Czechoslovak Communists who had spent the war in Moscow. Aided by the presence of the Soviet army, the Communists infiltrated the government bureaucracy and went to work propagandizing the Czechoslovak people. In the 1946 elections, the Communists emerged as the country's largest single party. Benes formed a coalition government with them. In 1947, when Benes wanted to accept the U.S. offer of Marshall Plan aid, Stalin said no. Next year, in a Soviet-aided coup, the Czechoslovak Communists seized total power. Czechoslovakia's Western-oriented Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the country's founder, was killed in a fall from a window in the Foreign Ministry. Many Czechoslovaks believed that it was murder, and saw in his death the demise of their own freedom.

The first Czechoslovak party boss, Klement Gottwald, was a harsh ruler. He nationalized the country's entire industry, including even small artisans' shops, collectivized all farms, and subjected the people to a withering succession of arrests, show trials and executions of "Titoists" and "traitors." Fittingly, Gottwald caught a chill at Stalin's funeral in 1953 and died a few months later. An almost equally unbending Stalinist took his place: Antonin Novotny, who had been Communist boss of Prague. As the slight winds of liberalism blew throughout the East bloc following Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, Novotny tried his best to ward them off. Even so, the pressure for change built up. Art, especially literature and film making, experienced an underground renaissance. Artists and students demanded freedom of expression. Industrial planners and economists asked for freer and more effective ways of doing business. Last January, the new forces surging within Czechoslovak Communism culminated in the person of Alexander Dubcek, who ousted Novotny from power and instituted a series of liberal reforms. For eight memorable months, Czechoslovakia was one of the most exciting and hopeful places in the world.

History has molded the Czechoslovaks in a very special way. As their folk hero, they exalt the Good Soldier Schweik, who is a sort of fictional monument to their own native ability to outsmart their oppressors by playing dumb. Schweik always pretends that he is willing enough to obey orders, but his bumbling behavior completely undoes his superiors. It was a trait that annoyed Hitler. "The more they curb themselves," he ranted, "the more dangerous they become." Last week, as new oppressors came into their land, the Czechoslovaks fell back upon that old and honored tactic.

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