The Rise and Fall of the Free Czech Press

cWhy did the Russians invade Czechoslovakia? If the Moscow newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya is to be believed, it was mostly because they could no longer abide the freedom that Alexander Dubcek had granted the Czech press. "The reintroduction of bourgeois press freedom led to the most destructive consequences," declared the Moscow paper in an editorial explaining the invasion. While it lasted, moreover, it was a freedom exercised furiously, with a passion pent up by two decades of enforced Communist conformity. And, despite the Russian tanks, it is not yet completely dead.

Freedom of the press was restored to Czechoslovakia in March, when the Communist Party's Central Committee stripped the country's euphemistically named Central Publication Authority of its censorship powers and fired its boss. The transformation was immediate and spectacular.

With the censors immobilized, Czech newsmen wrote editorials attacking deposed Party Boss Antonin Novotny, even though he was still hanging on as president. Digging deep into the regime's Stalinist past, they hounded state security men, government prosecutors and party bosses for interviews, came out with documented stories of terror, torture and rigged purge trials. Nothing escaped their attention. Several Prague newspapers sent reporters to interview former political prisoners, published detailed charges that they had been regularly beaten by guards. Interior Minister Josef Pavel, himself a purge victim in 1951, revealed that the police had tried to extract a confession from him by putting an empty pail over his head and beating against it "until I nearly went mad."

Drugged Confession. Wherever their curiosity led them, newsmen found evidence of direct Soviet meddling in Czech government affairs. A former Novotny security chief admitted to them that "26 Soviet advisers were active in all departments" of his secret police. The head of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia's Bratislava branch told them that the Russians had engineered his arrest in 1949, then drugged him to make him confess. The most explosive charge of all concerned the death of Czechoslovakia's last non-Communist leader, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose "suicide" was announced shortly after the Communists seized power in 1948. But was it suicide? Czech reporters found evidence to the contrary--including the fact that all telephone lines to Masaryk's residence had been cut just before his death.

Determined, as Reporter Magazine Editor Stanislav Budin described it, to "wed freedom and Communism," the press probed into every part of Czech life. It examined housing problems, urged a return to limited free enterprise, promoted the democratic reforms sought by Dubcek and his liberals.

Heretical Clippings. The fruits of such journalism were quickly apparent. Circulation doubled and tripled. Czechs waited in line at newsstands, tuned in excitedly to newscasts on Czech radio and television. To the Kremlin, however, it was all an insufferable threat. In May, Dubcek was summoned to Moscow, where Leonid Brezhnev thrust a stack of heretical clippings at him and, shaking with rage, told him that "this sort of thing has got to stop." But it did not stop. Dubcek refused to restore censorship, contented himself with asking newsmen to tone down their attacks for a while. At a national conference of journalists in Prague, the newsmen announced that they could be silenced only by force. "I am not interested in the pronouncements of those who cannot stomach freedom of the press," proclaimed Literarni Listy Editor Antonin Liehm. "The alternatives are simple. Either they will win, in which case more than just freedom of the press will disappear from this country's life, or they will lose."

Since the Russian invasion, the Czech press has carried its battle for freedom to extraordinary lengths. Many top newsmen, fearing for their lives, have fled to the West, but others have carried on. After Russian troops marched in to close them down, most Czech papers published underground editions. Television newscasters managed to broadcast from studios over portable army transmitters, and C.T.K., the government news agency, opened a clandestine telex service. Editors sneaked past Russian surveillance to confer with Dubcek's cooperative aides, promised to try to appease the Russians by imposing self-censorship.

Temporary Control. The censorship so far has been light. Journalists no longer write direct attacks against the Russians, no longer refer to Russian soldiers as "occupying troops," but their stories are anything but friendly. Rude Pravo reported with oblique subtlety that any agreements Dubcek made in Moscow had been dictated by "unimaginably abnormal circumstances," conducted a quick public-opinion poll that showed that Dubcek and his reforms had overwhelming popular support.

The press may not be able to hold out much longer. At Russian insistence, three important magazines--Literarni Listy, Reporter and the intellectual weekly Student--have already been banned. The Czech National Assembly last week was called into session to pass a "temporary" press-control bill that re-establishes censorship. As if to prepare for the event, Russian troops moved out of Czech newspaper offices and permitted journalists to return to their desks--where their activities will be easier to observe and control.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.