Losing the Luster

It is not yet a crime for Czechoslovaks to visit the grave of Thomas Masaryk, who founded their republic 50 years ago this week. But it is at least an act of courage. Last week, in advance of Czechoslovakia's anniversary celebrations, security agents at the graveside conspicuously photographed each pilgrim. Everywhere, Czechoslovaks are surrounded by a poised apparatus of repression. They are settling into a mood of resignation, withdrawing back into their private lives, abandoning politics once more to the politicians.

There was not even much reason to cheer last week as Hungarian, Polish and Bulgarian troops, and the first Russians, began to depart. The East Germans had already gone home. But some 75,000 Soviet troops will remain stationed along a central line that virtually cuts the country in half, and 60 guns still ring Prague. The one major concession that the Soviets made in the treaty governing the "temporary" stationing of their troops in Czechoslovakia carried an ominous loophole. The status-of-forces clause in the treaty provided that Czechoslovak law should apply to occupying soldiers as well as citizens. But when "higher interests" were involved, previous dictates made clear, Moscow's orders would prevail.

Negative Victory. Party Chief Alexander Dubcek continued to wage a political rearguard action, losing some skirmishes and winning others. Resisting

Soviet demands that he pack the Central Committee with conservatives, Dubcek rallied support for his progressives at grass-roots meetings. The press was still free enough to help, pinpointing and decrying meetings of "factionalist" conservatives, thus enabling Dubcek to counter their bid for popular support.

Perhaps the Czechoslovaks' chief victory was a negative one. The Soviets have not yet succeeded in finding enough quislings to put together an alternative government. Dubcek was able to deny the most notorious collaborator, Alois Indra, the Interior Ministry, which the Soviets wanted for him. He nonetheless had to give Indra a Cabinet post, the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Economists still hoped to press on with planned reforms, and Dubcek promised that "we shall in no form return to the outlived bureaucratic-centralist methods of management." But the "workers' councils," designed to give labor a voice in management, were abruptly canceled last week, apparently as a concession to the Soviets.

Departing Elite. Hanging over everyone is the question of whether and when the Soviets will begin mass arrests. Czechoslovaks remember all too well that in Hungary the roundup of dissidents did not begin until three months after the 1956 uprising was crushed, and did not peak until six months after the event. Fearing that possibility, some 600 scientists have left the country, and last week an airlift began bringing the first Czechoslovak refugees from Vienna to the U.S. They are mostly from Czechoslovakia's intellectual elite. A factory hand summed up the prevailing bitter mood of those Czechoslovaks who remain: "We will work even less than before; we will be the greatest country of nonworkers." All too evidently, the country was slipping back from its luminous "spring" (as the Czechoslovaks call their brief period of reform) toward the lusterless mediocrity of a Soviet satellite.

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