Revolution by Law?

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For better or worse, Czechoslovakia last week was deep in the throes of revolution. It was not an upheaval in the old style of blood and barricades. It was in Europe's new style--a revolution by law. Its objective was nothing less than to build a political and ideological bridge between the East and West, to prove that socialism can be more democratic than totalitarian.

So far, it was a revolution by decree. Neither the revolution nor the revolutionary government had yet been subject to the test of direct, secret elections. Last week there were elections of a sort in Czechoslovakia. But they had been arranged by the only four parties permitted to function. They were conducted at party meetings. The vote was by public acclamation; the purpose was to choose electors who in turn would choose members of a Provisional Parliament. The seats in this Parliament had already been allotted by the controlling parties.

On the basis of this balloting, the Socialists and Communists claimed 72% of the electorate's support. That claim would be proved, or disproved, only when Czechoslovaks got the secret, direct elections which the Provisional Parliament was commissioned to prepare. In American eyes this was neither freedom nor the promise of freedom. But Americans had not shared--they could hardly imagine--the Czech experience in the occupation years. In Czechoslovakia, as in all Europe, men in 1945 accepted or even welcomed measures which they would have abhorred in the democratic past.

Windows on the Future. From the windows of his paneled office, wiry, weathered President Eduard Benes could look across the historic Moldau, beyond the towers and spires of the golden capital, toward the rolling, cherished "Czech lands." For three decades, in the underground, in exile and in this office, he had labored to shape those lands and their people into a state.

He had helped bring the Czechs and the Slovaks out of Habsburg domination, transform the country into Central Europe's prosperous bastion of democracy. He had not despaired when the Nazi blackout descended on his 10,000,000 Slav countrymen. Now he was helping them turn on the lights again. But they were different lights, and what was emerging into view was not yet clear.

Eduard Benes calls his plan for Czechoslovakia "synthesis"--a word he loves. A shrewd master of simplicity, he explains his country's "middleclass revolution" in notably simple terms: "We are giving property to the propertyless. Others who have too many possessions are being scaled down. Everyone, however, will not be on the same level. Instead, the middle class will be a broad band within which there will be plenty of room for private enterprise and initiative alongside state control and socialism."

As Benes well knows, revolutions are never as simple as that. Synthesized or not, they pose the basic question: is the state to be the master or the servant of the people? And if the state is king, can the citizen be free? A lifelong democrat, Eduard Benes would probably answer such questions with another: what if, as in Britain and now in Czechoslovakia, free men choose to limit their freedom?

Son of Liberty. Eduard Benes grew up in a search for freedom. He was born, the last of a family of ten children, under a peasant's roof.

From the time he entered the Kozlany village school through his Gymnasium and university years in Prague and Paris, Benes was a dervish for study. At 16, the once pious Catholic boy had turned into an unkempt dogmatist. By the time he was 19, he had run the gamut of the philosophies of extremism, from Sorelian violence to Marxian materialism. Then he encountered Thomas Masaryk.

The late, great Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was Czechoslovakia's George Washington. He and Benes first met at Prague's Charles University, and thereby began one of history's notable partnerships in thought, politics and statesmanship. Masaryk's influence turned the didactic radical into a tolerant democrat and eclectic rationalist. Eduard Benes began to practice the blending "art of synthesis." In his Charles University thesis, he essayed a prophetic conclusion: mankind must find a synthesis of its ideals in order to form a working formula for progress. Democracy, in particular, must find the correct compromise between individualism and socialism.

Conspirator & Statesman. World War I plunged young Dr. Benes from university teaching into political conspiracy. His objective, fathered by Masaryk: to form an independent republic amid the dissolution of the Habsburgs' crumbling Dual Monarchy.

At Prague, on Oct. 28, 1918, the National Council proclaimed the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic. As secretary-general of the National Council, Benes had striven for Allied recognition, helped recruit a Czechoslovak army abroad, served as the workhorse of his cause. "Without Benes," said President Masaryk, "we never would have had the Republic."

For almost two decades, first as Czechoslovak Foreign Minister and Masaryk's heir-apparent, then as President after the aging Masaryk's resignation in 1935, Dr. Benes labored at a synthesis that would ensure Central Europe's security. He built what he called a "temple of peace," based mainly on an alliance between France and Czechoslovakia, buttressed by the League of Nations.

That policy failed. Naziism could not be synthesized. One night in October 1938, a plane whisked Dr. Benes into exile. He was lecturing on democracy at the University of Chicago when word came, five months later, of Hitler's march into Czechoslovakia. For a day he lay on a couch in a darkened room, in a stillness as of death. Next morning, resolute and reinvigorated, he plunged into the task of keeping the Republic alive in exile.

For six years Benes' homeland knew the tearing strains and compromises and moral storms of occupation. As in other lands of the New Order, not all Czechs and Slovaks were heroes; some made their reluctant peace with serfdom, some had even welcomed the conqueror. But many fought and many died. In exile, Benes won Allied support for his refugee government, organized a new Czechoslovak army, kept close contact with the homeland's hopes and fears, and planned a new synthesis. "Ideas do not stand still," he said. "We accept the catch phrase of the last war: 'The cure for democracy is more democracy!' ":

But there was one most fundamental difference. For its future security, Czechoslovakia looked not west but east. The cornerstone of Dr. Benes' rebuilt temple was a Treaty of Friendship, Mutual Assistance and Postwar Collaboration signed with the Kremlin in December 1943. The memory of Munich had erased the memory of Versailles.

New Freedom. Before the liberated Czechs acclaimed his return to the homeland last April, Dr. Benes expressed a double hope: within six months after liberation, Czechoslovaks would hold their first elections; within a year, Czechoslovakia would again be one of the most prosperous states in Central Europe. Last week the first of these promises had not yet been made good, the second stood in fair way of fulfillment.

Prague, abustle with material reconstruction and cultural renaissance, was a mirror of the nation. Life was still conditioned by shortages--in everything from bread to books. But Prague, like most of the country, had escaped with relatively light war damage. It was heady with vitality.

Busy pedestrians, cyclists and trams crowded the streets. The coffee houses did not yet have cream, but they were free of the hated Nazi "chimney sweeps" (black-uniformed SS men). Bookstores exuberantly displayed volumes banned by the Germans. Every day a thousand news-hungry people trooped to the U.S. Information Service office, hoping to find American papers and magazines. At night people gathered before the charred City Hall to hear a band play Smetana's stirring Ma Vlast--My Country.

Industry lacked raw materials and transport. But production was picking up. Coal mines were operating at a third of capacity. On the farms the harvest was good--a ray of hope for a nation that expects a hungry winter. Everywhere the people--farmers, workers, professionals, politicians--busily organized into cooperatives, unions, guilds, blocs, all woven into a Government-controlled web.

Everywhere people discussed politics openly and frankly. No censor was at work. But the character of the press had changed. Individuals could no longer publish newspapers. Only groups (political parties, unions, etc. had the right. At first the new press displayed a striking sameness in content, tameness in outlook. Recently polemical fur has begun to fly between Socialists and Communists.

The Program. Eduard Benes was the link between Czechoslovakia's democratic past and the uncertain present. His great talents for compromise and maneuver which he developed and used in the prewar years stood him and his country in good stead now. A prewar French biographer, Pierre Crabites, said of him that Benes "understands the art of keeping his eye on the bear when circumstances force him to dance with it." But, as his conduct in 1938 proved, he also knows when to stop dancing.

Under Dr. Benes is a coalition Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Zdenek Fierlinger, ex-Minister to Washington, ex-Ambassador to Moscow, an ardent Russophile and Social Democratic leader. The Communists, who had thrived in the wartime underground, hold just the posts that Communists want: Interior (police), Information, Education, and a Deputy Prime Ministership. They have all the standard machinery of Communist infiltration and inner domination. But though the apparatus is there, Czechoslovakia is not yet a police state. Any Czechs who care to do so are free to express their fears that it might become one.

The main facts of the Benes revolution:

Foreign Policy. The provisional government has reaffirmed the Czechoslovak-Russian pact of 1943 as the "unwavering basis" of the nation's "leading line of foreign policy," with friendly but secondary orientation toward the western democracies. So far, Russia has extracted one ounce of flesh--the border province of Ruthenia. Otherwise Moscow's public participation in Czech affairs has been largely confined to such events as Foreign Commissar Molotov's and Vice Commissar Vishinsky's joint appearance with Benes, Fierlinger et al. on the Moscow radio. Says Dr. Benes:

"Our alliance with the Soviet Union is quite natural. . . . It does not mean that we have cut ourselves off from the democracies of western Europe. . . . We have simply adapted ourselves to the developments of the war. . . ."

But a summer of Red Army occupation had brought disillusionment and uneasiness. Russian soldiers were not the best ambassadors for Russia. Some troopers acted like rustic louts--Stalin is said to have apologized to Benes.

A reaction was inevitable. Benes' countrymen tended to see their culture and material progress--the highest of any Slav people--in a new perspective. They looked inward, feeling that they had something to preserve and something to teach their big Slav cousin. Pride and pressure were building a new nationalism.

Minorities. Toward its disloyal minorities the once tolerant Czechoslovak heart has hardened. Dr. Benes and his Government are adamantly determined to rid the state of almost all of its 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans and 800,000 Hungarians--a major surgical operation on the nation's body, involving 16% of its prewar population.

Toward the Slovaks (3,000,000), who once chafed under Czech discrimination and who produced the quisling Father Tiso, the Czech big brothers (7,500,000) show a new tenderness. Last August Dr. Benes journeyed to Banska Bystrica in Slovakia, where he pledged a third of the future parliament and a third of the future economic directorate to cheering Slovaks, who numerically rate only a fourth.

Nationalization. The confiscation of German, Hungarian and collaborationist properties has already put 6,800 enterprises, employing 800,000 workers, under Government management. The nationalization of loyal Czechoslovak industry, banks and insurance companies (with compensation) is proceeding more slowly, encountering more difficulties. Up for Government ownership on the official list are mines, utilities, foundries, armament and chemical plants, pottery, porcelain and glass factories, cement, textile and metal factories. For the present, businesses employing fewer than 500 workers are exempt. The end objective: 70% nationalized, 30% free.

Land Reform. The farms taken from Germans, Hungarians and collaborationists are being redistributed among landless Czechs and Slovaks. The last big estates (not many, since prewar Czechoslovakia carried out an extensive land reform) are vanishing. Agriculture is being rationalized--but not through the Soviet system of collectivization. The kolkhoz (collective farms), Communists agree, would be anathema to Czechoslovakia's peasant landowners. Instead, the Government is promoting farmers' cooperatives on a scale surpassing that of prewar days, when they counted 2,000,000 members.

The Middle Way. Czechoslovakia's political arena is limited to four parties: 1) the Communists, led by stout, pipe-smoking Deputy Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, 48, an exile in Moscow between 1939 and 1945; 2) the Social Democrats, led by mousy, opportunistic Prime Minister Fierlinger, 54; 3) the Socialists, led by Dr. Benes; and 4) the People's (Catholic) Party, led by portly, colorful, progressive Monsignor Jan Sramek, 75, ex-Prime Minister and now Deputy Prime Minister.

So far the Czechoslovak Communists, at best temporary friends of middleway revolution, have made no move to seize power or to upset the balance envisioned by Dr. Benes. But they hold solid posts in all the key strata of the nation's life--in the Government, army, trade unions, cooperatives, nationalized industry. They are still authoritarians. They flank Masaryk's portrait with Lenin and Stalin.

Ebullient Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, 59, son of the great Thomas Masaryk, is a nonpartisan in domestic politics but a western democrat in outlook. Unassuming Dr. Petr Zenkl, 61, Lord Mayor of Prague, old crony of Dr. Benes, is one of the ablest and most popular of Socialist leaders. Shrewd Antonin Zapotocki, Communist boss of the powerful, well-disciplined central trade unions council (U.R.O.), is in the thick of the nationalization program. Workers committees chosen by the U.R.O. will help the Government to manage confiscated factories, allocate manpower, speed up production.

Prime Minister Fierlinger's Russophilism pulls the Social Democrats toward the Communists. But Dr. Benes has a stout friend in Monsignor Sramek, whose reports presumably account for the Vatican's belief that predominantly Catholic (74%) Czechoslovakia may indeed find its middle way.

The Prospect. Neither the U.S. nor British Governments so far include Czechoslovakia in their indictment of police states in other parts of Russia's sphere. And both Governments keep a close watch: the U.S. has stationed one of its ablest diplomats, Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt, in Prague. British Laborites, who see Dr. Benes' "middleclass revolution" as akin to their own, have set up a Parliamentary Czech Committee.

So long as Czechoslovakia's "main orientation" lies eastward, security-conscious Russia may well let Benes keep a democratic showpiece in Central Europe. But if Moscow grows suspicious, if the Big Three finally fall out, if the U.S. pulls out of Europe, if lines of force are drawn, what then? Dr. Benes knows full well that Czechoslovakia's survival as a free state, now as in 1938, depends on the good will and vitality and friendship of a free world.

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