Shortly before the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, TIME-LIFE International publisher of our overseas editions, received the following urgent message from a subscription donor in Canada:

"We entered a subscription for LIFE and TIME in the name of -- (a Czechoslovakian citizen). This happened to be a Christmas gift. Now the subscriber says his life has been threatened if he continues to receive your magazines. Will you, therefore, stop service immediately? . . ."

In response to this prophetic warning, TLI struck the name from its list and began its own investigation of the hazards of sending further copies to its Czechoslovakian subscribers. Meanwhile, the Communists brought off their coup and, as you may have read in your newspapers, promptly banned TIME, LIFE and 25 other foreign publications on grounds of "malicious reporting."

Shortly thereafter, these banned publications were more or less reinstated, pending permanent decisions as to their future. TLI, which has been through this sort of thing before, knows, however, that its future in Czechoslovakia is almost zero. Its first move, after satisfying itself that further receipt of our publications would be highly compromising, politically, to subscribers there, was to hold up individual subscriptions, including President Eduard Benes' weekly copy of TIME.

Then, after arranging to continue the supply of copies of TIME for the U.S. Embassy staff in Prague, TLJ waited to see what would happen to the newsstand copies of TIME'S March 1st and 8th issues, carrying accounts of the Communist coup, and the March 15th issue of LIFE International, which had a story on Prague's famed, freedom-loving Charles University. Word came on March 8 that TIME was banned for keeps from Czechoslovakian newsstands and that LIFE would henceforth be censored for "antiCommunist" content.

From there on, Czechoslovakia will probably follow the Communist pattern established in Poland for controlling foreign publications. Officially, there is Government censorship of all foreign publications, but Government policy allows almost all publications to pass the censor so that freedom of the press can be claimed. The real censorship is exercised by the state distributing agency, which can fail to distribute any publication it dislikes.

One TLIman, recently returned from Warsaw, saw almost no foreign publications on the newsstands there except Russian magazines and newspapers. When he inquired about TIME'S four Polish subscribers in Warsaw (there are 20 others, all members of the U.S. Embassy staff or of American relief organizations), he found that one was a leader of the Socialist party who had left the country, another had died three months ago, the third was abroad, and the address of the fourth was a destroyed building.

As yet, there has been no direct censorship or expulsion of U.S. correspondents from Czechoslovakia. Will Lang, of TIME Inc.'s Berlin bureau, who covered the coup, cabled that before he left Prague his Czech friends had already begun to avoid him, saying it would be unwise for them to be seen with an American any more.

And so it goes. Until the coup, Czechoslovakia was the only country within the Soviet orbit where TIME & LIFE could be distributed freely. It was the only country freely visited by people from other Russian-dominated countries and, therefore, almost the last portal through which the publications of the Western democracies could find their way to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. As this letter goes to press, TLI has written Czechoslovakia off as another example of the fact, which TLI has learned the hard way, that the war of ideas is a real war.

Cordially,

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