Into Unexplored Terrain

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

(See Cover)

Up the winding road to Hradcany Castle, which broods above Prague's Baroque towers and its wide, grey Vltava River, came a steady stream of Tatra limousines. As they had many times before, they bore the rulers of Communist Czechoslovakia to a meeting of the Central Committee, usually the most remote and tightly guarded of affairs. On this spring morning, however, the atmosphere on Hradcany Hill was more like the opening of a fair. The usual security guards were absent, and crowds of people wandered unhindered through the castle's many courtyards. As the Communist leaders arrived, they were greeted by whirring TV cameras, popping flashbulbs, microphones thrust into their surprised faces and reporters firing bold questions.

Last week's meeting was not only different; it was far and away the most historic meeting in the Central Committee's history--and a turning point for modern Czechoslovakia. Amid a display of press freedom and accessibility more familiar to Western politicians than Communist leaders, the party's top brass assembled to consider an "action program" for a democratic reform of Czechoslovakia that has been brewing during three stormy months of nationwide debates and mounting pressures. The reform harks back half a century in spirit to 1918, when Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points proclaimed the self-determination of peoples and enabled Czechoslovakia to be born as an independent state. This time, Czechoslovakia was announcing its own self-determination--a determination to regain control of its destiny and shuck off the worst features of an alien Communist system.

Wearing dark business suits and sober expressions despite the warm weather, the party leaders marched up the red-carpeted stairs in twos and threes and made their way inside to the massive Spanish Hall, with its high ceiling and Bohemian crystal chandeliers. When the tall, blue-eyed boss of the Czechoslovak Communist Party got out of his car, the crowd pressed closer for a better look and reporters broke into applause. Unaccustomed to such public displays, Alexander Dubcek, 46, merely tipped his grey fedora, smiled hesitantly and strode briskly inside. More than any other man in Czechoslovakia, Dubcek has planned, pleaded for and nurtured the sweeping changes that promise to alter the temper and quality of Czechoslovak life, and perhaps the nature of Communism in the rest of Eastern Europe as well.

Dramatic Changes. The vision of Czechoslovakia's future that Dubcek (pronounced doob-check) laid before his colleagues, in the form of a bulky, 70-page draft, calls for dozens of dramatic changes, including a major shrinkage in the Communist Party's own powers. Several weeks in the making, the draft would give real legislative powers to the National Assembly, which has long been merely a party echo, and even permit votes of no confidence in the government. Dubcek asked the Central Committee to rewrite Czechoslovakia's laws to assure everything from free speech and secret balloting to the right to emigrate and travel freely abroad. He urged a speedy return to a liberalized economy, greater independence from the state for industrial enterprises and a federal system that would give the country's Slovaks more power to run their own affairs. Within the Communist Party itself, dissenting factions would be allowed to develop and contest the leadership's views. Such national groups as student associations, farmers and unions would be freed of party ties and allowed to argue for their interests.

During his first 100 days in power, Dubcek has offered the 14,300,000 Czechoslovaks a bright and beckoning vision of how to take their own special road to socialism. In a country where for 20 years civil and personal liberties had been mercilessly squashed, almost total freedom of expression now reigns, the police have been put in harness and demonstrations of every sort can take place. Dubcek, who threw out the hardlining Antonin Novotny as party boss in January and as President in March, has transformed Czechoslovakia into the most liberal of Communist states. Hardly anything in Czechoslovakia is any longer so sacred that it cannot be questioned and, if necessary, changed. And the entire transformation has been worked without bloodshed or disorder.

Resolution to Reform. Censorship has been almost entirely lifted, and the press, television and radio have exploded in an orgy of free expression. Long-banned films, plays and books are blossoming into production. The country's judiciary has undertaken to review all cases heard in the 1950s in an effort to right legal injustices, and a special commission has been established to rehabilitate the thousands of victims of the Stalinist purge trials of that period. Church and clergy are fast being freed of restraints, and the Communists' phony religious front organization, called the "Peace Priests," is disintegrating. Last week the Czechoslovaks even had their first strike under Communism. Workers at an electrical-appliance factory in Pisek walked out in complaint against management--and did not come back until the manager signed a resolution to reform.

Police will now be required to wear numbered badges for identification. The party Presidium has even decided to postpone the planned May elections for local, regional and municipal offices until the end of June to give the authorities more time to liberalize the election laws. Novotnyites are falling right and left, quickly to be replaced by younger, more pragmatic men. Last week three top secretaries of the central Trade Union Council were forced to quit, the Czechoslovak Women's Union bounced its boss, the director of the secretariat for church affairs was ousted, and the Minister of Health was asked to quit his post.

Comradely Compromise. Relatively few men could have brought oft such changes with such calm and order. A tall, mannerly man with a receding blond hairline, Dubcek would be an unlikely choice for the task if only because he is a Slovak--the first ever to be entrusted with the most powerful office in the land. Though he has spent most of his adult life as a Communist apparatchik, he has none of the iron rigidity of that breed. Polite and softspoken, he is a master of restraint and poise, dislikes both dogmatism and pyrotechnics. A persuader rather than a strong-arm man, he consults colleagues before acting, feels that changes within the party should be worked out by comradely compromise rather than by dictation from the top.

Dubcek also believes that the party should win support among the people for its ideas; he seems genuinely to want his countrymen to have a greater voice in their affairs. "Democracy is not merely the right to utter opinions,' he says, "it also depends upon how these opinions are treated, whether the people really have a feeling of taking part in solving important social problems." To see that the Czechoslovak people get that chance, he left his family behind in Slovakia in January, moved alone into a downtown Prague hotel and began working 18-hour days on his reforms. Inevitably, since he wants to transform Czechoslovak society within the wide bounds of social ism, he is compared to the 15th century Czechoslovak Theologian Jan Hus, who tried to reform the Roman Catholic Church from within but saw his followers break away and form their own movement. Hus was burned at the stake. Dubcek does not expect any such fate--but he is feeling plenty of heat because of the course on which he has launched Czechoslovakia.

Spillover Effect. Dubcek has no intention of breaking Czechoslovakia's links with the Soviet Union and his socialist neighbors, but they view the events in Czechoslovakia with considerable alarm. They are all too aware that the success of Dubcek's reforms would almost certainly have a spillover effect, causing their populaces to seek more liberalization at home. When Dubcek was summoned to Dresden two weeks ago to tell party bosses from Russia, Poland, Hungary and East Germany just where he thought he was leading Czechoslovakia, he reportedly told them that he planned no big changes in foreign policy but intended to go right ahead with his internal reforms. During the summit, some 12, Russian troops were moved to Czechoslovakia's borders with East Germany and Hungary, ostensibly on maneuvers; they were later withdrawn.

Hungarian Party Theoretician Zoltan Komocsin warned that events in Czechoslovakia have "an anarchistic character," but the biggest storm broke last week when East German Party Ideologist Kurt Hager accused Dubcek and his men of "filling the West with the hope that Czechoslovakia will be pulled into the maelstrom of evolution." The remark reflected East German Party Boss Walter Ulbricht's fear that Dubcek's government may soon cozy up to West Germany for the sake of more trade and the special hard-money credits it badly needs. The Czechoslovaks were furious. Dubcek's government formally protested Hager's speech, and Radio Prague denounced "this inadmissible meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state." A second attack by Hager put a severe strain on relations between the two states, once such close allies.

Conciliatory Gesture. During the week, Russia denounced the West for speculating that it would ever move to hinder Czechoslovakia, proclaimed its undying "fraternal fidelity" for the Czechoslovak people. When it came time to pick a new President to replace Antonin Novotny, Dubcek decided to make a conciliatory gesture to the Soviet Union. At his request, the Central Committee nominated General Ludvik Svoboda, a liberal who enjoys wide prestige among the people and is particularly acceptable to Moscow because he commanded troops that served with the Russian Army in World War II.

Svoboda, who at 72 cannot be expected to serve long in the post, predictably announced that Czechoslovakia and Russia would always stand together. At week's end he was elected by the National Assembly, but his selection did not please everyone. Thousands of students conducted street rallies in Prague in support of their own candidate, a liberal intellectual named Cestmir Cisar, 48, who was until recently Ambassador to Rumania. Czechoslovakia's liberals, who earlier feared that Dubcek might have given in to the Russians at Dresden, also resented Svoboda's election as a sop to the Russians.

To Russia & Back. Czechoslovakia's whole history has been a fight to decide its own future, free from the oppression of the other powerful forces that have dominated its land. In the 9th century, when the Greek Apostles Cyril and Methodius spread Christianity among them in their vernacular, the Czechs and Slovaks were united in the powerful Moravian Empire. Later divided, they were ruled first by the Hungarians and the Holy Roman Empire, and then by the Habsburgs, who razed Bohemia's cities, slaughtered its landowners and persecuted the Hussites in a series of religious wars that plagued the country for 300 years.

The Czech revival began only in the late 19th century, thanks largely to the industrialization that developed in Bohemia and Moravia to a far greater degree than elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the empire was carved up after World War I, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, a tolerant and tenacious philosophy professor who had worked for years for Czech independence, talked the victors into creating Czechoslovakia as an independent state. Between the wars, Czechoslovakia was the only state in central Europe that consistently maintained a parliamentary democratic form of government.

It was during those years that a Slovak emigrant to the U.S., dissatisfied with his lot as a carpenter in America and attracted by the prospects of the new united Czechoslovakia, returned to his native land. He was Alexander Dubcek's father, Stefan Dubcek, and his return meant that his son missed becoming a U.S. citizen by a matter of months. Shortly after Alexander's birth in the Slovakian village of Uhrovec, the elder Dubcek, embittered by the difficult conditions that persisted in Slovakia, became a pioneer member of the newly formed Czechoslovak Communist Party. In 1925, following an appeal to help build the first socialist state, he uprooted his family once more and moved to the Soviet Union, where he founded a cooperative in Russian Asia with 300 other Czech Communists.

Alexander Dubcek grew up practically on the Chinese border, went to high school in Frunze. When he was 17, his father was kicked out of Russia during the Stalinist purges, and the family returned to Slovakia. There young Alexander joined the outlawed Communist Party and went to work as an apprentice machine locksmith at the Skoda munitions factory.

Police Terror. Dubcek was still there when Czechoslovakia's fledgling experiment in parliamentary democracy was ended by the Munich pact of 1938, which enabled Hitler to march into Czechoslovakia while the Western powers looked the other way. The Czechoslovaks justly felt betrayed by the West, but they put up little resistance at the takeover or during the occupation. One exception was the Slovak uprising of 1944, in which both Alexander Dubcek and his brother Julius fought the Germans in the mountains; Julius was killed and Alexander was wounded in the leg. The Czechoslovaks were further embittered when General Patton's Third Army rumbled to the outskirts of Prague, only to stop and, following an agreement between the Allied commanders, stand off while the Russians were allowed to liberate the city.

In agreement with Moscow, the Czechoslovak government that had spent the war years in exile in London returned to Prague in 1945. Eduard Benes became President and Jan Masaryk Thomas' son, Foreign Minister: the Communist Party leader Kiement Gottwald, who had been in exile in Russia was appointed Vice Premier and, a year later, Premier. In free elections held in 1946, the Communists won 38% of the vote, Benes party only 26%; the rest was spread through a group ot splinter parties. A coalition government was formed, and in 1947 it decided to accept U.S. aid under the Marshall Plan Stalin furiously forced the government to back down, but his suspicion of the coalition had been confirmed; he decided to do away with it.

When twelve non-Communist ministers resigned in 1948 in protest against Communist infiltration of the police, the Communists saw their chance. They seized virtual control of the government took over all mass communications and held rigged elections with only one list of candidates. Foreign Minister Masaryk fell to his death from his third-floor apartment window; the Communists said that his death was suicide, but much of the world believed that i was murder. Gottwald soon initiated a strongly Stalinist policy. He carried out mass arrests of "bourgeois" politicians and intellectuals, suppressed the Catholic Church (arresting most of its bish ops closing its seminaries and disbanding all religious orders), nationalized industry, collectivized agriculture and made police terror the law of the land.

At the insistence of the Kremlin Gottwald viciously purged the party in 1951 and 1952, executing eleven top Communists for Titoism and jailing hundreds more. Prague's police chief at the time particularly praised the city's Communist Party boss, a fellow named Antonin Novotny, for his "outstanding role in unmasking the conspirators." When Gottwald died in 1953, Novotny cannily got himself put in temporary charge of the party secretariat while the party was debating a successor. No one was ever able to dislodge him, and a few years later he also grabbed the presidency for himself. Stalin, too, died in 1953, and it is one of the cruelest tricks that fate played on Czechoslovakia that a Stalinist rose to power in the very year of his death. In 1955, Novotny had a huge statue of Stalin-reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world--unveiled in Prague on the commanding heights overlooking the Vltava River.

Striking a Truce. Novotny followed a rigidly orthodox Stalinist line. In no country behind the Iron Curtain, with the possible exception of Albania, did Khrushchev's destalinization speech at the Soviet Party's 20th Congress in 1956 have so little impact. Novotny banned books, plays and films, disciplined authors and artists and succeeded in finally strangling, by dogmatic ideas and rigid central controls the once robust Czechoslovak economy. When Czechoslovakia's much abused economy plunged into its worst crisis since the war and Khrushchev pushed his anti-Stalinist campaign farther, even Novotny had to knuckle under, the monumental statue of Stalin removed, was also forced to drop some of the more notorious Stalinists from Czechoslovakia's Communist leadership.

One such vacated post went to Alexander Dubcek. Shortly after the Communist takeover by Gottwald, Dubcek had become a full-time apparatchik, a professional Communist Party functionary. He was too junior an official to be seriously affected by the Stalinist purges of Gottwald and successfully es caped too close an association with the early repressions of the Novotny regime by spending three years--from 1955 to 1958--at Moscow's party political college. On his return to Slovakia, he was made regional secretary for the capital of Bratislava, and in 1960 he moved to Prague as secretary of the Czechoslovak Central Committee. Two years later, at the age of 40, he be came one of the chosen ten on the party Presidium. When Novotny was forced to drop the Slovak secretary, an arch-Stalinist, the highest post in the Slovak party went to Dubcek.

Once in a position of real power, Dubcek almost immediately began to distance himself from Novotny's line. One of his first actions as leader was to strike a truce with the Slovak writers and intellectuals, who thenceforth had wide freedom of expression. He also identified himself with the new economic theories that had begun to be proposed in Czechoslovakia by Professor Ota Sik (TIME, Nov. 11, 1966) and his colleagues at about the same time as, or even before, Evsei Liberman took up the cudgels for economic reform in Russia. As time went by, the quiet Slovak grew more confident and self-assertive and slowly emerged as a strong critic of Novotny's policy.

Pressured on all sides for reform and liberalization, Novotny adopted a carrot-and-stick technique. He gave ground to his critics when the pressure seemed irresistible, then unhesitatingly reached for the stick when he felt that things had gone far enough. He thus permitted a sudden flowering of imagination in Czechoslovak art and literature, allowing Franz Kafka's work to be published again, films to portray romantic love and other "bourgeois" themes and biting satire and protest to appear in literary journals. But he continued to make intermittent crackdowns on writers and intellectuals, banning books, films and magazines that dis pleased him. He also gave Ota Sik the green light to put some of his reforms into effect--including a greater stress on profits and bonuses and other incentives for workers--but hampered and slowed them down before they could really do any good.

Worst Insult. The disaffection with Novotny came to a head in the sum mer and fall of 1967. At a congress of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union, 11beral writers rose one after the other to denounce the regime for impoverishing the country's literature through censor ship and for brazenly rewriting its his tory Novotny struck back by banning the liberal journal Literdrni Noviny and blocking the election of liberals to the Writers' Union governing board. Even worse, he incurred the enmity of the students by sending his police to break up a march of 1,500 students complaining about a power failure at Prague's Technical Institute. The brutality brought out other students, and a series of demonstrations and repressions followed.

Against this background of swirling unrest, Alexander Dubcek entered the fray, carrying the banner of Slovak nationalism. As party boss of Slovakia, he rose at a Central Committee meeting in October and launched a fiery polemic against Novotny for breaking his promises and neglecting the development of Slovakia. In a highly heated exchange, Novotny called Dubcek a "bourgeois nationalist," one of the worst insults in the Communist lexicon. Dubcek began working behind the scenes to oust Novotny from party leadership, gradually bringing together dissident Slovak leaders, university officials, economists and other liberals. When Novotny went to Moscow in November for the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary, he peevishly excluded Dubcek from his official party. It was a major mistake. Left at home with all the dissidents, Dubcek whipped them into a unified opposition. When Novotny returned home, they felt strong enough to demand his resignation.

Novotny tried to relieve Dubcek of his Slovak post, but the Slovaks would have none of it. Finally, after Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev flew into Prague in a belated attempt to save him, Novotny resigned the party job in January, and Dubcek was elected to replace him. Even then, Novotny did not completely give up. His allies in the Defense and Interior ministries put to gether desperate plans for a coup, and at least one tank battalion was ready to roll into Prague on Novotny's behalf. But the coup fizzled when other commanders demanded written orders from the Central Committee before moving. (Major General Jan Sejna, then one of the architects of the coup, defected to the U.S.) By the time the party leaders gathered in Prague for festivities marking their 20th year of power in February, a public drive to force Novotny's resignation as President had already sealed his fate.

Butterflies as Bras. While it took a hardheaded politician like Alexander Dubcek to push through reform, it was Czechoslovakia's writers and artists who created the climate for it. Through 20 years of Communist rule, they had been more daring and less puritanical than their Communist colleagues almost anywhere else. Many of them enjoyed the privileges offered them by the party--free tickets on the national railways, for example--and went on paying homage to the approved art form of socialist realism. But Czechoslovak intellectuals have a long tradition of fighting political authority, and even under Novotny they constantly pushed to extend the bounds of the permissible. They succeeded in getting a surprising number of their works published, but for the most part they wrote secretly, kept a rich lode of manuscripts in their desk drawers. Currently, the intellectuals are celebrating Dubcek's promise to prevent any future censorship by taking them out again. "It is the end of an era," says Novelist Ludvik Vaculik, an editor of the journal Literarni Listy, the liberated successor to the banned Literdrni Noviny.

Also despite Communist rule, Czechoslovakia managed to produce a wealth of talent in film making. The country's "New Wave" of directors flows out of the FAMU academy in Prague, one of the best and toughest schools for cinema art in the world. Among the most audacious of the school's products is Director Vera Chytilova, whose dazzling photography and experiments in surrealism amount to nose thumbing at the party's effort to dictate style in art. Her Daisies, for example, is a plotless romp of two teenage girls whose stunts include holding up butterfly specimens in place of their bras, swinging from chandeliers and eating food ads instead of food. The work of Milos Forman has helped to make Czechoslovak films popular abroad; his Loves of a Blonde was a human, tender, wry love story of ordinary people with ordinary emotions that had no socialistic message to dull it; it appealed to people everywhere. One of its features: the first nude love scene in the history of the Czechoslovak cinema. Other top films range in style from Vojtech Jasny's fantasy about a cat with magic glasses who sees through human deceptions, When the Cat Comes, to Jaromil Jires' charming record of a couple's reminiscences on the eve of their first child's birth, The First Cry.

Since 1954, the Czechoslovak directors have carried off no fewer than 35 major international prizes for their films. The Czechoslovaks are also pacemakers in new screen technology, as illustrated by two highly successful experiments at their Expo 67 pavilion. Packed audiences were all delighted with the "Kinoautomat," which enabled them to affect the outcome of a movie's plot through an electronic vote, and with "Polyvision," a technique that projected a series of synchronized patterns and images on more than 100 small, moving screens. Many people thought that the pavilion, which cost more than $10 million, was the fair's best.

Biting Satire. These days, Czechoslovakia's writers specialize in biting satire on Communist bureaucracy. Their work is in the tradition of Kafka and Karel Capek, whose play R.U.R. first introduced the concept of a robot. In The Memorandum, a popular play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smocek, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways and hedges, which represent bureaucracy. While an amused keeper watches with his vicious dog, they crawl piteously about, toss out the bones of their dead comrades and conduct absurd conversations.

None of the better writers seems to have written even a line in praise of the triumphs of socialism. The popular Bohumil Hrabil's erotic stories about barflies, criminals and layabouts (The Pearls and' The Palaver ers) are filled with surrealism and black humor. Novelist Vaculik writes about languid Czechs such as the farmers in The Axe, who are brutally herded into Communist collectives. Novelist Ladislav Mnacko, who went to Israel in protest against Novotny's repression last fall, writes in Delayed Reports about tortures and rigged trials that he has seen as a journalist. In his A Taste of Power, Mnacko describes an apparatchik whose character is twisted by power.

But a sophisticated and relatively free cultural life has been of no help in solving Czechoslovakia's dire economic problems. Once a highly industrialized country that had a healthy trade with the West, Czechoslovakia has seen its economy warped and weakened under Communist rule. For too long it has been tied to barter agreements with the Soviet Union; shielded from competition, it allowed its industries to become sluggish and 'grossly inefficient. Forced to concentrate on providing iron, steel and heavy machinery for the Russians, it did not bother to keep up the quality of its other products or develop new ones that could be sold in world markets. Mismanaged by Communism's central planners, the economy simply became outmoded. In 1963, it even registered a negative growth rate.

Professor Sik and his colleagues will play a big role in Dubcek's new Czechoslovakia. Under the New Economic Plan that they have proposed, sweeping changes will be made in the economy. Wholesale prices will be determined by market forces instead of party bureaucrats, and incentives will be introduced for both workers and management. Plant managers will have the power to fire unnecessary workers, to reinvest profits or to distribute them as bonuses to the workers. One of Czechoslovakia's main needs is to catch up with the West in technology and become competitive again in markets outside the Soviet bloc. Since the country lacks credits in the West, Sik will doubtless urge a quick expansion of trade with Western nations to pay for the sophisticated machines that the country needs for modernization and to buy more of the top-quality consumer goods sought by the people.

While the job of reconstructing Czechoslovakia's economy is going on, Dubcek's government will be constantly under the shadow of the Soviet Union. Russia really does not need to march troops into Prague if it becomes displeased with Dubcek and his regime. For one thing, it is not anxious to risk another Hungary while it is getting propaganda mileage out of the U.S.'s problems in Viet Nam. For another, the Russians now have such a firm grip on the Czechoslovak economy that they could badly damage it solely by economic reprisals. "Let us not forget," said the popular Prague TV commentator Milan Weiner, "that nine out of ten cars here are driven on Soviet gasoline, two of every three rolls are baked from Soviet flour, and that the gigantic metallurgical factories would stop in a few days if the supply of Soviet ore were interrupted."

For this reason and for many others, Dubcek faces the delicate job of toeing a fine line between perilous extremes. He certainly wants to rebuild his country's bridges to Western Europe, pursue a more neutral foreign policy and promote more trade with the West--but he dare not invite Russian wrath. He must move ahead quickly enough with his reform program at home to satisfy the progressives, who have tasted their first real freedom in 20 years and now want democratic institutions to go with it. But he cannot alienate Czechoslovakia's considerable number of convinced and dedicated Communists by allowing criticism of the party and its creed to go to anarchic extremes.

More Heady. After years of waiting and watching liberalization spread through other Communist lands, the Czechoslovaks have finally moved at their own supreme moment and in their own manner. One of the most hopeful signs for the ultimate success of their revolution is the amount of participation by the people. Television has brought the winds of change into most of their homes. Throughout the country, thousands upon thousands of Czechoslovaks have flocked to meetings to air their opinions, have signed petitions supporting Dubcek, deluged government offices, radio and TV stations with calls, and even marched in the streets. Because it offers a socialist form of democracy so far unequaled anywhere in the Communist world, Czechoslovakia's revolution may have a far more lasting impact on Communism than either Tito's breakaway from the Kremlin or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. "It lies upon us, on Czechs and Slovaks," says Forestry Minister Josef Smrkovsky, "to enter courageously into unexplored terrain."

At week's end there was dramatic evidence of how far that exploration has already gone. More than 1,000 students poured into the streets of Prague after dark to protest the choice of General Svoboda as President because of his past Soviet ties. Angry and upset, they marched to the Communist Party headquarters and shouted for Alexander Dubcek to show himself. It was midnight. In the past, the students would either have been clubbed to the ground or, at the very best, ignored. This time, no one interfered with them. What was more, Debcek quickly appeared before them in the street. "What are the guarantees that the old days will not be back?" one student asked him. "You yourselves are that guarantee," replied Dubcek. "You, the young." Then, as if mulling over all his country's painful history, he said: "Can the old days come back again? There is only one path, and that is forward."

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