An Eminence from Moscow

Invited, unexpected and unwelcome all at the same time, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin flew into Prague last week to have a look for himself at what is going on in Czechoslovakia.

Only three days before, the liberalizing regime of Alexander Dubcek had announced that Kosygin would not be accepting any time soon its invitation to him to visit Czechoslovakia.

Plainly taken aback by his decision to come, the Czechoslovaks at first announced that Kosygin, as though he were any idle jet-setter, had merely slipped into town for a "short holiday" and a dip in the healing waters of the local spas. They had to admit soon enough that Kosygin really had come for "a continuation of an exchange of views" on Czechoslovak matters. At the first exchange with Dubcek, President Ludvik Svoboda and other officials, Kosygin reported that their reforms were "meeting with understanding" in Moscow--presumably a reassurance.

Clumsy Canard. Kosygin arrived at a time of rising anti-Soviet feeling in Czechoslovakia. Earlier in the week, that feeling had been exacerbated by an article in Moscow's Sovietskaya Rossiya that called Dr. Thomas G. Masaryk, founder of the Czechoslovak republic and the country's most revered historical figure, an "absolute scoundrel." The journal charged that Masaryk in 1918 paid a Russian terrorist named Boris Savinkov 200,000 rubles (then worth some $10,000) to kill Lenin. Masaryk's memory is enjoying a fresh outpouring of honor and homage in the wave of current reform, and Czechoslovakia's press reacted angrily to the Soviet charge. "An insult without parallel," said the newspaper Prace. Lidova Demokracie called the story "a gross falsification of our history" and "slander."

The Soviet charge was based on the confession, probably obtained after torture, of Savinkov at his 1924 trial that Masaryk had given him 200,000 rubles. Historians accept the fact that Masaryk gave money to a number of Russians for a number of reasons: to help them escape to freedom in Western Europe; or for cultural purposes; or to help get Czech troops out of Russia to continue the fight against Germany after the Bolsheviks opted out of World War I. At his trial, Savinkov himself testified that he did not know exactly what the money was to be used for, and even the official Soviet history of Czechoslovakia published in 1960 did not accuse Masaryk, a gentle, scholarly man, of plotting to kill Lenin. The charge was clearly a clumsy canard thrown in to aid Moscow's psychological warfare being waged against the Dubcek regime.

Questions Invited. Nothing so symbolized Dubcek's determination to press ahead with his "democratization" as the fact that last week, for the first time in 13 years, a Czechoslovak Communist leader held an open press conference, Western style.*Premier Oldrich Cernik welcomed some 100 Czechoslovak and foreign newsmen to the Presidium building in Prague for chocolate cookies, almond pastries, rich black coffee--and some give-and-take. Flanked by Ota Sik, Deputy Premier for Economic Affairs, Cernik first discussed the government's reforms. Legislation was being drafted, he said, to guarantee freedom of the press and the right of assembly, to rehabilitate citizens wronged by the repressive Communist regime of the past, to assure the rights of minorities and to set up a new electoral system. Then he invited questions.

What had been discussed when Cernik and Party Boss Dubcek journeyed to Moscow for a Kremlin conference the week before? "No question that could sow distrust was at stake. The role of the Soviet Union has been much overplayed." Were the "military maneuvers" of the Russian army in Poland over? "Why don't you ask the Poles?" Cernik insisted that Czechoslovakia would never alter its ties to Russia, but added: "We think we can contribute to the dismantling of the cold war." Cernik and Sik made plain that investments by the capitalist world would henceforth be welcome, announced that small, family-scale free enterprise would again be permitted in Czechoslovakia. Eventually, Sik said, he hoped to make the Czechoslovak koruna a convertible currency, and even to enroll his country in the International Monetary Fund.

Critical Test. Dubcek himself was busy trying to counter a growing mobilization of the conservative, hard-lining Communist bureaucrats still scattered in key positions throughout the government and economy. His first really critical test looms at the end of this month, when he intends to summon a Central Committee plenary session and try to force the resignations of some of the old guard among its 110 members. The conservatives, in turn, hope to have rallied enough support by then to turn Dubcek out of office and replace him with Alois Indra, 47, a onetime railway worker who sees things Moscow's way. He may get an open boost from Kosygin if Dubcek is unwilling to put the brakes on his reform program.

*Also for the first time, the party newspaper Rude Pravo invited its readers to weigh in with their views on the direction Czechoslovakia ought to take. The questions in the poll were nothing if not direct, including one that asked whether "an internal democratization process of the Communist Party is a sufficient guarantee for democracy."

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