DUB

THE scene in the Czechoslovak city of Bratislava seemed an unlikely end to the long weeks of crisis and confrontation in Eastern Europe. As soon as the train arriving from the Soviet Union came to a stop, the leaders of the Kremlin bounced out of their coaches and began effusively embracing the leaders of Czechoslovakia. Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev planted smacking kisses on both the country's President, Ludvik Svoboda, and its First Party Secretary, Alexander Dubcek. Then, to the surprise of all, Brezhnev suddenly grabbed the hands of Dubcek and Svoboda and raised them overhead in a victory salute.

Judged by their ebullient mood, the Russians seemed to be celebrating a victory of their own. But the victory last week clearly went to the Czechoslovaks, who for weeks have been under brutal pressures from Moscow to abandon their program of democratic reforms. Earlier in the week, the largest delegation of the Soviet Politburo ever to travel abroad together went to the tiny railroad junction of Cierna nad Tisou in Czechoslovakia to try to force the regime in Prague to back down and reimpose many of the old restrictions on freedom that Dubcek has removed. When the confrontation ended, however, the Czechoslovaks had successfully stared down the Russians, stuck to their reforms, and emerged with their program virtually intact.

"We promised you that we would stand firm," Dubcek told his people in a radio message after the Cierna summit. "I will tell you frankly that you can be well satisfied with the results of this meeting. We have kept the promises that we gave you." In sympathetic Yugoslavia, Radio Belgrade announced that Dubcek had "successfully defended more than he has had to concede." Describing the dimensions of the setback to Soviet foreign policy, the station said that the campaign of pressure against the Czechoslovaks was "a blasphemy, a heavy political blunder and a failure."

Quietly Forgetting. Dubcek somehow convinced the Russians to quietly forget the demands made in a quasi-ultimatum issued last month after a meeting in Warsaw with their hard-lining allies. At Cierna, he successfully resisted Soviet insistence that he restore censorship and ban non-Communist political organizations. He rebuffed the Russian call for a permanent Soviet garrison in Czechoslovakia to defend the country's borders with West Germany. More important, he got the Russians to pull out at last thousands of troops that had come to Czechoslovakia in June for Warsaw Pact maneuvers and had never gone home. By the end of the week, Prague reported that the last units of Russian soldiers had finally left Czechoslovakia.

At the same time, Dubcek went to great lengths to assure Moscow of Czechoslovakia's continued loyalty to the Communist bloc. He pledged, as he has in the past, that his country would not suddenly change its trade pattern and would remain solidly moored in the Communist economic community. He also declared that the party would use its influence to discourage anti-Socialist and anti-Soviet broadcasts and articles, and that he would require all political associations to function within the party-dominated National Front. All these, however, were minor concessions --the price of preserving Czechoslovakia's cherished new society.

Passing the Word. The Cierna agreement was ratified in Bratislava, where party bosses from Hungary, East Germany, Poland and Bulgaria--Moscow's Faithful Four--got the news. Having decided against taking dire steps to halt Dubcek's program, the Russians passed the word to their conservative allies, who then gave their support to the Cierna accords. Despite stubborn resistance from East Germany's doctrinaire Walter Ulbricht, all six countries signed a lengthy declaration that recognizes the right of every Communist state to decide its own internal policies--free of interference--but spells out in detail the obligations to the bloc's alliances.

The surprising agreement, along with the obvious mood of reconciliation, seemed to suddenly bring to a close a crisis that had left Eastern Europe on the brink of disaster for weeks. When Communist parties in Western Europe opposed the Kremlin's pressures on Czechoslovakia, and Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu and Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito gave open support to Prague, the Russians suddenly saw that they were faced with a further schism in the Communist world--and backed away. All at once, press attacks on Czechoslovakia, which had grown to fever pitch in recent weeks, ceased not only in the Soviet Union but also in all the other orthodox Communist states, except East Germany.

Insistent Drum Roll. If the week ended in harmony, it began with an insistent Soviet drum roll. To back up the demands of the Politburo at the conference table, the Russians engaged in widespread military maneuvers, which the Soviet newspaper Red Star described as "the largest in the history of the Soviet army." Despite this obvious threat--and in many ways because of it --the Czechoslovak people drew together in unprecedented support of Dubcek. In a surely unique event in a Communist state, thousands of citizens knelt in churches across the country to pray for the success of their Marxist leaders. More than a million Czechoslovaks solemnly queued at rickety bridge tables on street corners, in shopping arcades and factory canteens, to sign a pledge of support for Dubcek as he prepared to meet the Russians for the summit confrontation.

Sleeping at Home. For sheer lack of elegance, the talks in Cierna will certainly rank among the most unusual in the history of diplomacy. Cierna nad Tisou (on the Tisa River) lies on the Soviet border at the start of a featureless, burned-out plain known as the Hungarian puszta. Each day the Russian delegation rolled into town aboard a diesel train with 15 dark green cars, their windows masked with curtains. They parked their combined hotel-headquarters alongside the blue electric train of the Czechoslovaks, each night bade their hosts do svidania, climbed aboard their own train and sped a bare mile across the border to dine and sleep in the security of their own country. The Czechoslovaks remained parked in the depot all night, the windows of their wagons-lits glowing during long strategy sessions.

The bargaining took place in a railway workers' social center, the Junction Club, a two-story yellow stucco structure across from the railroad station. Along one side of the table sat the eleven members of the Czechoslovak Presidium, President Svoboda and a staff of some 45 people. The Russians brought nine of the eleven Politburo members, backed by a 100-man staff. Their two missing members, Dmitri Poliansky and Andrei Kirilenko, were left behind to mind the Kremlin.

From the start, the Russians tried to intimidate Dubcek. When he climbed aboard the train to greet them on the first day, Brezhnev was hopping mad.

Noticing the presence in Cierna of half a dozen reporters and photographers, he berated Dubcek, accusing the Czechoslovaks of leaking information on the site of the talks. The Russians sought to keep the summit a secret to avoid having to face demonstrators. Local police, reinforced by Soviet security agents and 100 Czechoslovak soldiers, did their best to keep everyone out. But newsmen filtered into town by negotiating back paths in the woods, and a delegation of 200 brawny steelworkers pulled into Cierna's depot aboard a freight train with 38 cars. Draped on the cars were banners reading, in Russian, "Eto nashe delo [This is our affair]."

Personal Attack. In the first sessions, Brezhnev attacked Dubcek personally, holding him alone responsible for permitting "counterrevolutionary forces" in Czechoslovakia, and thereby endangering the security of the whole Communist bloc. Brezhnev asked for a total reversal in Prague's policy. He called for a purge of progressives in the Czechoslovak party, for the muzzling of the free press, for a crackdown on non-Communist political organizations, and for an agreement on the stationing of Soviet troops along the West German border with Czechoslovakia.

The Czechoslovaks did not flinch. Dubcek denied Brezhnev's charges. He stressed the unity of the country behind him and warned that abandoning his program under pressure would "kill socialism in Czechoslovakia." He invited the Soviet leaders "not to stay in Cierna but walk around the country at your leisure and see how much your fears are illusory." Such talk only angered the Russians more. At the end of the first day, they stalked back to their train grim-faced and puffed off to the Ukraine.

Strolling in the Sun. Czechoslovak hopes rose and fell with the changes of mood on what came to be called, after the Czechoslovak movie of the same name, the "Closely Watched Trains." Only a few leaks of what was going on at the conference cheered them. The Russians, it was reported, had been impressed by President Svoboda, an old World War II ally, who in polite but forceful terms had asked them to withdraw their troops from Czechoslovak soil. The people were encouraged, too, by pictures of Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin and other Politburo members strolling in the sun with the Czechoslovak leaders during a lunch break.

When the talks, which were supposed to last only one day, dragged into two and then three days, the Czechoslovaks became apprehensive. Brezhnev mysteriously took ill and returned to his train compartment on the third day. Some observers feared that the sudden departure was only a diplomatic tactic, and that Brezhnev was actually threatening to walk out and break up the talks. A banquet for the two delegations was canceled. But the talks went into a fourth and final day.

After the announcement that the leaders would move on to Bratislava for another conference, the country was confused. A restless, worried crowd of several thousand people assembled in Prague's Old Town Square. "Tell us the truth!" they shouted when National Assembly President Josef Smrkovsky came out on a balcony. "For how much did you sell us to the Russians?" "If I told you that I am not ashamed to look into the eyes of our citizens after Cierna," Smrkovsky replied earnestly, "would you believe me?" In his radio address, Dubcek reassured the people that he had not surrendered, but warned: "We want you to keep your heads and prevent spontaneous demonstrations from turning into anti-socialist or anti-Soviet excesses."

Time of Testing. As long as some 28 divisions of Soviet troops continue to patrol beyond Czechoslovakia's borders in Eastern Europe, the threat of military intervention will never be far away. For the moment, however, Eastern Europe's crisis seems to be over. Faced with a solid wall of opposition within Czechoslovakia and the support of Dubcek by other Communist leaders (both Tito and Ceausescu are journeying to Prague this week for a show of solidarity with Dubcek), the Soviets had little choice but to let Dubcek go his way--at least for a time.

His example, however, and his success at Cierna, is not likely to be lost on other Communists in Eastern Europe, or even in the Soviet Union. The time of testing for all concerned is thus far from over. Indeed, it may well be just beginning. Freedom is a high-spirited experience, and Dubcek has yet to demonstrate that freedom and Communism can be combined. The Kremlin seems to have given him a chance to prove it--if he can.

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