Page:NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SURVEY 18; CZECHOSLOVAKIA; COUNTRY PROFILE CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110008-5.pdf/19

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Angry crowd confronts a Soviet tank in Prague

months earlier, refused to name a new government. Leading Czechoslovak conservatives tripped over each other in denying complicity in or sympathy with the invasion. The National Assembly issued a ringing resolution of protest. Angry throngs, defiant radio and television broadcasts, and an irrepressible flood of hastily lettered slogans and posters ridiculed Moscow's lame justification for intervention. An extraordinary congress of the Czechoslovak Party—by name and composition an expeditious substitute for the party conclave previously scheduled for September—was convened in secret under the very noses of the occupation troops in Prague on 22 August. By nightfall, the assembled delegates had elected a new and overwhelming liberal Central Committee, reconfirmed Dubcek in his post as First Secretary, condemned the invasion, and adopted a resolution threatening unspecified "measures" if the Czechoslovak leaders being held in the Soviet Union were not freed.

The following day, President Svoboda, accompanied by Husak and an ideologically mixed group of other Czechoslovak leaders, flew to Moscow to demand the release of his colleagues and to negotiate a mutually acceptable solution to the situation created by the invasion. Fearing the outbreak of an uprising similar to the one in Hungary in 1956 and under sharp attack from both Communist and non-Communist critics abroad, the Soviets backed down. Dubcek and his associates were freed and brought to the negotiating table in Moscow. A compromise agreement, one which fell far short of meeting the Kremlin's original objectives, was hammered out, and on the morning of 27 August Czechoslovakia's preinvasion leadership team returned home—tired and discouraged, but intact.

Undaunted, the Soviets launched a determined campaign to undermine the Dubcek group's domestic position by forcing it to implement a number of unpopular measures. In this, the Kremlin was successful. Prague's actions in nullifying the work of the extraordinary party congress, signing a status-of-forces agreement authorizing the "temporary" stationing of Soviet troops on Czechoslovak soil, and creating a new and appropriately "balanced" eight-member body at the apex of the party hierarchy reopened old divisions within the leadership and disappointed the population. Although, as Dubcek had promised, a law federalizing the country into separate Czech and Slovak republics was duly enacted and implemented, bitter factional infighting made it increasingly difficult for him to preserve any other feature of his preinvasion reform program. Finally, in April 1969, he bowed to the inevitable and agreed to step aside in favor of Husak, Slovakia's postintervention party boss and by then the leading advocate of "realism" and "normalization" of relations with the Soviet Union. Subsequently stripped of his remaining party posts and recalled from honorable exile as Ambassador to Turkey, Dubcek was eventually expelled from the party altogether and relegated to a modest and obscure existence as a motor pool supervisor in the Slovak forestry administration, a job he still held in late 1973.

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