APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110008-5
Despite the apparent urgency of the need to correct the "distortions" of the Dubcek era, Husak sought to establish a relatively moderate regime, one which would gradually win both popular acceptance and support by turning back the clock as gently and selectively as possible. In this, he was hampered to some degree by his own authoritarian bent, a trait which was reflected in his willingness to employ firm and occasionally brutal methods in suppressing the open manifestation of dissent which marred his early months in office. More important, however, his room for maneuver—never very great—shrank markedly as the forced exodus of liberals from public life gradually denied him the traditional centrist option of playing both ends of the political spectrum against each other. Husak's problems on this score were compounded by the Soviets who, suspicious about his reformist past and true intentions with respect to the future, not only withheld the support he needed to consolidate his domestic position but also actively sought to prevent him from becoming too powerful by giving measured encouragement to his hardline critics. In keeping with this strategy, flattering attention was paid to prominent conservatives, especially to those like Alois Indra and Vasil Bilal who were potential contenders for party leadership, and their willing cooperation was enlisted both in keeping a close watch on Husak and in prodding him to further rapid compliance with Soviet wishes.
Because of these pressures, Husak was forced into a series of damaging political retreats. He yielded to his opponents on some key cadre appointments. Bit by bit, he backed away from his early positions on a number of vital issues, including his initial and highly popular contention that the 1968 intervention has been both uninvited and unneeded, his promise that there would be no massive purge of the party membership, and his advocacy of a policy of "reconciliation" with the deposed liberal community. Indeed, as he shifted toward a more orthodox and conservative posture, his policies at times became indistinguishable from those of his hardline rivals.
But Husak's retreat never became a rout. A tough and battle-scarred master of the art of political survival, he yielded just enough to steal his conservative opponents' thunder and to bolster his standing with Moscow. By so doing, he was able to prevent his rivals from converting the party purge of 1970 into a witch-hunt that would have deprived the organization of its mass character and reduced it to an elite core of hardliners. He also managed to stave off demands for Stalinist-style political trials and for a wholesale purge of technicians, managers, and other members of the "technical intelligentsia." In late 1970, he even succeeded in getting Moscow to agree to the removal of two of his more troublesome domestic enemies: Czech Interior Minister Groesser and General Rytir, Prague's representative in the Czechoslovak-Soviet Military Liaison Office. Shortly therefore, following new concessions designed to satisfy Moscow's remaining minimum requirements for political normalization (most notably, the publication of two major party documents sanctifying a Soviet-approved explanation of the origins and nature of the country's recent internal crisis), political infighting in Prague began to taper off.
By late May 1971, when the long-postponed official 14th Congress of the Czechoslovak Party was convened to proclaim the defeat of "revisionism" and the advent of a hopeful new era of solid "socialist construction," the continuation of Husak's tenure as party chief was no longer in doubt. The thoroughness with which he had dismantled the liberal movement and his firmness in quieting public dissent had left his conservative opponents no lever with which to challenge his position. Moreover, the dedication with which he had aligned Czechoslovak policy with Soviet interests and his personal allegiance to Brezhnev had earned him the all-important backing of Moscow. The issue on which he had appeared most vulnerable—his failure to sanction the Warsaw Pact's military intervention in 1968—had been largely diluted by his public accession at the Soviet Party Congress a month before to the thesis that the invasion had been mounted in response to "appeals" by true Czechoslovak Communists.
For the most part, the 14th Congress was a pro forma affair, notable primarily for its display of unity within the top leadership. Husak was duly reconfirmed in office and subjected to some warm words of praise from Brezhnev. The changes made in the party leadership and organization were minor, designed either to tie up loose ends remaining from the reform era or, like according Husak the Soviet-style title of general secretary, to underscore Prague's loyalty to the U.S.S.R. Perhaps the most significant of these moves was the decision to recentralize the power structure by abolishing the Czech Bureau—a stopgap body created after the invasion by reformists attempting to federalize the party around equal Czech and Slovak organizations—and by returning the Slovak Party to its traditional subordinate, albeit separate, status.
Despite his emergence as undisputed primus inter pares, however, the congress was not an unqualified personal success for Husak. For all their pomp and circumstance, the proceedings had done nothing to improve his domestic popularity or to decrease his dependence on Moscow. Quite the contrary. Not only
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110008-5
