APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110010-2
The party under Husak took quick steps to regain close control of governmental and mass organizations. It replaced Dubcek's appointees to the cabinet ministries and to the top posts of the Federal Assembly with people responsible to party diktat. The legislature is again rubberstamping party decisions. Although the facade of federalization has been maintained, primarily to mollify Slovak nationalism, all important governmental decisions are made on the federal level. The actual implementation of national policies, however, as well as local administration, is generally in the hands of regional government hierarchies staffed by trusted bureaucrats. By 1970 the principal mass organizations, the National Front, the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement, and the Socialist Youth Union had again been fully subordinated to party supervision.
Reversing the Dubcek program to free the judiciary from political control, the Husak leadership has emphasized the judiciary's dual responsibility to enforce the party's "leading role" in society and to firmly implement the law. Liberal judges, including the entire federal Supreme Court, have been replaced with conservatives. While the regime has attempted to avoid the widespread use of police and judicial terror so commonplace under Novotny, Czechoslovak intellectuals charge that in those instances where the party feels its control to be particularly challenged, the authorities have been nearly as brutal as during the Stalinist era. Although these charges have not been verified, the tough new penal code and code of criminal procedure passed in early 1973 bespeaks the regime's determination to severely circumscribe the limits of permissible dissent.
This policy of alternating periods of repression and relaxation is aimed particularly at the intellectuals, and in some ways exemplifies the often seemingly contradictory facets of Husak's domestic policy moves. As early as 1970 Husak embarked on a campaign to make peace with the intellectual community, without whose support, he acknowledged, his goal of "reconciliation" could not succeed. With the purge of the more outspoken liberals completed, the regime sought to revitalize the country's cultural activity. Artists and literary figures who did not flee the country permanently or harm the "interests of the state" were granted an "amnesty" for their activities during 1968 and were encouraged to resume their cultural efforts. New publishing guidelines were drawn up favoring literary creativity, but proscribing any anti-Socialist works.
By late 1971, when the sham national elections gave new impetus to dissident activity by intellectuals, it was once again the stick rather than the carrot that seemed to dominate relations between the regime and the cultural community. This culminated in a wave of trials in mid-1972 when more than 50 dissident intellectuals were sentenced, some to relatively long prison terms. Though the trials seemed to generate little attention among the Czechoslovak public, exile intellectuals viewed them as clear reprisals against some of the leading lights of the 1968 reformist era. Nevertheless, the charges against the defendants were a compendium of illegal acts postdating the invasion, and thus technically in line with Husak's promise that no punitive action would be taken against any person for his activities during the Dubcek era.
By 1973, the pendulum appeared to have swung again, this time toward a less oppressive cultural policy. Husak's own intellectual status was underscored, and new reports were circulated claiming his consistent counsel within the party for patience in dealing with the intellectuals. This reflects Husak's policy of "differentiation," which separates the ex-reformers into an irredeemable "hard core," responsible for the events of 1968, and "honest Communists" who were merely duped and who can return to the mainstream of Czechoslovak life by recanting. Although most of the country's technical experts appear to have reached a modus vivendi with the regime, most creative artists and other intellectuals have resisted all the regime's blandishments and have boycotted the party-controlled cultural organizations. As a result, the country has become a cultural wasteland. Husak's policy preference for patient persuasion as opposed to oppression, is unlikely to become wholly applicable so long as dissident activity continues and is viewed by Husak's more conservative colleagues as a threat to wider domestic and foreign policy goals as well as to intraparty stability.
One of the most profound disappointments for the Czechoslovak population has been the reversal of the educational reforms initiated by Dubcek. In 1968 the traditional Communist educational system, which subordinated free thought to ideological indoctrination, seemed destined to end. In the liberal arts and sciences, in the universities and secondary schools, students and teachers alike had clamored for an easing of party controls over education, and for the open pursuit of knowledge and free exchange of ideas. Intellectual capacity was thought to have triumphed over political obsequity. Students wanted more autonomy in choosing their courses of study. Contacts with Western educators and methods were avidly sought.
Such expectations were shattered by the invasion. The regime has since ousted the professors and
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110010-2
