under the pressures, but his concessions may have been more verbal than real in an attempt to gain time.
The Communist governments of the Soviet bloc are responding in different ways to the Czechoslovakian developments. The East German and Polish regimes are dead set against the reforms and anxious to quarantine their countries against the contagion of democratization. The Hungarian, Rumanian and Yugoslav leaders look approvingly upon the new course while the Kremlin is watchfully waiting to see in what direction it will unfold and how far it will go.
As their conduct toward Yugoslavia in 1948, China in 1961 and Cuba since then demonstrates, the Moscow bureaucrats are capable of threatening and imposing severe economic reprisals upon workers states that refuse to kowtow to their dictates. Situated between the Soviet Union and Germany, Czechoslovakia is vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. However, the Prague leaders reportedly resisted a plan by the Warsaw Pact countries to hold military maneuvers in Czechoslovakia which would have put Soviet and East German troops on its soil at the most critical juncture of the new turn.
Czechoslovakia and Poland today represent the sharpest contrast in con-
ditions. In Czechoslovakia the liberalizers are on the march. With students and intellectuals in the forefront of a vast popular movement, the government is fos-— tering economic, political and cultural reforms. It is proceeding to rehabilitate the 30,000 victims of the Stalinist purges, beginning with Rudolf Slansky, former general secretary of the Communist party, who was executed after a frame-up trial in 1952.
In Poland, on the other hand, the Gomulka regime is repressing students, persecuting intellectuals, holding fathers responsible for the actions of their sons, dismissing them from their posts and expelling them from the party.
Ulbricht's East German government is no less alarmed about the effects of the liberalization processes in Czechoslovakia. A visitor was told: "Even if the bug does not spread here, and I don't think it will, we will still have to contend with a braking act with extra caution to avoid being accused of imitating the Czechoslovaks."
The Czechoslovakian events are bound to have a fallout in the rest of East Europe and play an explosive role in the months ahead. This is presaged by the expressions of support exchanged between the Polish and Czechoslovakian students despite the efforts made to keep them apart.
To prevent the spread of the insurgent spirit, and deter Dubcek from any accommodation with West Germany, the Soviet and East German leaders are considering extending substantial aid to Prague.
Dubcek's team is in midstream trying to navigate a difficult crossing. It has to steer between the hostile suspicions of the Soviet, East German and Polish leaderships on one bank and its inclinations toward greater freedom of action in foreign policy on the other. At home it remains beset by the Stalinist diehards who are on the defensive but encouraged by the Dresden meeting, and by insistent demands from the people for a definitive break with all the old policies.
The predicament of the new leaders was dramatized by two events in the past week. They are holding mass meetings throughout the country to enable the politically aroused sectors of the population to vent their grievances and articulate their demands.
At one such rally on March 20, attended by 16,000 young people, Joseph Smrkovsky, a member of the party presidium, was jeered when he criticized a proposed resolution because it omitted praise of Czechoslovakia's alliance with the Soviet Union. The resolution was finally amended by a compromise formulation saying that Czechoslovakia's geographical position in Central Europe made it essential that she maintain "equal and good relations with all neighbors, especially the Soviet Union."
At a similar meeting the previous week Smrkovsky did not oppose a resolution of support to the Polish demonstrators. (See "Novotny Forced Out as President of Czechoslovakia," World Outlook, March 29, p- 268.) This time, in deference to protests from Polish diplomatic sources, he opened the meeting by urging students to go straight home afterwards and refrain from marching from the hall to the Polish embassy, as some militants had planned.
A letter was sent to the presidium of the Communist party March 26, signed by 134 writers and artists, including the new president of the Writers Union, voicing their concern over the pressures exerted upon Czechoslovakia's delegation at the Dresden meeting. Party Secretary Dubcek had to take the unusual step of giving an interview to the official press agency to calm their fears.
On March 27 Czechoslovakia protested to East Germany over its interference in her affairs after the East German ideological spokesman, Kurt Hager, had criticized the reform movement at the congress of 1,200 Marxist philosophers in East Berlin. Hager later attacked Forestry Minister Smrkovsky by name for filling West German "militarist and revanchist" circles with hope.
This official objection is the most abrasive expression to date of the widening divergences between the East German and Czechoslovakian leaderships.
HELP FOR LONDON