Officials of ‘Prague Spring’ Defend ’68 Reform Effort

A group of officials in the “Prague Spring” government of former Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek have defended the reforms launched here 20 years ago and appealed for political rehabilitation and the right to participate in public life once more.

The officials, who were purged from the Communist Party in 1969, made their plea in a letter mailed to the Associated Press and other news agencies in Prague. They argued that the value of their reforms has been proved by “20 years of stagnation” since the reforms were abandoned.

The “Prague Spring” movement, designed to develop “communism with a human face,” began with Dubcek’s ascension to the national party leadership in January, 1968, and ended with a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion the following August.

The 43 people who signed the letter included former Communist Party members, government officials and the widows of several prominent leaders. Among those signing were Jiri Hajek, Dubcek’s foreign minister; Josef Spacek, a leading party ideologist of the period; Vladimir Kladac, the former education minister, and the widows of Josef Smrkovsky, a popular Prague Spring politician, and of Rudolf Slansky, a Communist leader who was executed in the Stalinist repression of the 1950s.

Most of those signing the letter have not been involved in opposition activities since their fall from grace. All live in Czechoslovakia, and none are under arrest.

They offered to take part in the current reforms here and urged Czechoslovakia’s 15 million citizens to follow suit. But they insisted that more must be done than what they called the current half-hearted steps, and they said Czechoslovakia needs “profound, revolutionary change.”

450,000 Ousted From Party

They also argued that everyone, including the 450,000 citizens expelled from the party in 1969, should be allowed to participate in political life.

“Nobody in our country should be punished for their thoughts, views and attitudes,” the letter said. It also rejected the assertion that the reforms undertaken in 1968 had to be stopped because they were “out of control.”

The seven-page document blamed the invasion for preventing the consolidation of the reform, which was still in its early stages. It argued that reforms could succeed today only if all citizens are guaranteed full legal and constitutional rights, and if the media and arts are completely opened and the “blank spots” removed from national history.

Dubcek was ousted from his position as party leader in April, 1969 and, the following year, was stripped of his party membership.

He was replaced by Gustav Husak, who resigned his party leader post in December, after nearly 20 years on the job, retaining the post of president. Husak’s successor, Milos Jakes, presided over the purges that removed Dubcek and the nearly half a million other people from the party rolls, including most of those who signed the letter made public Thursday.

There is little hope that the former party members’ appeal for rehabilitation will be satisfied.

Zdenek Horeni, the editor in chief of the party newspaper, Rude Pravo, said in an interview Thursday that “there will be no change in the interpretation of our evolutionary and revolutionary past.”

Horeni reflects the general hard-line interpretation of 1968 taken by the government.

A Rude Pravo editorial last week blamed Dubcek for letting reform “run out of control.”

The editorial said that comparisons between the Prague Spring and the economic reforms launched in the Soviet Union by Mikhail S. Gorbachev are a “gross, blatant and transparent lie.”