Ex-Czech Leader Dubcek Asks West’s Support for Gorbachev

In his first interview with an American publication since Soviet tanks swept him from power in August, 1968, Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubcek has appealed to the West to support the reform program of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“I support Gorbachev’s policies unconditionally,” Dubcek told Life magazine. “ . . . His programs should be supported in all ways--economically, politically, culturally. He should be supported also by Western democracies.”

The former first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party has kept silent for nearly 20 years. In a brief interview with the Italian Communist Party newspaper L’Unita in January, he said he found “a profound connection” between Gorbachev’s program and the “Prague Spring” reforms he had supervised. Life’s interview, appearing in the July issue, was conducted in Prague through an interpreter by Life correspondent Lisa Distelheim.

Dubcek defended his 1968 reforms as “necessary,” saying, “There is nothing to regret.” Since the Soviet-led invasion he has lived in Bratislava, he said, supervising mechanics in a forestry office and then working as a mechanic himself before his retirement in 1981. “I have had a hard life,” he told Distelheim, but “they haven’t killed me.”

“I have been under surveillance all the time” since 1968, Dubcek said. But he added that he has no intention of leaving Czechoslovakia, saying, “It is my home.”