Moscow’s Push Seen in Prague : East Bloc: U.S. specialists believe the Soviets had a hand in the change. Policy-makers in Washington face new issues.

U.S. specialists say they believe that Czechoslovakia’s leadership changes Friday were encouraged by the Soviet Union, perhaps in an effort to clear away the last remaining trouble spot in Eastern Europe before the Dec. 2-3 summit meeting in Malta.

Over the past few weeks, the Soviet Union has demonstrated in a number of ways its interest in political change in Prague, Eastern European specialists said. The single most dramatic example was an interview broadcast over Leningrad television several weeks ago with Alexander Dubcek, the leader ousted by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

“It seems to me this wouldn’t have happened without internal reform in the Soviet Union and if the Soviet Union hadn’t actually been nudging things along in Eastern Europe,” one State Department official observed.

He added, “. . . Once the demonstrations started up (in Czechoslovakia) on a large scale, the Soviets probably didn’t want the situation to continue festering as they prepared to sit down with the President of the United States.”

Charles Gati, who is a professor of political science at Union College in upstate New York, said he believes that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is eager to show President Bush “that ‘we (the Soviet Union) mean business. These are not just words. We are for real.’ ”

Czechoslovakia now may confront U.S. policy-makers with some of the same issues they so recently confronted in Poland and Hungary: how to support and encourage the changes at a time when the United States does not have much money to spend.

“We will be facing the questions, first, of how to open lines of communication to the new people, and second, of how to see what we can do economically,” Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution said. “U.S. policy will have to consider many of the same things we have already been considering for the Poles and Hungarians.”

U.S. specialists, however, noted that Czechoslovakia is different in some ways from these other Eastern European countries.

“The opposition is not nearly so well organized as it was in Poland,” one State Department official said. “Until a couple of weeks ago, it was really just a handful of intellectuals, so there may be an uncertain situation for a while. We’re going to have to figure out who’s in charge.”

On the other hand, he added, “the Czechs have some good things going for them. They have a reasonably functioning economy. They don’t have as big a debt (as Poland).”

U.S. officials said Friday they were not particularly surprised by the resignation of Czechoslovak leader Milos Jakes, given the massive demonstrations in Prague over the past few days and the changes this fall in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Bulgaria.

“They’re joining the rest of Eastern Europe, and I’m sort of surprised that it took them this long,” said one U.S. official, who refused to be quoted by name.

Gati said he was not certain that Karel Urbanek--who was named late Friday to be Jakes’ successor as Communist Party leader--will survive in the post.

“I don’t give him (Urbanek) much time,” said Gati. “They had to reach pretty low in the party ranks to find him. These people in the streets (in Prague) don’t want some secondhand horse.”

However, one State Department specialist said Friday he understood that Urbanek was “definitely a reformer” who has close ties to Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec. Earlier this week, Adamec met with Czechoslovak opposition leaders and suggested that he differs with Jakes’ hard-line policies.

U.S. specialists said there have been a number of signs that the Soviet Union has been seeking change in Czechoslovakia. A member of the Supreme Soviet recently declared that he had been involved in the 1968 Soviet invasion, then called upon the current Czechoslovak leadership to resign.

“The Soviets made clear that their troops in East Germany would not be involved in any effort to put down the East German demonstrations,” Sonnenfeldt said. “And they (Soviet officials) may have said the same sort of thing to the Czechs.”

In Moscow, the Soviet press had progressively made clear that the Kremlin would like to see the Prague leadership resign, although it had been installed, in effect, by the Kremlin. For the past week the only question in the Soviet capital had been, “How much longer?”

On Friday, before news of the leadership resignations had been announced, the popular main evening news program showed hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Prague’s Wenceslas Square--with Soviet television’s correspondent reporting that the people were impatiently waiting for news of the expected changes.

When that news finally came, Radio Moscow and Tass, the official news agency, reported it as a bulletin but provided no details or commentary immediately.

Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, had made clear that Moscow’s sympathies lay with the people, not the leadership. Czechoslovaks had lost faith in leaders who did not match words with deeds, Pravda said, adding that this was a crisis of trust in the Jakes leadership.

“It is clear that people took the streets not at the instigation of the West, but because their own problems had piled up in the country,” Pravda said. “The society, as never before, needs a reasonable dialogue. It is very important that each side can express its point of view and listen to the other.”

Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief Foreign Ministry spokesman, quoted Jakes early Friday as saying that Czechoslovakia is standing “at a crossroads.”

“He said that long-term development was impossible without implementing reforms, and he spoke in favor of dialogue,” Gerasimov said, quoting from confidential documents. “This dialogue has begun, and we hope it will help neutralize the situation.”

Times staff writer Michael Parks, in Moscow, contributed to this story.