Emigres Tiptoe Hesitantly Back Into Homeland : Czechoslovakia: A few of the estimated 100,000 who emigrated are returning to share in the remarkable political transformation.

Jaroslav Hutka just didn’t fit in after the Prague Spring.

Not that he was a political dissident, at least not at first. But the songs he wrote and sang were a bit unorthodox. And with his long hair and beard, he was different from the humorless men who took power in Czechoslovakia after the reform movement of 1968 was crushed.

“It was clear to them that I was not one of them,” he said Thursday over the kind of lunch that only a few weeks ago he thought he would never have again.

Hutka lasted longer than a lot of others; but eventually the pressure, the surveillance, the police interrogations and, finally, the threat of prison, convinced him it was time to leave.

Stripped of his citizenship, he climbed into his red Skoda on Oct. 17, 1978, and with his wife headed for the Netherlands. He was certain that the border crossing at Rozvadov would be the last he would see of his homeland.

Thanks to thousands of university students, who were in grammar school when he left, and to some of his dissident friends who managed to stick it out, Hutka was proved wrong last Saturday, when he became the first of Czechoslovakia’s well-known, post-1968 political emigres to be allowed to return.

A few others have followed in the heady days since, coming home to witness--and take part in--an extraordinary political transformation they hope will be more lasting than the one that occurred 21 years ago and shaped their lives.

Whether they will prove to be the vanguard of a mass movement remains to be seen.

To some officials, the emigres represent an important pool of talent that could help rebuild the national economy with knowledge acquired in the West.

“It would be useful for us and our republic,” said Valtr Komarek, head of the Economic Forecasting Institute and a supporter of the opposition group Civic Forum. “We will try to help them return.”

But Civic Forum complains that Czechoslovak embassy officials in some countries are refusing permission to political emigres who want to return.

It is not clear how many of the estimated 100,000 Czechoslovaks who emigrated during the post-1968 crackdown want to come home, even if the reforms continue.

“It’s only a few individuals who are coming back now,” an Interior Ministry official said Thursday. “It’s too early to know what will happen in the future.”

A diplomat from a country with a large Czechoslovak emigre population agreed with this assessment.

“The floodgates haven’t opened yet,” he said. “They may be waiting and watching.”

Some of those who have been allowed back into the country in the last few days have already left again because of commitments in the West. For example, actor Pavel Landovsky told the Socialist Party newspaper Svobodne Slova that he drove from his home in Austria to the Czechoslovak border Sunday almost as a lark. He had been turned away the day before, but this time he was allowed in.

“I came without even a toothbrush,” he said.

Hutka, the singer who went to the Netherlands, said that he too will go back, to his new home in Cologne, West Germany, although he now expects to spend about half his time here.

“I don’t think it will be a problem,” he said.

But even if they stay only a short time, these emigres are making their mark on the revolution of 1989. Hutka was scarcely off the plane from Cologne when he was whisked to Prague’s Letna Parade Ground, where he performed for more than 500,000 of his countrymen at a rally organized by Civic Forum.

His first song, written in 1972 and familiar from underground recordings to most Czechs at the rally, was about smiling faces and human freedom.

Hutka has also appeared on state television since his return, and last Tuesday he joined Landovsky and Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and Civic Forum leader, at Prague’s Theater on the Balustrade.

“Everybody thought it was a dream,” a newspaper writer observed. “Landovsky, Havel and Hutka together on the stage.”

Hutka, who was 20 at the time of the Prague Spring, did not believe in it at the time.

“When the Russians came, I began to believe that there was something in it,” he said. “But for me (the Czechoslovak reformers) were still all Communists. No better. So I couldn’t believe them.

“After the invasion came the question marks. What is the nation? What is our national identity? Before that I never thought of such things.”

He followed his own formula for survival: “You can’t fight them because they are too strong.” Besides, he said, “if you try to fight them, you are involved in their politics, so I had this idea--to find another world as if they weren’t here.”

He began to build his performances around a collection of early 19th-Century Moravian ballads. These, he said, along with new ballads, which he continued to write, “were part of our world, and this world was free of all those tanks.”

The ballads were not part of the accepted cultural agenda of the hard-line, post-reform regime, and that made them suspect. The pressure increased, and in 1975 Hutka was thrown out of the official Union of Performing Artists. This made his professional situation even more tenuous.

Then came the decision by many of his friends to sign Charter 77, the declaration of human rights. Within a few months, Hutka added his name, and the interrogations got worse.

“They wanted to know everything I knew,” he recalled. “I told them nothing, so they were very angry with me.”

The authorities opened a criminal case against him for engaging in “unauthorized enterprise.”

“At one moment, I was sure it was either jail or emigration,” he said. “The time was terribly difficult for me. People were very frightened. I decided, OK, I’m going.”

In the West, he said, he spent his time singing, writing and thinking. For a long period, he thought there was no solution, but “then Gorbachev came.”

He recognized Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a potent force for change, not only in the Soviet Union but in Czechoslovakia as well, but he thought the process would be slow.

“Even a month ago,” he said, “I thought it would take two or three more years. No, not that long ago--before Nov. 9.”

Nov. 9 was the day the East German authorities opened the Berlin Wall.

When his friends called from Prague and promised to organize a welcoming committee for him, he said, he thought: “That’s the way to do it. Alone I can’t do it. But with people around. . . .’ ”

He had second thoughts, he said, even as his plane neared Prague. He was not afraid, just curious.

Was he excited about coming home?

Not really, he said. Rather, he felt “absolutely peaceful, a nice, peaceful happiness.”