Soviet Troops Scarce in Czech Town : East Bloc: The garrison’s low profile is meant to ease tension as the hard-line regime collapses.

As hard-line communism in Czechoslovakia went into its death throes last week, an eerie quiet fell over Mlada Boleslav, an industrial town just northeast of Prague.

Soviet troops, stationed here since 1968, simply disappeared.

“They went inside and stayed there for days,” Oldrich Kubala, an editor at the regional newspaper Zar (Light), told a visitor.

Soviet commanders said the move was taken as part of a concerted attempt by Moscow to reduce tension during the political crisis that preceded the collapse of the hard-line regime, but for many Czechoslovaks it carried a deeper message: The era of Soviet military intervention had passed.

Indeed, although uniformed Russians have reappeared in the town, people were speculating Friday about how much longer the Soviet garrison might be here.

It was a question virtually no one would have considered two weeks ago.

Few expect any immediate withdrawal of the 75,000 to 80,000 Soviet troops. Any significant withdrawal would be highly unlikely in advance of agreement in the East-West talks on conventional forces that are taking place in Vienna. But the collapse of the hard-line regime has raised the question of Moscow’s military presence for the first time in 21 years.

It was a Soviet-led invasion, in 1968, that crushed the Prague Spring--Alexander Dubcek’s reform program--and installed the hard-liners who wielded unchallenged power until two weeks ago.

In both Moscow and in Prague there have been calls from within the Communist parties to reassess the invasion. On Friday, the Czechoslovak party officially labeled it “unjustified,” and said the decision behind it was “wrong.”

“We cannot continue to go around this thing with closed eyes,” Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec said Wednesday.

Diplomats think that attempts by the Czechoslovak party’s new leadership to distance itself from those associated with the invasion is certain to intensify pressure for an early withdrawal.

If the decision that brought in the Soviet troops is wrong, people here believe, then their continued presence surely is, too.

The prospect of their departure has brought few tears to the eyes of people in Mlada Boleslav.

“If they left today, it wouldn’t be soon enough,” Jiri Boura, a long-distance truck driver, commented.

“The sooner the better,” a mechanic at the Skoda car plant said.

Even at Communist youth headquarters, where two weeks ago such remarks would have been heresy, officials nodded a restrained, almost embarrassed “yes” when asked if it was time for the Red Army to go.

“They occupy a lot of apartments, and there is a real housing shortage,” said Renata Cesakova, head of secondary school activities for the Mlada Boleslav region.

People here remember Aug. 21, 1968, the date of the invasion, the way Americans remember the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was a national tragedy, a personal trauma. No one has forgotten exactly where he or she was at the time.

“People without weapons tried to block the tanks,” the truck driver Boura, who was 25 then, recalled. “But they had to give up.”

Incidents of open hostility between citizens and soldiers are said to be infrequent, but the resentment persists. There are similar feelings in other garrison towns.

The commander of Soviet military forces in Czechoslovakia, Col. Gen. Edvard Vorobyov, told Britain’s Independent Television News in an interview that was aired Thursday that these feelings have come out into the open in recent days.

He said a group of children gathered the other day at the base of a regiment near Sumperk and shouted for the soldiers to go home.

Vorobyov indicated that the Czechoslovak authorities had asked the Soviet forces to stand clear during the recent crisis, to dispel fears sweeping Prague of a military crackdown.

“There was friendly advice for us to stop all movements planned for military training of our combat vehicles and armed personnel in the direction of Prague and other towns,” he said.

The Soviets are also reported to have delayed routine troop rotations to the Soviet Union scheduled for late November, apparently out of fear that the arrival of new forces might be be misinterpreted.