Prague’s Fast-Paced Politics Puts a Prisoner Into Power

While the pace of political change has been rapid here, for no one has it been faster than for 45-year-old Jan Carnogursky, a deputy prime minister in the new government.

In the space of only two weeks, the Slovak lawyer has moved from dissident to defendant to government minister.

For him, life began to turn on a Sunday evening two weeks ago in his Bratislava prison cell after he had been pardoned by Gustav Husak, then the nation’s president.

“The warder came and told me to dress and led me to an officer of the court,” the small, self-effacing lawyer recalled in a Saturday interview. “He said I had been pardoned by the president.”

It was a pardon that stemmed from an opposition demand for the release of all political prisoners.

While he had known of the groundswell of resistance to the repressive Communist regime, experiencing it outside of jail was something else.

“I was shocked,” he said. “Of course I’d had newspapers, but I wasn’t able to feel, inside, the atmosphere outside.

“I was released late in the evening. I took a tram home. I saw posters that said ‘Free Elections.’ When I was arrested in August, one charge against me was that I said I wanted free elections.”

The next evening he addressed a large anti-government rally in Bratislava, and within 48 hours of his release he was negotiating with the prime minister for political change.

On the eve of taking up his new position, Carnogursky said he was not interested in revenge. “Members of the secret police and wardens behaved in a correct way toward me,” he said. “I’m a lawyer. I’m used to suppressing my feelings.”

When Carnogursky was sworn in Sunday by Husak, it brought together the two opposite poles of Czechoslovak politics--the unyielding dissident and the man most closely connected with the hard-line Communist regime that followed the Soviet-led 1968 invasion.

Still, Carnogursky said beforehand, he would feel little bitterness when he shook hands with the man who symbolized the state apparatus that tormented him.

“Even Mr. Husak has spent many more years in jail than I have,” he said.

“I . . . remember that Mr. Husak was arrested during the reign of (the country’s first Communist leader) Klement Gottwald . . . (and) after Husak became someone important to political life, he was compelled to support Gottwald’s reign.”