Czech Communist Reshuffle Retains Basic Party Doctrines

The once-dominant Communist Party wound up an emergency congress here Thursday with a reshuffled leadership but few fundamental changes in its basic doctrines.

Although the party congress adopted a new program that promises to respect minority views, the delegates rejected calls to abandon Marxist-Leninist ideas or the basic principle of “democratic centralism,” which effectively prohibits internal dissent once party leaders make decisions.

The delegates’ main response to the collapse of Communist power here was a traditional one: They ordered a purge. The congress expelled one former leader and suspended 32 more, including former President Gustav Husak, former Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal and virtually the entire top leadership of the last 20 years. An investigatory commission will be set up to probe financial corruption by former leaders and recommend further expulsions, the congress decided.

Unlike Communist parties in neighboring East Germany and Hungary, the Czechoslovak Communists rejected suggestions that their party change its name.

The delegates also voted to disband the party-controlled People’s Militia. The step carried great symbolic significance but few practical consequences because the militia had been disarmed and effectively dispersed last month.

Separately, the new Czechoslovak government, which is dominated by non-Communist ministers, announced that it had agreed with the Vatican on the filling of five Catholic bishoprics that have long been vacant here. The government would provide the Vatican full leeway to fill positions as the church sees fit, Deputy Prime Minister Frantisek Hromadka said after returning here from two days of talks in Rome.

The government also announced the formal disbanding of the STB, as the secret police here are known. Police agents will be reassigned to new posts, with only a small force of experts kept as a national force to fight drug trafficking and smuggling, a government statement said.

The emergency Communist Party congress had been billed by party leaders as a key step toward regaining public trust and setting the party on the path to compete in free elections that are expected to be held here in the spring or early summer.

But it failed to meet the demands of reformers, and much of the debate seemed at times to have little connection with the nation’s current realities.

Many delegates “are still under an illusion,” complained Jaromir Sedlack, a leader in the Democratic Forum, the party’s reform wing. “They think we’re still quite important; they don’t realize we’re a minority, that the real power is elsewhere now.”

The congress avoided an outright split in the party, providing Sedlack and his fellow reformers enough party positions to keep them within the ranks. But its actions provided little evidence that the Communists will be able to stave off devastation at the polls.

Both mainstream and reform delegates conceded that the party would receive far less support than the roughly one-third of the vote that its candidates won in the nation’s last free election, in 1946.

“I think 10-12% maximum,” said Iva Strackova, an economist and party reform leader in one typical response.

Indeed, the best measure of the party’s loss of clout came when workers at the giant Palace of Culture, where the congress was held, announced that its deliberations would have to end because they refuse to work overtime. In the party’s heyday--only a month ago--such disrespect would have been unthinkable.

Today, however, the unthinkable has become commonplace here. Party leaders are discovering that most of their office buildings, including the ones that houses the party Central Committee, actually belong to the state, not the party, and that they are being evicted. Party officials have lost their bodyguards, special food stores and chauffeured limousines.

On Thursday, the party announced that it is asking its department heads to take a pay cut because of falling revenue. The current central staff of more than 9,000 people will have to be cut at least in half over the next few months, party spokesman Josef Hora said.

The Communists once claimed 1.7 million dues-paying members here, a number swollen by the need to belong to the party to obtain the most desirable jobs. Now, the ranks are shrinking too fast for party leaders to count.

Asked what the actual number of dues-paying members is now, one party official replied, simply, “God knows.”