Moscow Again Criticises Prague

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31763, 21 August 1968, Page 13

Moscow Again Criticises Prague

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

MOSCOW, Aug. 20.

“Pravda” yesterday stepped up its latest war of words against Prague with a charge that the activities of the enemies of socialism there were “not meeting the necessary rebuff.”

The scarcely-veiled criticism of the reformist Czechoslovak party leadership came in an article from two of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper’s top commentators, Vasili Juravski and Viktor Mayevsky, in a Praguedatelined dispatch. Their accusations were based on a long account of the alleged persecution of a

group of 99 Prague car factory workers who wrote to “Pravda” last month supporting the presence of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia.

Treatment of the 99, which appears to be building towards a major issue in tense Soviet-Czechoslovak relations, was one of the main props in a more sweeping “Pravda” article yesterday charging that anti-SociaUst liberal forces were stepping up their activities in contravention of terms of the recent Bratislava declaration.

The allegation that antiSocialist forces were “not meeting the necessary rebuff” was one of the main charges made by the Soviet Union and its four orthodox East European allies in their famous “Warsaw letter” to leaders last month. This letter caused a threeweek crisis which came to a

sudden—but apparently only temporary—end with the bilateral meeting between the Czechoslovak and Soviet leaders at Cierna Nad Tisou earlier this month, followed by the Bratislava summit

At Bratislava the Czechoslovak leaders joined their critics from the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany,- Bulgaria and Hungary in publicly, pledging amongst other things, to struggle against “bourgeois Ideology and antiSocialist forces.”

After a fortnight of oblique warnings that they should implement this pledge, the Kremlin is now in effect openly accusing the Czechoslovak leaders of being unable or unwilling to do so. The letter from the 99 was prominently printed in “Pravda” on July 30 during the Cierna Nad Tisou meeting. Until yesterday, it had not since bee'a mentioned here.

Yesterday’s article contained a long account of an alleged campaign against the signatories, and complained that it had continued, even after the Bratislava meeting. It said the workers had been subjected to attacks and ridicule at factory meetings, and criticised in the press for treachery and lack of patriotism for defending friendship between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Some of them, including both the chief of the deputy chief of the factory’s people’s militia, had been “dismissed from their work in social organisations,” “Pravda” said. The “Pravda” commentators said that in spite of a declaration last Tuesday by the ruling 11-man presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, “rejecting and condemning the undemocratic forms of the campaign which had ftveloped round the let-

ter,” the “persecution and humiliation of the workers who signed the letter is continuing. “Moreover, matters have evidently gone to the length that some groups of workers are being set against others, that people who courageously came out in defence of the vital interests of the working class are being subjected to direct repressions. “Such are the facts. They bear convincing witness that the enemies of the working class in Czechoslovakia are openly and impudently attacking its socialist achievements. Regrettably, these attacks are not meeting the necessary rebuff,” the “Pravda” article said. The Soviet commentators also complained that Czechoslovaks who had written to Western politicians supporting a liberal viewpoint had not been subjected to criticism.