Sik Expelled From Party

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32119, 15 October 1969, Page 15

Sik Expelled From Party

(N.Z.P A.-Reuter— Copyright)

PRAGUE, October 14. Dr Ota Sik, the architect of Czechoslovakia’s economic reform programme last year, has been expelled from the Communist Party for failing to heed a warning on his activities abroad.

Announcing the expulsion last night, the party secretariat said that Dr Sik was expelled from the central committee in May because “his behaviou last year grossly violated party discipline and the duties of a Czechoslovak citizen—particularly abroad.”

But he ignored the warning and “continued his activity abroad which was incompatible with the principles and policy of the party, and this is why he was expelled from the party ranks at a meeting of the party secretariat,” the announcement said. Dr Sik, a former Deputy Prime Minister, who has been in Switzerland much of the time since last year’s Warsaw Pact invasion, was the highestranking official to be expelled from the party in the purge of reformists under the former liberal party secretary, Mr Alexander Dubcek. Mr Dubcek himself was removed from the 11-man ruling presidium last month, and another 30 progressives were demoted, including a leading reformist, Mr Joseph Smrkovsky, who was expelled from the central committee. Dr Sik, who after the invasion was accused by the Russian news agency, Tass, of “dragging his country on to the road of capitalism” with his policies, was a new-type Communist-trained economist who was convinced that the root of economic ailments plaguing Czechoslovakia was

rigid planning from the centre.

But his strong advocacy of the use of the profit motive and decentralisation became increasingly the target of conservative criticism. At the time of the invasion he was in Jugoslavia but returned to Prague for the central committee meeting at which he was expelled. In June, he resigned from his post as director of the Economic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science.