‘Dubcek, Small-Town Politician’

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32381, 21 August 1970, Page 11

‘Dubcek, Small-Town Politician’

(N.Z.PA. -Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, August 20. The former Czechoslovak leader, Mr Alexander Dubcek, was treated like an animal on the way to slaughter during his enforced visit to Moscow after the Russian-led invasion of his country, according to a book published in London today

The book, the first full biography of the now disgraced Mr Dubcek since his downfall, says that he was in an advanced state of shock at the time he was arrested.

“What was. in fact, done to him is not yet clear,” says the British writer, William Shawcross. “But it is one of the most hideous and repulsive aspects of the invasion. . . All are agreed that he was treated more as an animal on the way to slaughter than as the legal head of an allied State. “He was sent back from Moscow on August 26 to destroy himself, his reform movement, and his following. He was sent back to exterminate bis ideals.” One of the basic problems,

according to the writer, was that Mr Dubcek did not rise to statesmanlike stature; he was essentially a small-town politician. Mr Dubcek himself admitted, after 15 months in power, that his reforms of Czechoslovakia’s Communist system had sometimes been “ill-adminis-tered”

The biography, simply entitled, “Dubcek,” was written by the journalist son of Lord Shawcross, Britain’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Mr Shawcross visited Czechoslovakia in July, 1968, a month before the invasion that led to Mr Dubcdk’s downfall, and returned 20 times for interviews with politicians, students, and friends of the Dubcek family.