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respective electoral levels under party supervision. This phase also included public hearings at which each candidate committed himself to the program and answered citizens' questions. Finally, the voter "approved" the official slate of the polls.

Although the elections were patently rigged, the regime went all out to cloak them with an aura of democratic respectability. According to the tortured official philosophy, it is the voter's participation in the preelection process and his willingness to convince himself of the candidate's proper political caliber that gives the elections their "democratic" character. Indeed, it is the duty of the citizen, not merely his right, to countersign the slate, thus transforming what otherwise would be an official appointment into an "election."

The regime hailed the results of the 1971 elections as a measure of popular support for its policies. It claimed that 99.8% of the 10.3 million eligible voters supported the single slate constituting a "crushing defeat" for the regime's opponents, both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. In reality, there appeared to be a politically significant, albeit limited, popular response to a dissident (and naturally illegal) pamphleteering campaign calling on the population to boycott the elections. Some Czechoslovak Communist exiles later claimed that as much as one-quarter of the eligible voters either boycotted the elections or expressed their opposition by crossing off the names of all candidates on the ballot. The atmosphere of intimidation surrounding the elections, the much evident police presence at all voting places, and the subsequent reported arrests of dissidents charged with antielection incitement, bore out the public conviction that the elections were a poorly concealed sham.

D. National policies (C)

For a few brief months in 1968, the Czechoslovak Communist Party, under the leadership of Alexander Dubcek, initiated a sociopolitical program that if carried out would have profoundly affected virtually every sector of national life. Embodied in an Action Program, these new principles called for far-ranging policy changes which would have had the effect of "democratizing" communism. If it had been successful, the Dubcek "experiment" might have led to the emergence of a third type of Communist system which would parallel neither the Soviet nor the Yugoslav models and which might have eventually carried Czechoslovakia out of the socialist camp. His short tenure in office, however, during which his energies were largely directed to coping with enormous pressures from the Soviets and his domestic critics, did not permit Dubcek to implement many of his proposed reforms.

It has been Gustav Husak's task to establish a government system unencumbered by the atrophy that characterized the Novotny regime while avoiding the more extreme innovations of the Dubcek leadership. Fully conscious of the economic and social problems facing Czechoslovakia, Husak has tried to evolve a program that incorporates some of the necessary reforms proposed under Dubcek, but reforms that do not threaten Moscow's suzerainty over Eastern Europe. Thus, he has had to begin with a thorough and time-consuming housecleaning of the liberal elements in his country who were responsible for Czechoslovakia's "deviation" from the Moscow-approved line. To the extent that the deviation affected foreign affairs, which above all mirror Prague's intentions toward its socialist allies, the housecleaning has been particularly thorough. Husak has virtually surrendered, at least for the time being, sovereignty in molding Czechoslovakia's international posture, and has committed his country to accepting Soviet control of its foreign affairs. Within this framework, Czechoslovakia in 1973 was making strenuous efforts to reestablish its credentials in the international arena, primarily by seeking to improve its relations with the West, especially the United States.

Domestically, Husak has steadily enhanced his authority, and has resisted placing the government in the hands of extremist elements who advocate a return to the repressive and discredited methods of the Novotny regime. Since coming to power, Husak has earned the reputation of a shrewd practitioner of political gamesmanship. He has displayed his ability to recognize the limits of his personal power, to judge the proper moment for compromise, and to reverse himself for the sake of political expediency. His timely warnings in mid-1968 that the reform movement should not overreach itself, his about-face since the invasion on such crucial issues as federalization and the "invitation" thesis justifying Soviet intervention in 1968, and even his servitude to the men in the Kremlin are all the mark of a pragmatic, if opportunistic, man.

Husak's shrewd policies of satisfying the material wants of the population and portraying himself publicly as a moderate wishing to do the best for his people so long as they cooperate by not raising Moscow's ire have served him well in dividing his internal critics. Indeed, this basic principle of his

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110010-2