558
VITEZSLAV NADEJE
published by the clandestine monthlies, prove that the official vote of
99.8 percent for the National Front candidates was rigged.
Husak's present position is unenviable. He is faced with a dis–
illusioned population and an unreliable Party that is worried about
ever gaining ideological supremacy over the "Right" (Jaroslav Kucera,
Tribuna,
the CC's weekly, December 1971 and February 1972). The
"sound core" of the Party "has not progressed or matured politically"
since the wheat was separated from the chaff, complains the Slovak
CP's daily,
Pravda
(December 1971 ). The Party is full of member;
who are ashamed of their membership. Some justify possession of a new
membership card by the argument that a nucleus of decent people had
to remain in the Party to curb the extremists. Many ease their con–
science by helping the persecuted reformers to find jobs or supporting
them financially, or by keeping ex-members informed of developments
inside the Party. Others, as
Tribuna
complains, turned political somer–
saults in order to save their skins.
The Party as a whole reflects the petty bourgeois values of the
society and i plagued by lack of discipline. Since the Party's Four–
teenth Congress, in May 1971, 400,000 members have not been very
active and 4,000 party orga nizations have held no meetings for months
on end (CC report ) . I t seems that instead of a solid bulwark against
revisionism, Husak has a fifth column behind him. In fact, even Brezh–
nev and Kosygin attacked the CPCS for its political, moral and eco–
nomic failings in January 1972. Hence the leadership is now adopting
a tougher line. Members are being given specific tasks in the struggle
against the "Right" so that each will be forced to compromise himself
and will be obliged to defend the Party's aims in his own interests.
Husak's own position is aggrayated by his growing conflict with
the STB.
At the end of 1971 the Soviet leadership decided on a decisive
blow to dissidents at home. At the same time Czechoslovak leaders were
ordered to silence the opposition in their country once and for all and
to keep information from being smuggled over the borders as this dam–
age to Soviet prestige was particularly unwelcome before the European
Security Conference. But long before the SO\"iet directive eighty percent
of secret police work, a good part of which expresses anti-Semitic
sentiments reminiscent of the fifties, had consisted of documenting the
activities of the "Right" from 1968 onward (disclosed by a Deputy
Minister of the Interior to the Defense and Security Committee of the
Federal Assembly ). One of the main sources of information are tele–
phone conversations: 30,000 telephones are tapped in Prague, a city
of one million inhabitants.
