Former Czech Activists Assail Repression By Prague Regime

Two Cambridge-area graduate students from Czechoslovakia said last night their country still remains in the grip of a repressive regime.

Speaking at a program of films and discussion at Cabot Hall, Karel Kovanda, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at MIT, called the current Czech government "the harshest, the most stalinist in all of Eastern Europe." Kovanda was chairman of the Union of Czechoslovakian Students at the time of the Russian intervention in August 1968.

He said, however, that organized resistance to the repressive policies of the present regime still exists. Although there is no armed opposition, a number of small groups have continued to disseminate reform-oriented propaganda, he added.

Jacques D. Rupnik, a second-year graduate student in Soviet studies, said that, after increasing police repression made public protest too dangerous a tactic, Czechs turned to widespread passive resistance.

Discontent

Rupnik cited a 40 per cent reduction in productivity between 1969 and 1971 as one expression of the dissatisfaction of the majority of the Czechoslovakian people.

The graduate students also showed "Seven Days to Remember," an underground Czech film documenting acts of resistance during the first week of the Soviet invasion.

The film emphasizes the almost uniformly non-violent reaction of the population. Individuals are shown barricading highways, tearing down roadsigns, and massing in the streets of Prague, but never battling the invading soliders.

Rupnik said that as the second largest military force among the Warsaw Pact nations, the Czech army, had it been mobilized, might have deterred an invasion, even though it could probably not have defended against an actual one.

After the intervention Bulgaria and Romania immediately mobilized their armies, he said, to discourage interference with reforms in their nations.

Kovanda said the most concrete action being undertaken by groups outside of the country to help restore political freedom in Czechoslovakia is the funding of underground organizations.