EAST EUROPE BRANCH NOTES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79B00864A001400010062-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: T
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 11, 2006
• Sequence Number: 62
• Publication Date: April 22, 1974
• Content Type: NOTES

Approved For R'as 08644"M1400010062-8
#53
State Dept. review completed
EAST EUROPE BRANCH NOTES
25X1
IAprII 22, 1974
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Liberal Writers Offered Travel Passorts
Prague has offered travel passports to three liberal
Czechoslovak writers who have the opportunity to teach in
the West.
Jiri Hochman, a former editor with Rude Pravo, has
already received his passport and will apply without delay for
an exit visa. Hochman has told the US Embassy in Prague that
fellow writers Milan Kundera and Pavel Kohout have also
been offered passports and the possibility of permission to
go abroad to teach.
Approved For Release 2007/03/06 : CIA-RDP79B00864A001400010062-8
 Approved For Rabe
Hochman attributes the offers in part to the precedent
Moscow set in the Solzhenitsyn case. He said he had previously
refused an offer of an emigration passport, but a travel
passport implies the legal right of return to Czechoslovakia
at any time. Another factor impelling Hochman to leave is
that the police, who interrogated him and offered the
passport, implied that he risked being charged with complicity
in the "theft and removal to Austria" of the ashes of Josef
Smrkovsky, President of the Czechoslovak parliament during
the Dubcek era,who died in January.
The general feeling among blacklisted intellectuals,
according to Hochman, is that Czechoslovakia is headed further
into a severe cultural and political "dark age" in which a
few selected individuals will be charged with past crimes to
underline the regime's hardline domestic policies.1 25X1
Approved For Release - 64 A001400010062-8
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 25X1 Approved For Release 2007/03/06 : CIA-RDP79B00864AO01400010062-8
Approved For Release 2007/03/06 : CIA-RDP79B00864AO01400010062-8