Good treatment from Russians

An eight-hour vigil outside the Soviet embassy in Karori on Friday led to three one-hour student-diplomat confrontations in the Embassy's reception room over Soviet attitudes to Czechoslovakia.

Soviet ambassador Mr B. Y. Dorofeev talked to:

• Three Spartacist Club picketers.

• Three Socialist Club members who presented a letter from their club but did not demonstrate.

• About thirty demonstrators who signed a letter presented to Mr Dorofeev by Owen Gager, Bert Fisher, and Bill Logan.

"We are very grateful for being listened lo in this way. We have been treated far better than we have been when demonstrating outside other embassies," said Owen Gager.

Discussions with Soviet diplomats led some demonstrators lo feel optimistic, others pessimistic, about Czechoslovakia's future.

Bert Fisher, who spent some time on the day of the vigil at the Czech Legation felt that Owen Gager's statements to the "Evening Post" showed a "failure to see the conflict in historical and ethnic perspective."

"Russian tanks of the Czechs are a symbol of freedom not of oppression as they might he to the Hungarians," he said.

"It is idiotic to say that the situations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are the same."

Owen Gager, commenting on the discussions, said it was not he, but Mr Dorofeev who had linked Czechoslovakia with Hungary—"I merely quoted what was said to me in the Embassy," he said.

"We were 'assured' by diplomats that Russian would only intervene militarily in Czechoslovakia if there were 'civil war' or if intervention were 'requested by the Government'.

"It would he easy for pro-Stalinist elements in Czechoslovakia to manufacture a situation where one or both of these conditions was satisfied—as was done in Hungary in 1956.

"I do not think the situations in any other respect are necessarily comparable."

"But I do not feel reassured by statements made to me in the Soviet Legation, and I have told the Legation so," Owen said.