Word: czech
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...Russians invade Czechoslovakia? If the Moscow newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya is to be believed, it was mostly because they could no longer abide the freedom that Alexander Dubček had granted the Czech press. "The reintroduction of bourgeois press freedom led to the most destructive consequences," declared the Moscow paper in an editorial explaining the invasion. While it lasted, moreover, it was a freedom exercised furiously, with a passion pent up by two decades of enforced Communist conformity. And, despite the Russian tanks, it is not yet completely dead...
With the censors immobilized, Czech newsmen wrote editorials attacking deposed Party Boss Antonin Novotny, even though he was still hanging on as president. Digging deep into the regime's Stalinist past, they hounded state security men, government prosecutors and party bosses for interviews, came out with documented stories of terror, torture and rigged purge trials. Nothing escaped their attention. Several Prague newspapers sent reporters to interview former political prisoners, published detailed charges that they had been regularly beaten by guards. Interior Minister Josef Pavel, himself a purge victim in 1951, revealed that the police had tried to extract...
Drugged Confession. Wherever their curiosity led them, newsmen found evidence of direct Soviet meddling in Czech government affairs. A former Novotný security chief admitted to them that "26 Soviet advisers were active in all departments" of his secret police. The head of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia's Bratislava branch told them that the Russians had engineered his arrest in 1949, then drugged him to make him confess. The most explosive charge of all concerned the death of Czechoslovakia's last non-Communist leader, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose "suicide" was announced shortly after the Communists seized...
Determined, as Reportér Magazine Editor Stanislav Budin described it, to "wed freedom and Communism," the press probed into every part of Czech life. It examined housing problems, urged a return to limited free enterprise, promoted the democratic reforms sought by Dubček and his liberals...
Heretical Clippings. The fruits of such journalism were quickly apparent. Circulation doubled and tripled. Czechs waited in line at newsstands, tuned in excitedly to newscasts on Czech radio and television. To the Kremlin, however, it was all an insufferable threat. In May, Dubček was summoned to Moscow, where Leonid Brezhnev thrust a stack of heretical clippings at him and, shaking with rage, told him that "this sort of thing has got to stop." But it did not stop. Dubček refused to restore censorship, contented himself with asking newsmen to tone down their attacks for a while...