Word: czech
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Five years after the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in the name of the working class, the Czech workers got caught in one of the great swindles of modern times. They listened dazedly on May 30 as their masters proclaimed "currency reforms" wiping out most of their savings, repudiating the state bonds they had been forced to buy, and cutting their wages almost 70% (TIME, June 8). The next day they acted without plan, without leadership or premeditation. What they did will be long remembered...
...some politically unaware workers let themselves be persuaded into believing that the currency reform was aimed at them, and that they would not be able to live on their new wages and would go hungry. They staged antistate demonstrations ... In the town hall rioters tore down pictures of Czech state leaders and hung up pictures of the imperialist agent Benes [the last non-Communist President]. The American gangsters stepped on pictures of Stalin and Gottwald and violated the Soviet flag. The archives in the town hall were burned...
...last week got on with the job of robbing them of their money. The operation was neatly done-in three stages. First, Radio Prague boomed: "All state loans after 1945 and securities issued after 1945 are declared worthless." This meant that workers forced to put their savings into the Czech version of "E" bonds now hold worthless paper, a total of about...
...that Oatis was convicted of violating could be used to send any newsman to jail at the whim of the Reds. Says the Czech law and penal code: "He who attempts to obtain state secrets with the intention of betraying them to a foreign power [is guilty of espionage] . . . By a state secret is meant a fact [of] political, military or economic interest [which] should remain concealed . . . By economic secret is meant everything . . . important for economic enterprise . . . that should be kept secret." In short, Oatis was guilty of espionage if he tried to check the location or output...
Married. Jaroslav Drobny, 31, self-exiled (1949) Czech tennis champion; and Mrs. Rita Anderson, English-born U.S. tennis star often paired with Drobny in European mixed-doubles tournaments; he for the first time, she for the second; in Ealing, England...