Word: czech
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Family & Early Years: His father, William Andrew Stassen, was the son of Norwegian and Czech immigrants; his mother came to the U.S. from Germany when she was six years old. Harold, one of five children, was born April 13, 1907, at West St. Paul, Minn., where his father ran a 40-acre truck farm. He grew up on the farm, worked as a grocery clerk, bakery pan greaser and Pullman conductor to pay his way through the University of Minnesota, graduated from the law school with above-average marks in 1929 at the age of 22. The same year...
...great crime against the Czechoslovak people, and I therefore face this trial before the people and the world. I have been an enemy of the Communist Party, and I created a conspiratorial movement to split the party. I also worked similarly within the army right back to the first Czech rising in 1942, when I was active against the interests of the Soviet Union and on behalf of the Benes regime. I am a person with two political faces. In reality, I have never been a Communist...
...describe, a kind of diabolical retribution lurks everywhere. Rudolf Slansky was one of the main architects of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948; after that, he reached the pinnacle of power. His main rival was President Klement Gottwald, who seemed immovably imbedded, like a great rock, in the Czech party...
Slansky said that he had plotted with Gottwald's doctors in an attempt on the President's life; that he had planted "French agents, British agents, American agents, Yugoslav agents," and told them the secrets of the Czech armed forces and workers' organizations. He implicated, as foreign contacts, former British M.P. Konni Zilliacus, who once fellow-traveled with Stalin and now does with Tito, and Moshe Pijade, a Jewish ideologist in the Tito regime. He said he had given important jobs to "capitalist Jewish emigrants who returned to Czechoslovakia as imperialist agents." According to the indictment...
...Underneath the ugly sputterings of antiSemitism, the real motive force of the trial seemed to be the factional war between Gottwald and Slansky which has been waged for years. The U.S. State Department theorized that Moscow had been determined to smash one faction or the other to keep the Czech party malleable. But why Slansky instead of Gottwald? Gottwald had long been known as a nationalist first and a Communist second, whereas Slansky had always been the pure type of international Muscovite, without a trace of state allegiance. The only explanation was that at the moment, in the most civilized...