Word: czechoslovakia
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...Hockey, United States vs. Czechoslovakia...
...Hockey, Czechoslovakia vs. West Germany...
Many Eastern exports are now high-profile performers, including Czechoslovakia's Smetana Quartet, a string ensemble that earns $5,000 a performance in Western cities. Czechoslovak Hockey Player Jaroslav Pouzar, 36, helped Canada's Edmonton Oilers win three Stanley Cup championships. Though most East bloc talents are more modestly gifted, Western clients are usually delighted with them. Says a Viennese cabaret manager who hires Polish dancers: "They are better trained than Westerners, work longer and cost less." A four-man Prague dance band called Bob's Combo belts out tunes in English, German and even Japanese aboard the Royal Caribbean...
...Czechoslovakia during the spring, the Communist Party led by Alexander Dubcek undertook reforms that now seem a distant forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost -- efforts to humanize the socialist structure, to encourage greater individual discretion. Euphoria bloomed in the "Prague Spring." But the Soviets could not tolerate that measure of autonomy in their satellite, any more than they could abide Hungary in 1956 or, later, Poland in 1981. In August 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and crushed the hope. Not long after, Dubcek ended up working obscurely for the Forestry Administration in western Slovakia...
...restless with provincial posts? Perhaps. Mlynar, who was rising toward the top levels of the Czech Communist Party, visited his old classmate in 1967 and recalls that Gorbachev complained about excessive interference by Moscow in local affairs. Mlynar described the sweeping reforms that Alexander Dubcek was then beginning in Czechoslovakia. He remembers Gorbachev saying, with a sigh, "Perhaps there are possibilities in Czechoslovakia because conditions are different." The Czech reforms, however, were crushed by Soviet tanks the following year, and Mlynar went into exile; he now lives in Austria. The two old friends talked and drank through that afternoon...