Word: czechoslovakia
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...Poland sent anything resembling a thrill into the world. The national strike he led showed up Communism as a failure?a thing not done in the Warsaw Pact countries. Leonid Brezhnev, a different sort of strongman, had to send troops to Poland's borders, in case that country, like Czechoslovakia and Hungary before it, should prove in need of "liberation...
...comparison with other East bloc nations, Polish life was seemingly not all that bad. The average wage ($200 a month) and per capita meat consumption (152 lbs. a year) were surpassed only in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Private hard-currency bank accounts were legal, passports were relatively easy to obtain and the state provided the usual panoply of Communist benefits: guaranteed jobs, free medical care, factory-sponsored vacations. But this was not enough. Poles were tired of standing in endless lines: for meat, flour, sugar and other staples. They were tired of shoddy, overpriced goods, when they could...
...preparing for the final onslaught against Hitler's Germany, Roosevelt and Churchill gave tacit approval to the notion that Eastern Europe would be a Soviet "sphere of influence" after the defeat of their common enemy. It became more than that. By 1948 Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Yugoslavia had acquired Communist governments, either by the force of Soviet arms or by political subversion...
Twelve years later, Moscow's muscle lashed out again. In 1968 Czechoslovakia's party leader, Alexander Dučdek, was promoting a series of reforms that promised "socialism with a human face": a more flexible planned economy with touches of political pluralism. The Soviets countered by sending 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops into Prague under the guise of "fraternal assistance...
...aggressive aspirations of imperialist forces, against the attempts of reaction to damage the positions of socialist countries, specifically of socialist Poland." The implication that pressures on Poland were external rather than internal was similar to charges made against "Western imperialists" and "West German revanchists" before the invasion of Czechoslovakia...