Word: czechoslovakia
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FRANTISEK KUPKA, along with his better-known contemporaries, Kandinsky and Mondrian, pioneered abstract painting. To look back at his prolific work is to trace the history of twentieth century aesthetics, and the development of an art that tries to embody concepts--non-objective art. Born in 1871 in Czechoslovakia, Kupka came to Paris, the center of artistic activity in 1896, and soon settled down in the suburb of Puteaux, where he lived the rest of his life...
...Spanish Communists are, along with the Italian party, the most de-Stalinized in Europe. They condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and last year criticized the Portuguese Communists for their lack of commitment to democracy. This hostility to authoritarianism was reflected in the outcome of the party's power struggle while in exile. The fight was won by the Paris faction supporting the moderate Santiago Carrillo over a Moscow-based group favoring Lister, the venerable Spanish Civil War stonecutter-general...
This is not to minimize the activism and significance of dissidents in these countries--the dissident movements throughout Eastern Europe are both vital and growing. But somehow--except perhaps in Czechoslovakia, where the state seems to be the dissident force not the "dissidents"--politics, or more accurately, ideology didn't seem to matter a great deal to people. It is in this sense that the American perspective on Eastern Europe seems most distorted...
...know if this story makes a political statement about relations between the Soviet Union and the people of their client states in Eastern Europe and I'm inclined to feel that it does and doesn't. Certainly in Czechoslovakia, and in Romania to a lesser extent, resentment toward the USSR runs high, but in other countries, East Germany and Poland, for example, there is more of a desire among people, particularly students, to convey a sense of awareness to the Westerner, a feeling that, as one East Berliner put it, "We're not being taken in. We have both feet...
...pervasive as I had been led to believe they would be. The bureaucracy is massive and often impenetrable. Freedom of travel, of information, and of expression are virtually non-existent, and though in some places, Hungary and Poland for example, things seem to be improving, in others, notably Czechoslovakia, they are obviously getting worse. But nontheless, references to Captive Nations just don't seem to have much meaning in a discussion of Eastern Europe. Indeed the dialogue in America on the Helinski Conference appeared very much weighted on the side of rhetoric--compassion played a relatively minor role. The result...