Word: czechoslovakia
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...agreed to the trials of lower-ranking liberals in order to fend off demands from hard-liners that he try the political leaders of the Prague spring. Two leading "ultras" are Vasil Bilák and Alois Indra, the Soviets' principal collaborators during the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia. Bilák and Indra reportedly favor punishing even Dubček, who lives quietly in Bratislava. He is in charge of the motor pool for the Forest Administration...
June 8: Seven men and three women (one of whom had a small child) took over a Czechoslovak airliner going to Prague. The pilot was accidentally killed in a cockpit melee when he refused to change course. All were arrested in West Germany; Czechoslovakia is seeking extradition...
...four years since Russian tanks crushed Alexander Dubcek's experimental "socialism with a human face," predominantly Roman Catholic Czechoslovakia has undergone a national religious revival-perhaps in reaction to the imposition of Soviet-style repression. The number of baptisms, church weddings, church funerals and applications to seminaries has been steadily rising, and more and more citizens are giving their children religious instruction. Lately, the Soviet-installed regime of Gustav Husák has responded to the trend with a concerted anti-church campaign of discrimination, propaganda and outright repression...
State educational officials have let it be known that attendance at religious classes will be counted against youths who want to enter Czechoslovakia's overcrowded universities. The Czechoslovak press has launched an all-out attack on religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the most heavily Catholic region, the Communist Party organ Pravda warned readers that religion causes schizophrenia, leads to mental imbalance and encourages crime. The national army paper Obrana Lidu denounced the Vatican as the world's "greatest center of ideological subversion...
Ever since 1950, the Communist government in Prague has steadfastly refused to let the Vatican appoint bishops in Czechoslovakia. The Dubček regime opened negotiations with the Holy See in 1968, but they were abruptly suspended after the Soviet invasion and Dubček's fall. Since then, the country's prelates have been dying off without being replaced. The death of two Czechoslovak bishops last month leaves only one of the country's twelve dioceses in the hands of a Vatican appointee...