Word: czechoslovakia
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...Warsaw, Budapest, East Berlin, Sofia, Prague. One by one, the rejected leaders of the former Soviet satellites, abandoned by Moscow, promised free elections -- and more or less faded into oblivion. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down; the cold war ended. And only last week history was further rewritten when Czechoslovakia's onetime reformer Alexander Dubcek, whose effort to achieve "socialism with a human face" was smashed by Soviet tanks in 1968, re- emerged from oblivion to head the National Parliament; shortly thereafter, frequently imprisoned playwright Vaclav Havel was elected President. It was as though the age-old rules of political...
...rarely show much aptitude for the give-and-take of politics, the careful timing, the restraint. Yet in an irony more exquisite than any he ever envisioned for the stage, Vaclav Havel became not only the conscience but also the commonsense leader of the mass movement that led to Czechoslovakia's orderly ouster of its communist leaders. Having inspired fellow citizens by his rhetoric and unrelenting example, he heard them demand that he take over as head of state. That was not for him, he said. He was a writer. In fact, his work so depended on being an outsider...
...subjected to discrimination because he was born to wealth. His father was a real estate developer. An even richer uncle owned hotels and the Barrandov movie studios, which remain the center of Czechoslovak filmmaking. One of his English-language translators, Czech emigre Vera Blackwell, has said, "If Czechoslovakia had remained primarily a capitalist society, Vaclav Havel would be just about the richest man in the country." Instead, by the time Havel was a teenager, the communists had dispossessed the family. More painful still, Stalinist rules barred youths of upper-class descent from full-time education beyond early adolescence. Undaunted, Havel...
...soon out of a job at Balustrade. Although he continued to write for publication or production in the West, his public role in Prague shifted to politics. He became a principal organizer of Charter 77, a human rights organization designed to compel Czechoslovakia to honor the commitments in existing treaties and its own constitution. As Havel argued, "If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he or she would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about." Havel was first jailed in 1977. By August...
...anyone else -- which is very overbearing indeed. If Havel is the embodiment of moral rectitude to his nation, that is even more strongly the way he sees himself. His true passion is not for possessions or power but for giving life a purpose. That is why the people of Czechoslovakia were able to do last week what the government never could: persuade him to move out of the flat built by his father, with its sweeping views of the Vltava River and the Hradcany castle complex, across the river into the castle itself. It is Prague's presidential palace...