Word: czechoslovakias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most powerful Communist in Czechoslovakia was suddenly besieged in downtown Prague last week by a pack of long-haired flower children. Carrying assorted objects that ranged from badminton rackets to open umbrellas, wearing bright colors and strung with beads, Prague's hippies thrust bunches of carnations and tulips into Party Boss Alexander Dubček's hands during a May Day parade singularly devoid of the polemics heard elsewhere in the Communist world. Dubček smiled with pleasure at the unusual sign of support for his reformist regime, signed autographs and accepted sandwiches and cake offered...
...hand, the Soviet Union was pressuring him to slow down his reforms; Pravda spoke ominously of "subversive activities, antipopular forces, anti-Communist hysteria and anarchy" in Czechoslovakia. To soothe the Russians, Dubček, accompanied by Premier Oldrich Cernik, flew to Moscow for talks with Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev. Even as they went, however, increasingly vocal liberals in Czechoslovakia were demanding nothing less than full democracy...
...Hurry. The U.S. has kept meticulously silent over events in Czechoslovakia for fear of further embarrassing Dubček before his Communist neighbors. Last week, though, the State Department said that it was watching the liberalization with "interest and sympathy," even expressed willingness to reopen talks about $20 million worth of Czechoslovak gold confiscated from the Nazis toward the end of World War II. The U.S. has refused to return the bullion without some compensation for $72 million in American properties that the Communists nationalized in 1948. At week's end, the Dubček regime rebuffed the offer...
...Public Theater, Producer Joseph Papp has rocked his subscribers with the original production of Hair (see above), shocked them with a freewheeling fantasia on the theme of Hamlet, and socked them with the allegorical, enigmatical Ergo (TIME, March 8). The theater's latest offering, spiky satire from Czechoslovakia called The Memorandum, winds up its season with a nervous laugh...
...Memorandum was written in 1965 by Vaclav Havel, 33, one of Czechoslovakia's leading playwrights. As a satirist, Havel is fortunate to have the doctrinaire rigidities of a Communist society as a mockable target. Memorandum, first produced at Prague's Balustrade Theater, is a witty evisceration of the absurdities of party-line orthodoxy and bureaucratic musical chairs. But no audience need live in a Commu nist country to feel the tickle of Havel's barbs-it is enough to have experienced alienation in the midst of a scientific, computerized society. His main target is the mechanization...