Word: czechoslovakias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dramatic Changes. The vision of Czechoslovakia's future that Dubček (pronounced doob-check) laid before his colleagues, in the form of a bulky, 70-page draft, calls for dozens of dramatic changes, including a major shrinkage in the Communist Party's own powers. Several weeks in the making, the draft would give real legislative powers to the National Assembly, which has long been merely a party echo, and even permit votes of no confidence in the government. Dubček asked the Central Committee to rewrite Czechoslovakia's laws to assure everything from free speech...
...winding road to Hradčany Castle, which broods above Prague's Baroque towers and its wide, grey Vltava River, came a steady stream of Tatra limousines. As they had many times before, they bore the rulers of Communist Czechoslovakia to a meeting of the Central Committee, usually the most remote and tightly guarded of affairs. On this spring morning, however, the atmosphere on Hradčany Hill was more like the opening of a fair. The usual security guards were absent, and crowds of people wandered unhindered through the castle's many courtyards. As the Communist leaders...
Last week's meeting was not only different; it was far and away the most historic meeting in the Central Committee's history-and a turning point for modern Czechoslovakia. Amid a display of press freedom and accessibility more familiar to Western politicians than Communist leaders, the party's top brass assembled to consider an "action program" for a democratic reform of Czechoslovakia that has been brewing during three stormy months of nationwide debates and mounting pressures. The reform harks back half a century in spirit to 1918, when Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points proclaimed...
...Czechoslovak Communist Party got out of his car, the crowd pressed closer for a better look and reporters broke into applause. Unaccustomed to such public displays, Alexander Dubček, 46, merely tipped his grey fedora, smiled hesitantly and strode briskly inside. More than any other man in Czechoslovakia, Dubček has planned, pleaded for and nurtured the sweeping changes that promise to alter the temper and quality of Czechoslovak life, and perhaps the nature of Communism in the rest of Eastern Europe as well...
...thousands of Czechoslovaks have flocked to meetings to air their opinions, have signed petitions supporting Dubček, deluged government offices, radio and TV stations with calls, and even marched in the streets. Because it offers a socialist form of democracy so far unequaled anywhere in the Communist world, Czechoslovakia's revolution may have a far more lasting impact on Communism than either Tito's breakaway from the Kremlin or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. "It lies upon us, on Czechs and Slovaks," says Forestry Minister Josef Smrkovský, "to enter courageously into unexplored terrain...