Word: czechoslovaks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...joined the Soviets in the invasion issued only official communiques of self-congratulation, their people clearly did not share that sentiment. In East Berlin, for example, hundreds of people flatly refused the demand of party workers to sign petitions in support of the intervention. Instead, they came to the Czechoslovak cultural center, where they left bouquets and bought, as some said, "souvenirs of Dubcek...
...remarkable men to achieve that. They were Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, a philosophy professor, and his colleague and ultimate successor, Eduard Bene?, who had been one of his students at Prague. When the war broke out, they slipped out of their homeland to work abroad for Czechoslovak freedom. A master of public persuasion, Masaryk traveled to the U.S. and argued the case for his country's freedom so well that President Wilson included autonomy for the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire among his 14 points for a peace settlement in Europe...
...western border areas, the Sudetenland where most of the Ger man-speaking population lived. In return, Hitler promised to make no more territorial demands in Europe. Six months later, however, German tanks stormed into Prague without warning, and Nazi Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels read Hitler's decree to stunned Czechoslovak radio listeners: "Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!" Benes, who fled abroad, tried to make people outside his country see that what had happened there soon would be repeated elsewhere. Soon enough, all the world realized that he was right...
Feeling guilty about the Czechoslovaks, the British allowed Benes to form a wartime exile government in London. Meanwhile, though they had offered no resistance at the time of the German in vasion, the Czechoslovaks waged an underground war against the occupiers. In one of their retaliation moves, the Germans wiped out the entire village of Lidice. After Germany's defeat, Benes took his regime to Prague and started anew. He faced tremendous obstacles. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill acceded to Stalin's demand that Czechoslovakia fall into his sphere of influence after...
...first Czechoslovak party boss, Klement Gottwald, was a harsh ruler. He nationalized the country's entire industry, including even small artisans' shops, collectivized all farms, and subjected the people to a withering succession of arrests, show trials and executions of "Titoists" and "traitors." Fittingly, Gottwald caught a chill at Stalin's funeral in 1953 and died a few months later. An almost equally unbending Stalinist took his place: Antonin Novotny, who had been Communist boss of Prague. As the slight winds of liberalism blew throughout the East bloc following Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, Novotny tried his best...