Word: czechoslovaks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Plainly taken aback by his decision to come, the Czechoslovaks at first announced that Kosygin, as though he were any idle jet-setter, had merely slipped into town for a "short holiday" and a dip in the healing waters of the local spas. They had to admit soon enough that Kosygin really had come for "a continuation of an exchange of views" on Czechoslovak matters. At the first exchange with Dubcek, President Ludvik Svoboda and other officials, Kosygin reported that their reforms were "meeting with understanding" in Moscow-presumably a reassurance...
...last week, it looked as though the Soviet army was about to invade Czechoslovakia and smash the reforming regime of Party Boss Alexander Dubček. Out of War saw crackled the news that a column of Russian troops was moving from the Polish city of Cracow toward the Czechoslovak border, and Western military attachés and diplomats were suddenly forbidden to travel outside the capital. Another Soviet force was reported heading from Dresden in East Germany toward Czechoslovakia, whose swift-paced "democratization" has lately alarmed Moscow and hard-lining members of the Eastern bloc...
Increasingly at liberty to speak their own minds, Czechoslovak newspaper and radio columnists fueled the scare. "For God's sake," a Radio Prague commentator addressed Moscow, "don't repeat the tragic experience of Yugoslavia and Hungary." Práce, the trade-union newspaper, editorialized that "any sort of military intervention represents such an adventurist policy that it is unbelievable that any member or responsible body such as the Soviet Central Committee could take it into consideration...
...time being, at least, the Soviets seemed merely to be putting on a show of force across the borders of Czechoslovakia in order to pressure Dubcek into slowing the pace of liberalization. Radio Prague announced belatedly that the troop movements were part of Warsaw Pact maneuvers and that the Czechoslovak government had been notified in advance that they were to take place. But the hard-liners were clearly trying to put heat...
...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 of new talks, attacking...