Word: czechoslovaks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Addressing 1,200 delegates at the 14th Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party last week in Prague's vast Congress Hall, First Secretary Gustav Husák announced that his two-year policy of normalization and consolidation had successfully annulled the "dangerous" reforms of the Alexander Dubček era. Much of the session was a Te Deum to the Soviet Union, which still maintains 80,000 troops on Czechoslovak soil three years after invading the country and crushing Dubč's Prague Spring...
...another item of business: plotting a five-year economic plan. Husák denounced the principle of "market economy" toward which such other East bloc nations as Poland and Hungary are slowly but steadily moving. Czechoslovakia will instead adhere to "economic management by a single national plan." Thus the Czechoslovak leader committed his country to the same sort of stifling centralization that almost ruined its economy in pre-Dubč days and has plagued the Soviet Union's economy with ruinous inefficiencies. The illogic of such a decision was hardly surprising in a nation where invaders are hailed...
Party Purge. As it is, Czechoslovak institutions have been thoroughly altered since the reformist days of 1968. Within the party, screening commissions and intimidation have weeded out 500,000 errant Communists who backed Dubč's 1968 reforms, reducing membership to 1,200,000. Hoping to save their own skins, friends secretly denounced one another before the commission inquiring into activities under Dubč that are now considered questionable. Loss of party cards has meant loss of livelihood as well. Teachers have had to become taxi drivers; diplomats, hotel clerks; and intellectuals, gas-station attendants. Even the still popular...
...Czechoslovak culture has been all but smothered by normalization. Dozens of controversial magazines and newspapers are banned. The only books that can be published are those "helpful to socialism." Even the Czechoslovak Union of Gymnasts has had to pledge to "intensify the political education of all members." It is no wonder that, as TIME Correspondent Burton Pines cabled after a visit to Prague: "The population has become lifeless beyond cynicism...
Subtle Protest. To ease the pains of political reaction, the government has tried to hold down prices and make more consumer goods available, but shortages persist. Two-thirds of Czechoslovak shoe production is exported to the Soviet Union to help pay for the Soviet occupation, for instance, and even Husák in a recent party speech was forced to take note of the situation. "To put it plainly," he said, to get a proper fit "one must have either an excessively small or excessively large foot, or one has to cut one's own foot down...