Word: czechoslovaks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kremlin had been startled and angered by a series of sharp Carter Administration criticisms of Soviet and Czechoslovak treatment of dissidents. The State Department warned Moscow that continual harassment of Andrei Sakharov conflicted with "accepted international standards of human rights." This was followed by a more moderate statement of support from Jimmy Carter. The Russians evidently decided that they could not ignore comments that they regarded as provocative, and that seemed to signal a new and tougher approach to Soviet-American relations. As if to test the U.S. resolve, the KGB arrested Dissident Alexander Ginzburg in a telephone booth. Hours...
...more encouraging was the response from Prague last week to the State Department's support of the Czechoslovak dissidents. After threatening hundreds of critics and arresting three prominent signers of Charter 77, the petition calling for observance of the human rights section of the Helsinki accords (TIME, Jan. 24), the Czechoslovak government suddenly altered its repressive course. Many analysts thought party leaders had become convinced that the damage done to Czechoslovakia's image abroad had finally outweighed the advantages of successfully extinguishing dissidence at home...
...this case, the moderating effect of the Carter Administration's critique was amplified by a chorus of other voices. Not since the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had so much obloquy fallen on a Communist government. Among those who denounced the Czechoslovak campaign against the 500 signers of Charter 77 were the British Foreign Office, the French, Spanish, Italian and British Communist Parties, the European Economic Community and the leaders of the Socialist International. Norway called off the signing of a new trade treaty with Czechoslovakia, and Peking's People's Daily lauded the Czechoslovak people...
Early last week, the State Department publicly rapped Czechoslovakia for not living up to the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki agreement. Specifically, State took the Czechs to task for harassing many of some 300 Czechoslovak intellectuals who had signed a petition called Charter 77 demanding various domestic reforms. Next day, there was another State blast on human rights, this time aimed at the Soviet Union and concerning its leading resident dissident, Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize...
...addition to the Kohouts, the chartists include former Foreign Minister Jiři Hájek, former Politburo Member František Kriegel, former Party Secretary Zdenek Mlynar, Student Leader Jiři Mueller, Dramatist Vaclav Havel and the widow and son of Rudolf Slánský, the Czechoslovak Communist Party secretary-general who was executed in 1952 during Stalinist-style purges. Dubček, who now holds a minor bureaucratic post in the Forestry Commission in Bratislava, was not among the signers...