Word: czechs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Five years after the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in the name of the working class, the Czech workers got caught in one of the great swindles of modern times. They listened dazedly on May 30 as their masters proclaimed "currency reforms" wiping out most of their savings, repudiating the state bonds they had been forced to buy, and cutting their wages almost 70% (TIME, June 8). The next day they acted without plan, without leadership or premeditation. What they did will be long remembered...
...some politically unaware workers let themselves be persuaded into believing that the currency reform was aimed at them, and that they would not be able to live on their new wages and would go hungry. They staged antistate demonstrations ... In the town hall rioters tore down pictures of Czech state leaders and hung up pictures of the imperialist agent Benes [the last non-Communist President]. The American gangsters stepped on pictures of Stalin and Gottwald and violated the Soviet flag. The archives in the town hall were burned...
From Ostrava, in the Czech Ruhr, Nova Svoboda reported: "At Vaclav, Zone, Czechoslovak Pioneer Mines, Bohumin Iron Works and the Stalingrad Iron Works in Liskovec, some workers let themselves be misled by provocateurs in the service of the bourgeoisie . . . Considerable unrest and provocations took place . . . State and labor discipline was seriously disturbed . . . Loyal workers liquidated the subversive activities...
...much the Reds themselves acknowledged; how much more went on? Radio Free Europe, just across the Czech frontier, painstakingly analyzed reports by travelers and refugees and filled out the story...
...check the alarming growth of absenteeism among Czech factory hands, the newspaper Rude Pravo reported last week, the Czechoslovakian Red government has instituted a system of "camera control." Workers have been told to photograph fellow employees coming to work late or leaving early, and all "allegedly sick" co-workers who are found "in their gardens or working elsewhere." The pictures will be posted on factory bulletin boards...