Word: dubcek
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While the Czechs never tried to put up a bare-fisted fight against the mighty Soviets (as the Hungarians did in 1956), their brief experiment to reform socialism under Alexander Dubcek in 1968, crushed that same year with Soviet tanks, was the virus which infected Soviet communism two decades later...
...charge of re-imposing the Stalinist ideology on the Czechs after the Soviet invasion, finding it in his words, "one of the most horrible things I've had to do." His own idea of communism changed then, as he could not argue against the far more timely ideas of Dubcek's people...
Another link was Zdenek Mlynar, who was one of the principal architects of the Prague Spring along with Dubcek. By one of history's most incredible coincidences, he had attended Moscow State University in the 1950s and shared a dorm room there with a young Russian named Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Apparently the two kept in touch, and Gorbachev was intrigued with what his former roommate was doing to reform communism in Prague. Gorbachev later said that Dubcek's reforms served as the main ideological pillars for his perestroika. When Gorbachev's spokesman Gennady Gerasimov was asked at a press conference...
...Prague. One by one, the rejected leaders of the former Soviet satellites, abandoned by Moscow, promised free elections -- and more or less faded into oblivion. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down; the cold war ended. And only last week history was further rewritten when Czechoslovakia's onetime reformer Alexander Dubcek, whose effort to achieve "socialism with a human face" was smashed by Soviet tanks in 1968, re- emerged from oblivion to head the National Parliament; shortly thereafter, frequently imprisoned playwright Vaclav Havel was elected President. It was as though the age-old rules of political conflict had been suspended...
...Parliament amended the presidential oath of office to eliminate the customary pledge of loyalty to socialism, a vow that the nonsocialist Havel likely would have refused to take. In the same session, Parliament honored Havel's determination to have "close by my side" another revered ghost from 1968. Alexander Dubcek, the former leader who launched the Prague Spring, was restored to a post of power, after two decades of internal exile, by being elected the legislature's new presiding officer. The stately transition was completed on Friday, when Prime Minister Marian Calfa, whose Communist Party colleagues so long denounced Havel...