Word: dubcek
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What sort of bargain Svoboda and Dubcek might be able to strike in Moscow remained problematical. Pravda's massive editorial sounding the warning on the invasion made it clear that the Kremlin wants to be assured of several things before it withdraws its army. The Russians insist that the old-line cad res be kept in their jobs in the party and government. They want press freedoms curtailed. They want guarantees that Czechoslovakia's economy will remain oriented toward the Soviet bloc...
...right," said Agriculture Minister Josef Boruvka, "the negotiations would not have lasted more than an hour." One report said that Svoboda was promising to reimpose a degree of censorship and brake the democratization a bit as part of a political compromise. The Russians, in return, would permit not only Dubcek but also Cernik and Smrkovsky to continue in office. This would leave mat ters pretty much where they stood after Cierna?except that Soviet tanks would still be in Czechoslovakia as enforcers of the agreement. There were even reports that the party bosses from Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria...
...were, they were no more mysterious than the motives and timing of the men who triggered them in Moscow. One of the real dramas of the invasion of Czechoslovakia took place in the Kremlin, whose leaders have been locked in debate for weeks about whether to strike down Alexander Dubcek's liberal reforms. Why did Russia's leaders finally decide to use fists instead of flexibility...
...answer is that the dangers constituted by Dubcek's Czechoslovakia finally came, in their estimation, to outweigh all the dangerous consequences of invasion. The Kremlin leaders must have come to the conclusion that Czechoslovakia's experiment would sooner or later prove fatal to the system that they had so carefully constructed since World War II. Freedom of speech and of the press, the right of free assembly, criticism both from within the party and political clubs outside it-all threatened to un dermine and eventually destroy Eastern European Communism. Poland, Hungary, East Germany were all susceptible...
Czechoslovakia runs like a dagger from Europe into the Soviet Union and sits next door to East Germany, the shield of the Soviet bloc's de fense system. In a sense, Dubcek's growing unruliness-and the invasion of his country to bring it back in line-was a near-domestic issue for Moscow, not an international one. This was all the truer because, inside Russia, the youth and intellectuals-among others-seemed electrified by the spectacle of Czechoslovak reform...