Word: dubcek
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...deputy editor of an irreverent weekly called the Reporter, Ruml, then 44, had chronicled the student protests that set the stage for the extraordinary reform movement known as the Prague Spring. He reported on the enthusiasm that Party Leader Alexander Dubcek's vision of "socialism with a human face" had aroused among factory workers, and wrote scathing pieces about the ominous Warsaw Pact army maneuvers taking place in Czechoslovakia that summer. On Aug. 21, those exercises had turned into a full-scale invasion...
...pronounced the four-day meeting a success and hailed glasnost as "one of the heroes of our conference." He also promised to "bring about a qualitatively new condition in our society and give a human face to socialism" -- the exact phrase used 20 years ago by Czechoslovak Reformer Alexander Dubcek. As Gorbachev joined the delegates in singing verses of the Internationale, he took off his glasses. A pensive, almost weary expression crept across his face, the look of a man who has put one more victory behind him but still has many more battles to face...
...dealing with such issues as legal reform, nationalities and a general political resolution. They will then become official party policy. The theses include a manifesto of freedoms that suggests a cross between the U.S. Bill of Rights and the "Socialism with a human face" of Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubcek, which was crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968. The state, according to the document, should provide "material and juridical conditions for the exercise of constitutional freedoms (freedom of speech, the press, conscience, assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations, etc.). And firmer guarantees of personal rights, such as the inviolability...
...Czechoslovakia during the spring, the Communist Party led by Alexander Dubcek undertook reforms that now seem a distant forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost -- efforts to humanize the socialist structure, to encourage greater individual discretion. Euphoria bloomed in the "Prague Spring." But the Soviets could not tolerate that measure of autonomy in their satellite, any more than they could abide Hungary in 1956 or, later, Poland in 1981. In August 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and crushed the hope. Not long after, Dubcek ended up working obscurely for the Forestry Administration in western Slovakia...
...Gorbachev getting restless with provincial posts? Perhaps. Mlynar, who was rising toward the top levels of the Czech Communist Party, visited his old classmate in 1967 and recalls that Gorbachev complained about excessive interference by Moscow in local affairs. Mlynar described the sweeping reforms that Alexander Dubcek was then beginning in Czechoslovakia. He remembers Gorbachev saying, with a sigh, "Perhaps there are possibilities in Czechoslovakia because conditions are different." The Czech reforms, however, were crushed by Soviet tanks the following year, and Mlynar went into exile; he now lives in Austria. The two old friends talked and drank through that...