Word: ek
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Russians invade Czechoslovakia? If the Moscow newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya is to be believed, it was mostly because they could no longer abide the freedom that Alexander Dubček had granted the Czech press. "The reintroduction of bourgeois press freedom led to the most destructive consequences," declared the Moscow paper in an editorial explaining the invasion. While it lasted, moreover, it was a freedom exercised furiously, with a passion pent up by two decades of enforced Communist conformity. And, despite the Russian tanks, it is not yet completely dead...
Determined, as Reportér Magazine Editor Stanislav Budin described it, to "wed freedom and Communism," the press probed into every part of Czech life. It examined housing problems, urged a return to limited free enterprise, promoted the democratic reforms sought by Dubček and his liberals...
...collaborators but simply captives. It came as a response to the tearful pleas of the man whose seven-month-old experiment to humanize Communism had prompted the Soviet invasion. On his return the week before from three days of negotiations in Moscow, Party First Secretary Alexander Dubċek told the Czechoslovak people that their only sensible alternative was to submit to the Soviet will. Then, setting the example, he began the humiliating task of dismantling Czechoslovakia's short-lived freedom and reforms...
...that point, Dubċek and his colleagues were equally unbending. As a justification for their invasion, the Soviets wanted Dubċek to make a public statement thanking the Red Army for saving Czechoslovakia from the clutches of counterrevolutionaries. Dubċek refused. Nor could the Soviets prevail upon two Novotnýite conservatives, whom most Czechoslovaks suspected of issuing the call for intervention, to give some credence to the rumor by at least keeping their mouths shut. As soon as they were re-elected to a new Central Committee that Dubċek formed last week...
...sounded all too familiar to the Czechoslovaks, who remember the virulent press criticism that preceded the tanks just a few weeks ago. Nearly everyone braced for some new Soviet move. Some Czechoslovaks feared that harsh new pressures would be placed on Dubċek or that he might be shunted aside in favor of Gustav Husák, the leader of the Slovak branch of the party, who last week seemed to have won some favor with the Soviets for his open criticisms of "errors and inadequacies" in Dubċek's former policies. Others feared, but hardly dared...