Word: ek
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under the Soviet guns, Dubček and the other reformist leaders worked frantically to keep their people from committing national suicide. In an urgent appeal to the National Assembly, they had implored the Deputies to refrain from inflaming the tense situation. The Deputies insisted on issuing their protest, but then they reluctantly went into recess. In a radio address, the President of the Parliament, Josef Smrkovský, argued that the present regressions represented only a temporary setback. He and the other leaders, he said, had accepted the Soviet dictates, and the attendant crackdowns on personal and political liberty...
Total Isolation. Gradually, what had really happened in Moscow was made known and the humiliation of Dubček and the government exposed. On the morning of the invasion, Soviet troops had kicked their way into the room where Dubček was meeting with the other leaders. The Soviets hauled them out of their chairs and frisked them roughly for weapons. Then they forced Dubček and the others to lean against the wall, supporting themselves on their hands and remaining in that painful position for more than two hours. During that time, a Soviet officer stole...
...Though they gave him a regal reception in public, the Soviets subjected him in private to vitriolic abuse. "It was ten times worse than Cierna," a member of the Czechoslovak delegation said later. With Brezhnev leading the attack, the Russians ordered Svoboda to set up an anti-Dubček puppet regime. They insisted on the right to name the members of the Presidium. If he did not comply, they warned, Czechoslovakia would be submitted to punishments that would make the rape of Hungary seem mild. They apparently even threatened to dismember the country, incorporating Slovakia into the Soviet Union...
...occupation; they also called most of the interference plays. When an announcer urged his countrymen to take pictures of the Russian invaders "for later documentation," a small army of Prague amateur photographers started clicking their shutters at the Russians. After Villiam Salgovič, an anti-Dubček conservative, rounded up 40 security agents to run errands for the Soviets, an underground station broadcast all of their license-plate numbers. A truck driver who recognized one plate bore down on the car and rammed it against a brick wall with his two-ton trailer...
Others have also deplored the Soviet intervention. Several weeks before the invasion began, ex-General Pyotr Grigorenko, another frequent demonstrator for freedom, called at the Czechoslovak embassy in Moscow to express his approval of Dubček's reforms and his indignation at Russia's campaign. In late July, Author Anatoly Marchenko, a member of the Daniel-Litvinov circle, sent a letter to three Czechoslovak news papers declaring: "I am ashamed of my country. I would be ashamed of my people if I thought that they really did unanimously approve the policy of the [Soviet] Central Committee...