Word: ek
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last July, Frank Shakespeare, the new director of the U.S. Information Agency, asked USIA officers stationed in Eastern Europe what sort of government they thought the people of those Communist lands would choose, had they a free choice. The overwhelming consensus of the diplomats was Dubček-style socialism. The blond, boyish-looking Shakespeare, 44, only five months on the job, was shocked. "You mean you don't think they'd choose a U.S.-style democracy?" he asked...
...leaders of Prague's short-lived Springtime of Freedom have long since been silenced. Alexander Dubček is variously reported on an extended vacation in Slovakia or undergoing treatment in a Prague sanatorium. Josef Smrkovsky, the onetime darling of Czechoslovak liberals, is on an enforced vacation in Bohemia. Hundreds of other officials, journalists and even schoolteachers have lost their jobs. But under the hard-line regime of Party Boss Gustav Husàk, who replaced Dubček seven months ago, the purges...
...federal Parliament had been replaced by hardliners. Among those expelled in absentia from the Czech Council last week were Economist Ota Sik and Kafka Expert Eduard Goldstücker, former president of the Writers' Union, both of whom have gained refuge in the West. Said Dubček's onetime Culture and Education Minister, Ćestmír Císaŕ, as he resigned from his post as Council president: "I admit my share of the responsibility for the errors and shortcomings, but I beg you to believe that they were not committed out of ill will...
...well as leaders of the composers' union have all been forced to resign. Some 300 journalists have been fired for harboring liberal tendencies. To undercut the bargaining position of Czechoslovakia's nine unions of artists, writers and other creative people, Minister of Culture Miroslav Bružek has declared that he will deal with members strictly on an individual basis. Only those who obey the party line will be given financial aid and permission to travel abroad...
...Only a cut above the amateur" was British Critic Ernest Newman's scornful evaluation of Czech Composer Leoš Janáček in a 1924 review of the opera Jenufa. "Atrocious drama and wretched theater," complained a New York Times critic after a 1931 performance of From the House of the Dead. Through years of such disasters,Janáček (pronounced Ya-na-chek) remained a proud, angry man who longed desperately for recognition and stubbornly believed that his peculiar brand of musicmaking would be vindicated. Now, four decades after his death, the often maligned composer...