Word: ek
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When Alexander Dubček was sent off to Ankara two months ago as Czechoslovakia's Ambassador to Turkey, it appeared that he had been saved from the full wrath of the Communist Party's ultraconservatives. The "ultras" wanted to try Dubček, hero of the liberalizing "Prague spring" of 1968, for his ideological sins. The man who replaced him as party boss, Gustav Husák, pledged repeatedly that there would be no retributions. Husák, after all, spent nine years in prison in the 1950s as the victim of a Stalinist purge...
...seems all too clear, however, that the noose has been tightening around Dubček's political neck. In recent weeks he has come under noisy attack from such hard-line extremists as Party Secretary Vasil Bilák, who denounced Dubček as a "weak man" and his reformist colleagues as "two-faced people." After months of rumors, the party paper, Rudé Právo, announced that Dubček had been suspended from party membership and that several leading reformists, including ex-National Assembly President Josef Smrkovsky, had been expelled from the party. Though...
Perhaps significantly, the announcement of Dubček's suspension came just after Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had spent five days in Prague. The Czechoslovak party official most frequently seen in Gromyko's company was none other than Vasil Bilák, an ominous sign that he might be Moscow's choice as Husák's eventual replacement...
Economic Shortcomings. The next move will take place when the Central Committee meets in mid-April. If the ultraconservatives have sufficient strength by that time, they may try to expel Dubček permanently from party membership. But even if they fail, it is difficult to believe that Dubček can long retain his diplomatic post in Ankara...
Considering Dubček's enormous popularity in the days when he was seeking to "humanize" Communism, there has been little outward reaction to his eclipse-and little active resistance to the overall repression. The fact is that the Czechoslovak people have resorted to passive resistance to the point where their slowdowns in factories and on farms are endangering the entire economy. Only recently, for example, the government proclaimed four Saturdays as wageless extra workdays because of "serious economic shortcomings." The Czechoslovaks did not exactly respond with patriotic fervor. As an industrial worker in Prague commented...