Word: ek
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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...federal Parliament had been replaced by hardliners.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...
...Soviet invasion killed that hope. Dubček's successor, Gustav Husák, justly complains that he took over an economy in chaos-but unjustly blames the Dubcek regime and specifically Sik, who is on indefinite official leave in Switzerland. The chaos is really the result of the repeal of the Dubček and Sik reforms, and of the fact that Czechs today commonly proclaim: "We are not going to work for the Russians." The Soviets, for their part, are doing nothing to help. They are withholding sorely needed credits until political "normalization" is complete...
...euphemism for force. The government has brought in Yugoslav construction crews, Polish textile workers and Hungarian railroad men, and called on Czech workers to work "voluntary" weekend shifts to commemorate Lenin's 100th birthday next year. The notion ironically harks back to the freely given "Dubček shifts" that workers put in during their brief springtime of freedom. Otherwise, the occupation regime's tinkering with the economy has made the situation worse. A 16% wage increase in the first half of 1969 only increased the rate of inflation. Now the regime is trying to freeze wages...