Word: ek
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When the demand for reform became overwhelming in 1966, the rigid regime of Antonin Novotný hesitantly began decentralizing the economy while trying to maintain tight political control. After Alexander Dubček rose to power in 1968, he added the vital ingredient of political freedom and adopted a series of reforms proposed by Economist Ota Sik. As Deputy Prime Minister under Dubček, Sik initiated far-reaching decentralization and began rapidly to modernize the economy, particularly in consumer industries that had suffered from decades of neglect. Sik also hoped to get $400 million in credits from the West...
...Stalinist Label. The first signs were anything but optimistic. At week's end Premier Oldfich Cernik's entire 29-man Cabinet was dissolved. Cernik, one of the first of Dubćek's allies to make amends with pro-Moscow conservatives after the invasion, was ordered by the Central Committee to form a new government. Its membership, announced this week, reflected the hardliners' virtually total control. The purge extended to the local political level; the Prague city party committee was stripped of every remaining Dubćek loyalist. Five more liberals "resigned" from the Czech National...
...fate of the topmost liberal leaders, including Dubćek, hung at least partially on a debate between two factions of the ultraconservative majority on the eleven-man Presidium that runs the country. One group, reportedly led by Deputy First Secretary Lubomir Strougal, a ruthless pro-Moscow loyalist, urged that Dubćek and other liberals be placed on trial, perhaps even on charges of treason. The second group, headed by Party Secretary Alois Indra, apparently objected that such kangaroo-court sessions would saddle the regime with a neo-Stalinist label. Ludvik Svoboda, the popular President and elder statesman...
...from a tortured sleep, seized a camera and began to film what he had just been dreaming. Reality is distorted and logic becomes madness in The Ritual, Bergman's most nightmarish fantasy since The Silence. In the claustrophobic office of some anonymous bureaucrat, three actors (Ingrid Thulin, Anders Ek and Gunnar Böornstrand) perform a bizarre masque, part psychodrama, part sexual charade. They are like the mummers from The Seventh Seal or the circus performers from The Naked Night imprisoned in an allegory of doom. Inevitably the object of the masque is death. But the dramatic value...
...hierarchy. Though demonstrators scrawled the words HUSÁK-RUSÁK (Husák the Russian) on walls, the fact is that the Russians do not entirely trust Husák. He is in an unenviable position: rejected by the reformers because he replaced Dubček, disliked by the Czech majority because he is a Slovak and hated by the orthodox pro-Soviet elements (who imprisoned him for eight years) because he is a nationalist who believes in limited reforms...