Word: ek
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...Russians invade Czechoslovakia? If the Moscow newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya is to be believed, it was mostly because they could no longer abide the freedom that Alexander Dubček had granted the Czech press. "The reintroduction of bourgeois press freedom led to the most destructive consequences," declared the Moscow paper in an editorial explaining the invasion. While it lasted, moreover, it was a freedom exercised furiously, with a passion pent up by two decades of enforced Communist conformity. And, despite the Russian tanks, it is not yet completely dead...
Determined, as Reportér Magazine Editor Stanislav Budin described it, to "wed freedom and Communism," the press probed into every part of Czech life. It examined housing problems, urged a return to limited free enterprise, promoted the democratic reforms sought by Dubček and his liberals...
Heretical Clippings. The fruits of such journalism were quickly apparent. Circulation doubled and tripled. Czechs waited in line at newsstands, tuned in excitedly to newscasts on Czech radio and television. To the Kremlin, however, it was all an insufferable threat. In May, Dubček was summoned to Moscow, where Leonid Brezhnev thrust a stack of heretical clippings at him and, shaking with rage, told him that "this sort of thing has got to stop." But it did not stop. Dubček refused to restore censorship, contented himself with asking newsmen to tone down their attacks for a while...
...carried on. After Russian troops marched in to close them down, most Czech papers published underground editions. Television newscasters managed to broadcast from studios over portable army transmitters, and C.T.K., the government news agency, opened a clandestine telex service. Editors sneaked past Russian surveillance to confer with Dubček's cooperative aides, promised to try to appease the Russians by imposing self-censorship...
Temporary Control. The censorship so far has been light. Journalists no longer write direct attacks against the Russians, no longer refer to Russian soldiers as "occupying troops," but their stories are anything but friendly. Rude Pravo reported with oblique subtlety that any agreements Dubček made in Moscow had been dictated by "unimaginably abnormal circumstances," conducted a quick public-opinion poll that showed that Dubček and his reforms had overwhelming popular support...