Word: ek
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...Faint. As the leader of his country's experiment to infuse Communism with humanism and democracy, Dubček was the symbol and hero of Czechoslovakia's will to be free. The circumstances of his arrival last week in Prague, after three days of negotiations in Moscow, illustrated the unyielding grip in which the Soviets and their hard-lining East Bloc allies now hold his land. Dubček's plane landed in secret at dawn. Bulgarian troops and tanks guarded the field, and Soviet secret police whisked him and his fellow reformist leaders in official Soviet...
...Czechoslovak people were aware of little of this at first. They knew only that the Soviets had arrested Dubček as a traitor the week before and spirited him away. Then, in what looked like an astounding turnabout, the Soviet leaders had him flown to Moscow, where they confirmed his status as continuing chief of the Czechoslovak party. Czechoslovaks joyously seized on his return to Prague as evidence that they had somehow prevailed in their improbable contest of national determination against Soviet force. That belief was buttressed by the fact that during the hours before Dubček...
Under the Soviet guns, Dubček and the other reformist leaders worked frantically to keep their people from committing national suicide. In an urgent appeal to the National Assembly, they had implored the Deputies to refrain from inflaming the tense situation. The Deputies insisted on issuing their protest, but then they reluctantly went into recess. In a radio address, the President of the Parliament, Josef Smrkovský, argued that the present regressions represented only a temporary setback. He and the other leaders, he said, had accepted the Soviet dictates, and the attendant crackdowns on personal and political liberty...
Total Isolation. Gradually, what had really happened in Moscow was made known and the humiliation of Dubček and the government exposed. On the morning of the invasion, Soviet troops had kicked their way into the room where Dubček was meeting with the other leaders. The Soviets hauled them out of their chairs and frisked them roughly for weapons. Then they forced Dubček and the others to lean against the wall, supporting themselves on their hands and remaining in that painful position for more than two hours. During that time, a Soviet officer stole...
...Though they gave him a regal reception in public, the Soviets subjected him in private to vitriolic abuse. "It was ten times worse than Cierna," a member of the Czechoslovak delegation said later. With Brezhnev leading the attack, the Russians ordered Svoboda to set up an anti-Dubček puppet regime. They insisted on the right to name the members of the Presidium. If he did not comply, they warned, Czechoslovakia would be submitted to punishments that would make the rape of Hungary seem mild. They apparently even threatened to dismember the country, incorporating Slovakia into the Soviet Union...