Word: ek
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...ominous days last week, it looked as though the Soviet army was about to invade Czechoslovakia and smash the reforming regime of Party Boss Alexander Dubček. Out of War saw crackled the news that a column of Russian troops was moving from the Polish city of Cracow toward the Czechoslovak border, and Western military attachés and diplomats were suddenly forbidden to travel outside the capital. Another Soviet force was reported heading from Dresden in East Germany toward Czechoslovakia, whose swift-paced "democratization" has lately alarmed Moscow and hard-lining members of the Eastern bloc...
...make impossible the conference of Communist parties that Russia hopes to convene this year. Nor would it be a military Cakewalk. Since Russian troops left in 1945, Czechoslovakia has built a 175,000-man army and an air force of 850 planes. Its population is strongly behind Dubček's government and increasingly anti-Soviet...
...Russians are worried about the increasingly anti-Soviet tone of Dubček's liberalization. Czechoslovak news papers, for example, openly accused the Russian secret police of engineering the forced confessions and show trials of the 1950s. In fact, the onetime state prosecutor at those trials, Karol Bacilek, charged last week that the man who came to Prague to force Czechoslovak Communists to conduct the purge was none other than Anastas Mikoyan, later the Soviet President...
...Russians also fear that Dubček will turn to the West for the economic aid that he badly needs. Thus a prime topic of conversation during Dubček's visit to Moscow was an unusual Soviet offer of $300 million or more worth of credit in hard currency. Dubček will no doubt gladly take the money, but he is also eager to make sure that the Russians do not revert from the carrot to the stick and cut off the oil and raw-material shipments upon which his country depends. As a hedge against...
...Hurry. The U.S. has kept meticulously silent over events in Czechoslovakia for fear of further embarrassing Dubček before his Communist neighbors. Last week, though, the State Department said that it was watching the liberalization with "interest and sympathy," even expressed willingness to reopen talks about $20 million worth of Czechoslovak gold confiscated from the Nazis toward the end of World War II. The U.S. has refused to return the bullion without some compensation for $72 million in American properties that the Communists nationalized in 1948. At week's end, the Dubček regime rebuffed the offer...