Word: ek
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...serious errors and aberrations" that had left "a dark stain" on the country. The reformers, many of whom had been humiliated by worse rituals in the past, did not linger long over their triumphal moment. After days of debate and amendment, they pushed through Party Boss Alexander Dubček's "action program" for the democratic reform of Czechoslovakia (TIME cover, April 5). Then they nominated Economist Oldřich Černík, 46, as the new Premier to organize a government that will carry out "a renaissance of socialism...
...swirling unrest, Alexander Dubček entered the fray, carrying the banner of Slovak nationalism. As party boss of Slovakia, he rose at a Central Committee meeting in October and launched a fiery polemic against Novotný for breaking his promises and neglecting the development of Slovakia. In a highly heated exchange, Novotný called Dubček a "bourgeois nationalist," one of the worst insults in the Communist lexicon. Dubček began working behind the scenes to oust Novotný from party leadership, gradually bringing together dissident Slovak leaders, university officials, economists and other liberals. When Novotn...
Novotný tried to relieve Dubček of his Slovak post, but the Slovaks would have none of it. Finally, after Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev flew into Prague in a belated attempt to save him, Novotný resigned the party job in January, and Dubček was elected to replace him. Even then, Novotný did not completely give up. His allies in the Defense and Interior ministries put to gether desperate plans for a coup, and at least one tank battalion was ready to roll into Prague on Novotný's behalf. But the coup...
Butterflies as Bras. While it took a hardheaded politician like Alexander Dubček to push through reform, it was Czechoslovakia's writers and artists who created the climate for it. Through 20 years of Communist rule, they had been more daring and less puritanical than their Communist colleagues almost anywhere else. Many of them enjoyed the privileges offered them by the party-free tickets on the national railways, for example-and went on paying homage to the approved art form of socialist realism. But Czechoslovak intellectuals have a long tradition of fighting political authority, and even under Novotn...
...play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smoček, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways and hedges, which represent bureaucracy. While an amused keeper watches with his vicious dog, they crawl piteously about, toss out the bones of their dead comrades and conduct absurd conversations...