Word: ek
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...took over the country to prevent a "counterrevolution." Translation: Czechoslovakia was showing signs of growing democratization. So ended, tragically, the eight-month-long Prague Spring, an unprecedented and exhilarating period of cultural and political freedom that had been orchestrated by the Czechoslovak Communist Party of Alexander Dubček. Under Dubček, censorship had been lifted, police files aired and Communist Party officials-for the first time ever-subjected to open, popular criticism. Then, thanks to the Kremlin, the country was yanked back into the grim, gray twilight of East bloc conformity it had known since...
...government of Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak, who succeeded Dubček as party boss eight months after the invasion, was indeed a little nervous as the Aug. 20 anniversary approached. All police leaves were canceled. Trusted Communist cadres in the Workers' Militia were assigned weekend guard duty in factories across the country. As is the custom, the estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Soviet troops who remain bivouacked in Czechoslovakia continued to make themselves scarce, as they have since...
...result, reports Aikman, is that most of the country has settled into an apathetic limbo. After 1968, the new regime purged 326,817 members, from the Czechoslovak Communist Party; today, having re-expanded, it claims 1.9 million members, vs. 1.7 million in 1968. Former First Secretary Dubček, now 56, is a watchman in a Bratislava public garden, under constant surveillance. Former Foreign Minister Jiři Hájek is now a pensioner in Prague and a persistent critic of the Husák regime. Former Premier Oldřich Černik holds an obscure research job outside...
Some 150,000 Czechs, including Film Directors Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer and Ján Kádár, have fled to the West. In reprisal for supporting the attempted Dubček liberalization, thousands of professionals and technicians who stayed behind were forced into menial jobs. What remains of the once flourishing Czechoslovak culture is a wasteland of agitprop that French Poet Louis Aragon has called a "Biafra of the spirit...
...country has been losing its share of Western hard-currency markets for its principal exports, which include glassware, engineering machinery and textiles. Capital investment has been minimal, and many factories are obsolete. Decentralized planning, economic incentives and worker participation were intended to be keystone policies of the Dubček government. In a highly bastardized form, they have been revived by Finance Minister Leopold Lér. But Lér's plan in no way envisions the kind of widespread shop-floor democracy that had been the dream of Dubček's Finance Minister...