Word: hus
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...undergone a national religious revival-perhaps in reaction to the imposition of Soviet-style repression. The number of baptisms, church weddings, church funerals and applications to seminaries has been steadily rising, and more and more citizens are giving their children religious instruction. Lately, the Soviet-installed regime of Gustav Husák has responded to the trend with a concerted anti-church campaign of discrimination, propaganda and outright repression...
...Also, Husák is engaged in a power struggle with two rivals on the Politburo, Vasil Bilàk and Alois Indra, ultra hard-liners who immediately welcomed the Soviet invasion in 1968. In order to protect his tenuous position, Husák may have been forced to order the arrests...
Czechoslovak Party Boss Gustav Husák could hardly have been more emphatic. In response to a question by a visiting French Communist about reprisals against onetime followers of ousted Reformer Alexander Dubček, Husák declared: "There is and will be no trial and no arrest for political activities in 1968 and 1969, and there is and will be no trial or arrest for opinions held. Socialist legality will be scrupulously respected...
Unfortunately, Husák was lying. Even as he gave those assurances earlier this month to Roland Leroy, a member of the French Communist Politburo, the first large-scale mass arrests since Dubček's downfall were in process. As of last week, more than 200 Czechoslovaks had been rounded up. About 40 were charged with distributing leaflets that denounced last November's national-assembly elections as a rigged farce-which, of course, they were. Many of the others were liberal intellectuals and journalists who supported Dubček's short-lived Springtime of Freedom, which...
Haunting Question. Husák himself during the 1950s spent eight years in prison for placing his Slovak nationalism ahead of his allegiance to Communism. Ever since he succeeded Dubček in 1969, he has persistently claimed that he would not tolerate political trials. Apparently he has been under pressure from the Russians to crack down on would-be reformers; last month, an editorial in Pravda warned of the "mortal danger" of "counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia...