Word: hus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Addressing 1,200 delegates at the 14th Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party last week in Prague's vast Congress Hall, First Secretary Gustav Husák announced that his two-year policy of normalization and consolidation had successfully annulled the "dangerous" reforms of the Alexander Dubček era. Much of the session was a Te Deum to the Soviet Union, which still maintains 80,000 troops on Czechoslovak soil three years after invading the country and crushing Dubč's Prague Spring...
...norm in Czechoslovakia, the Russians misjudged it. They let the Prague Spring reach full blossom, then felt compelled to crush it. Now, three years afterward, outside criticism of Soviet ham-handedness has largely faded. Thus last week's congress turned into a Brezhnev victory: he responded beamingly to Husák's "sincere thanks" for the 1968 intervention...
There was little to cheer about when the congress turned to another item of business: plotting a five-year economic plan. Husák denounced the principle of "market economy" toward which such other East bloc nations as Poland and Hungary are slowly but steadily moving. Czechoslovakia will instead adhere to "economic management by a single national plan." Thus the Czechoslovak leader committed his country to the same sort of stifling centralization that almost ruined its economy in pre-Dubč days and has plagued the Soviet Union's economy with ruinous inefficiencies. The illogic of such a decision...
Subtle Protest. To ease the pains of political reaction, the government has tried to hold down prices and make more consumer goods available, but shortages persist. Two-thirds of Czechoslovak shoe production is exported to the Soviet Union to help pay for the Soviet occupation, for instance, and even Husák in a recent party speech was forced to take note of the situation. "To put it plainly," he said, to get a proper fit "one must have either an excessively small or excessively large foot, or one has to cut one's own foot down...
...Husák's defenders insist that he is compelled to pursue a tough course because of pressure from Moscow and is only waiting until after the 14th Congress to institute improvements. That may well be wishful thinking. Last month, at the Slovak Communist Party's Congress in Bratislava, he said: "Various reformers entertain the hope that there will be a more liberal period after the Party Congress. If they mean freedom for bourgeois tendencies, for laying the foundations for a new disruption, they should not entertain any illusions." He has also denounced Communist "radishes," meaning party members...