Word: husak
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Those who probably took the dimmest view of the trip were Czechoslovakia's Communist Party officials. Under their heavy hands, the Prague Spring of 1968 quickly gave way to sullen winter as the country became one of the most rigidly orthodox in the East bloc. Party Leader Gustav Husak, 74, installed by former Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev as Dubcek's replacement, has symbolized the backward-looking government's unimaginative face...
...strongest reaction to the Gorbachev moves has come in Czechoslovakia. Since Soviet troops marched into that country in 1968 to stamp out the short- lived Prague spring of liberalization, the regime of Gustav Husak, 74, has pursued policies of stolid central planning coupled with rigid political control. Now, encouraged by Gorbachev's words, reformers within the Communist Party appear to have begun a campaign against conservatives. In the process they have encouraged some public support. GORBACHEV can be seen scrawled on a number of Prague walls, and in Pilsen and Bratislava last month small groups of people waved banners declaring...
Czechoslovakia's Premier Lubomir Strougal, a longtime advocate of reform, has taken the lead in attacking orthodoxy in what Western diplomats believe is shaping up as a power struggle. Strougal recently denounced the economic policies of the Husak years, saying, "The reforms of 1968 were politically misused . . . but after that, our economy was managed with the methods of the 1950s...
...signaled what Hu called a "new phase" in relations between the two countries. It came less than a month after a more modest working visit by Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland. Next year could produce new state visits from two more East bloc leaders, Czechoslovakia's Gustav Husak and Hungary's Janos Kadar...
Since the Soviet party congress in February, three East European countries have had their own meetings. At the first congress in Czechoslovakia last month, Gustav Husak, 73, signaled that no winds of change would be blowing through his regime anytime soon. Echoing Gorbachev, Husak inveighed against mismanagement, but his dominant theme was self-congratulation. Husak has maintained absolute control by offering a Communist version of a consumer society while stifling opposition with one of the most efficient police states in the Soviet bloc. Czechoslovakia's relative prosperity, however, has been bought at a punishing price: by starving industry of needed...