Word: novotn
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...orgy of breast-beating confessions was reminiscent of the old days, but the roles were curiously reversed. At Prague's Hradčany castle last week, deposed Party Boss Antonín Novotný led members of his old guard in recanting past mistakes before the Communist Party's Central Committee. He had, Novotný admitted, been guilty of "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...
...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...
...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 Novotný they constantly pushed to extend the bounds of the permissible. They succeeded in getting a surprising number of their works published, but for the most part they wrote secretly, kept a rich lode of manuscripts in their desk drawers. Currently, the intellectuals are celebrating...
...Pearls and' The Palaver ers) are filled with surrealism and black humor. Novelist Vačulik writes about languid Czechs such as the farmers in The Axe, who are brutally herded into Communist collectives. Novelist Ladislav Mñačko, who went to Israel in protest against Novotný's repression last fall, writes in Delayed Reports about tortures and rigged trials that he has seen as a journalist. In his A Taste of Power, Mñačko describes an apparatchik whose character is twisted by power...