Word: novotn
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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...jockeying began with a rare and unpopular demonstration of pro-Soviet support, staged in a downtown Prague meeting hall by the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Society. It drew some 3,000 middle-aged and elderly citizens, the rank and file of a hard-line group sometimes called the Novotný Orphans, in honor of Stalinist ex-Party Boss Antonin Novotný. With some 20 Soviet officers seated on stage, the crowd applauded wildly as Novotný's former foreign minister, Vaclav David, called for "an open fight against antisocialist forces." Meanwhile, outside the hall, some 500 younger Czechoslovaks waited...
Drugged Confession. Wherever their curiosity led them, newsmen found evidence of direct Soviet meddling in Czech government affairs. A former Novotný security chief admitted to them that "26 Soviet advisers were active in all departments" of his secret police. The head of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia's Bratislava branch told them that the Russians had engineered his arrest in 1949, then drugged him to make him confess. The most explosive charge of all concerned the death of Czechoslovakia's last non-Communist leader, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose "suicide" was announced shortly after the Communists seized...
...colleagues were equally unbending. As a justification for their invasion, the Soviets wanted Dubċek to make a public statement thanking the Red Army for saving Czechoslovakia from the clutches of counterrevolutionaries. Dubċek refused. Nor could the Soviets prevail upon two Novotnýite conservatives, whom most Czechoslovaks suspected of issuing the call for intervention, to give some credence to the rumor by at least keeping their mouths shut. As soon as they were re-elected to a new Central Committee that Dubċek formed last week, Oldřich Svestka and Jan Filler issued denials...
...reforms. Nevertheless, his removal was a victory not only for the Russians but also for the conservatives in Prague whom Moscow would like to see unseat Dubček. For Prchlik was the general who had prevented a January coup by army units loyal to ex-party Boss Antonin Novotný, the Stalinist that Dubček bounced from office...
...major sign of how much life has changed is the outpouring of honors for Thomas Masaryk, the country's first President, and his son, the late Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who was probably murdered by the Communists. The very existence of both men was officially erased during the Novotnŷ period. Now, at the graves of the two patriots in the village of Lany, small green shrubs have been planted to form letters that spell the presidential motto, "Truth Prevails." Schools in Prague and Bratislava have been renamed after both men. And some mornings, as the train pulls into...