Word: reformers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most historic meeting in the Central Committee's history-and a turning point for modern Czechoslovakia. Amid a display of press freedom and accessibility more familiar to Western politicians than Communist leaders, the party's top brass assembled to consider an "action program" for a democratic reform of Czechoslovakia that has been brewing during three stormy months of nationwide debates and mounting pressures. The reform harks back half a century in spirit to 1918, when Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points proclaimed the self-determination of peoples and enabled Czechoslovakia to be born as an independent state. This...
Resolution to Reform. Censorship has been almost entirely lifted, and the press, television and radio have exploded in an orgy of free expression. Long-banned films, plays and books are blossoming into production. The country's judiciary has undertaken to review all cases heard in the 1950s in an effort to right legal injustices, and a special commission has been established to rehabilitate the thousands of victims of the Stalinist purge trials of that period. Church and clergy are fast being freed of restraints, and the Communists' phony religious front organization, called the "Peace Priests," is disintegrating. Last...
...treated, whether the people really have a feeling of taking part in solving important social problems." To see that the Czechoslovak people get that chance, he left his family behind in Slovakia in January, moved alone into a downtown Prague hotel and began working 18-hour days on his reforms. Inevitably, since he wants to transform Czechoslovak society within the wide bounds of social ism, he is compared to the 15th century Czechoslovak Theologian Jan Hus, who tried to reform the Roman Catholic Church from within but saw his followers break away and form their own movement. Hus was burned...
Butterflies as Bras. While it took a hardheaded politician like Alexander Dubček to push through reform, it was Czechoslovakia's writers and artists who created the climate for it. Through 20 years of Communist rule, they had been more daring and less puritanical than their Communist colleagues 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 Novotn...
While the forces of liberalization continued to gather momentum in Czechoslovakia, the regime of Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka stiffened its resistance to reform. To filter out the ringleaders of the student demonstrations that have occurred over the past few weeks, it closed down eight academic depart ments at Warsaw University, forcing 1,000 out of its 7,000 students to reen roll this week. The government drafted into the army more than 200 students, expelled 34 others at Warsaw and fired six professors, at least two of them Jew ish, on charges of inciting disturbances. In a revival...