Word: schmidts
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...four years Astronomer Aden B. Meinel of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory had worked on the problem. He devised a powerful spectrograph, built around a special Schmidt camera, which gathers light from a large area of the sky. Last month, when the sun was nicely spotted in the right places, he got his apparatus ready and pointed it in the direction from which he expected the hydrogen particles to come. Nicely on schedule, the night sky lit up with an "extreme aurora...
...walk through Prague's Wenceslas Square," says Schmidt, "and see ... on nine-tenths of the shops ... the sign 'Narodni Podnik' which means National Enterprise." Nearly 100% of industry, wholesale trade and export-import trade, and 80% of shops have been communalized. Although this economic concentration in the hands of the government is capable of generating great power, Communists are finding that compared with the selective precision of private enterprise, nationalized enterprise on such a scale is often a blunt instrument. Thus Rude Pravo, central Communist Party organ, complained recently that so many sieves were being delivered...
Even though social security benefits now cover nearly all contingencies from birth to funerals, Schmidt found strong indications that the country's industrial workers are dissatisfied with their lot. They have even staged several brief strikes, although strikes are illegal in the People's democracy. Writes Schmidt wryly: "[They] have observed, however, that while in the old days they could damn or even strike against their boss, now that they are working for themselves, that sort of thing is dealt with ... as sabotage...
Resistance in the Mind. The Communists have won few new converts, Schmidt believes. "The overwhelming majority of Czechs profoundly hate Communism . . . [This includes] almost all peasants, almost all of the old middle class, and a good many workers . . . But the Czechoslovaks' resistance is mostly in their minds. The Communists have compromised but not conquered their minds . . . Of active resistance-with all due respect to a heroic few-there is little...
Concludes Schmidt: "The people of Czechoslovakia today stand as prisoners in a Communist camp. Their sense of national identity and honor, their sense of the value of political freedom and their revulsion against alien rule is strong. But not so strong as the instinct for individual self-preservation ... On the whole, their position is about what it was under the Nazis...