Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...being made towards east-west detente. The second theory is that Russian use of force in supressing the reforms in Czechoslovakia indicates we are no longer playing the old ball game, that we are now dealing with Soviet leaders who will be as unpredictable and possibly as hostile as Stalin...
...Stalin...
...long guns of tanks swiveled from side to side in the baroque alleyways of Prague. The Russians surrounded the presidential palace on Hradcany Hill, planted artillery on the heights of Letna Hill, where a mammoth statue of Stalin once overlooked the city. In Old Town Square, they even placed six antiaircraft guns by the Jan Hus monument, the symbol of Czechoslovakia's historic quest for liberty. Everywhere, paratroops in purple berets stood guard alongside tank crews in full battle dress, cradling automatic rifles in their laps. In swiftness of execution, the invasion had been a model military operation...
...underground war against the occupiers. In one of their retaliation moves, the Germans wiped out the entire village of Lidice. After Germany's defeat, Benes took his regime to Prague and started anew. He faced tremendous obstacles. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill acceded to Stalin's demand that Czechoslovakia fall into his sphere of influence after the war. As a result, when General George Patton's tanks prepared to liberate Prague in the war's closing days, orders came from Allied headquarters to halt. The Russians got the honor of freeing the capital. In their wake...
...first Czechoslovak party boss, Klement Gottwald, was a harsh ruler. He nationalized the country's entire industry, including even small artisans' shops, collectivized all farms, and subjected the people to a withering succession of arrests, show trials and executions of "Titoists" and "traitors." Fittingly, Gottwald caught a chill at Stalin's funeral in 1953 and died a few months later. An almost equally unbending Stalinist took his place: Antonin Novotny, who had been Communist boss of Prague. As the slight winds of liberalism blew throughout the East bloc following Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, Novotny tried his best...