Word: vaclav
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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TEMPTATION by Vaclav Havel...
When New York City's Public Theater produced his The Memorandum in 1968, Vaclav Havel sat in the audience. But by the time his The Increased Difficulty of Concentration was mounted the following year, the Soviets had marched into his native Czechoslovakia, and Havel was no longer able to travel. His works have been banned from Czech stages. For his human-rights activism, he has repeatedly been jailed. This week, when the Public opened his Temptation, Havel was serving an eight-month sentence for "incitement" and "a public order misdemeanor" during a peaceful demonstration in January protesting the legacy...
Whole segments of the East bloc, once firmly under the thumb of Soviet orthodoxy, are launched in headlong pursuit of a new political and economic order. But not all. In Bulgaria an aging leadership shows no sign of interest in homegrown perestroika. In Czechoslovakia, where leading dissident Vaclav Havel has been sentenced to jail, trials moved into a second month for other activists held on charges ranging from organizing peaceful antigovernment demonstrations to signing political petitions. And in Stalinist Rumania, party leader Nicolae Ceausescu remains the "Idi Amin of Communism," as his neighbors call him. The unregenerate totalitarian, obsessed with...
...Vaclav Havel has been fighting for freedom in Czechoslovakia since the day Warsaw Pact forces crushed the reform movement that flowered in the spring of 1968. So it was hardly surprising that he was arrested on Jan. 16, along with eight other activists, while trying to lay flowers in Prague's Wenceslas Square. That was where student Jan Palach set himself ablaze two decades earlier to protest the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...reforms that Husak suppressed. Whether Jakes (pronounced Ya-kesh) is the right man for that job is hotly debated. A colorless Soviet-trained bureaucrat who presided over a sweeping purge in the early 1970s, he hardly qualifies as new blood. In an interview with TIME, Dissident Playwright Vaclav Havel called Jakes a "man without a specific face, without his own ideas." On the other hand, said Havel, "in our situation any change is good." Jakes's pro-Soviet credentials suggest that he may be at least somewhat more amenable to Gorbachev's demands for reform than Husak...