Word: warsaw
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Striking with stunning speed and surprise, some 200,000 soldiers of the five Warsaw Pact countries punched across the Czechoslovak border to snuff out the eight-month-old experiment by Alexander Dubcek's regime in humanizing Communism. Russian and East German units smashed southward from East Germany. Forces thrusting from...
...guide the arriving armada down to the landing strip. Forbidden by the Dubcek government to shoot back at the overwhelming force of invaders, the Czechoslovaks, from high army officers down to shoeshine boys, quickly established a principle and stuck to it through the days that followed: anything that the Warsaw Pact intruders wanted done they must do themselves. With few exceptions, the invaders found no collaborators...
Throughout the country, black flags of mourning appeared on buildings, statues and monuments. On walls, barn doors, highway signs, car and store windows, the Czechoslovaks tacked up posters and chalked messages demanding in all the languages of the Warsaw Pact that the invaders go home. One message scrawled on a wall in Prague read: "Lenin, wake up. Brezhnev has gone mad!" Said another: "Hungarians, go home. Have you not had enough of these things?" Wenceslas Square turned into a fleet of Czechoslovak flags bobbing on a sea of demonstrators, who shouted in the direction of the 20 tanks parked among...
...them wore red, white and blue corsages and carried IVAN GO HOME! placards. Thev burned propaganda leaflets dropped from Soviet helicopters. Hundreds of thousands of citizens in fac tories, sports clubs and professional associations signed petitions calling upon Svoboda to declare Czechoslovakia neu tral and withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Radio Prague began broadcasting the license-plate numbers of secret police cars so that people could slash their tires...
Though the Warsaw Pact countries that joined the Soviets in the invasion issued only official communiques of self-congratulation, their people clearly did not share that sentiment. In East Berlin, for example, hundreds of people flatly refused the demand of party workers to sign petitions in support of the intervention. Instead, they came to the Czechoslovak cultural center, where they left bouquets and bought, as some said, "souvenirs of Dubcek...