Word: wente
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other reformist leaders worked frantically to keep their people from committing national suicide. In an urgent appeal to the National Assembly, they had implored the Deputies to refrain from inflaming the tense situation. The Deputies insisted on issuing their protest, but then they reluctantly went into recess. In a radio address, the President of the Parliament, Josef Smrkovský, argued that the present regressions represented only a temporary setback. He and the other leaders, he said, had accepted the Soviet dictates, and the attendant crackdowns on personal and political liberty, in hopes of getting the occupation lifted. "We are sure...
...hope-or hopelessness. In Prague, students who only days before had taunted the Soviet soldiers and set fire to their tanks now dispersed at the first sign of a Red Army uniform. Shopkeepers used razor blades to scrape political slogans off their store windows. The free radio stations either went silent or dropped the word free from their names. The underground newspapers stopped publishing anything controversial (see following story). At the same time, the apparatus of repression fell swiftly into place, and the arrests of members of the underground, of liberal writers and artists, began...
FROM the outset, the Czechoslovaks' remarkable campaign of passive resistance was aimed straight at their oppressors' vulnerabilities-their sense of direction, their stomachs and their morale. The tactics were laid down in one of the many variations of "the ten commandments of resistance" that went up on walls all over town: "We have not learned anything, we don't know anything, we don't have anything, we don't give anything, we can't do anything, we don't sell anything, we don't help, we don't understand...
Clicking Shutters. The backbone of resistance was Czechoslovak radio, which managed to stay on the air by wit and engineering wizardry. Middle-of-the-night calls went out to nearly all station personnel when the invasion started, and announcers managed to talk their way past Soviet lines even after the studios were surrounded. Věra Stovíčková, one of the best-known voices of Prague Radio, got past Russian guards by claiming that she was a charwoman. Others slipped out of the studios with vital transmitting equipment, which was soon wired up to put "Radio Free...
...Russians. One station devoted 45 minutes to a reading on the life of Jan Hus, a 15th century religious reformer who was betrayed while dealing with his enemies on a safe-conduct pass. Arrested and tortured, intoned the commentator, Jan Hus refused to deny "his truth" and went to the stake crying, "Jesus, our Savior, have mercy on me and my country...