Word: bratislava
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Kuznetsov also seemed to be doing what Chervonenko had dismally failed to do: lining up an alternative leader to Dubcek. On a one-day flying visit, Kuznetsov went to the Slovak capital of Bratislava for a chat with Gustav Husak, the Slovak party secretary whose recent public criticism of Dubcek's handling of Czechoslovakia's short-lived reform program won favorable mention in the Soviet press. Kuznetsov's visit encouraged speculation in Czechoslovakia that the Soviets hoped ultimately to replace Dubcek with Husak when the switch could be made without needlessly inflaming the country's turbulent...
...Confession. Wherever their curiosity led them, newsmen found evidence of direct Soviet meddling in Czech government affairs. A former Novotný security chief admitted to them that "26 Soviet advisers were active in all departments" of his secret police. The head of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia's Bratislava branch told them that the Russians had engineered his arrest in 1949, then drugged him to make him confess. The most explosive charge of all concerned the death of Czechoslovakia's last non-Communist leader, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose "suicide" was announced shortly after the Communists seized power...
...what has moved the men in the Kremlin to desperate reaction against Czechoslovakia and perhaps Rumania. Their responses are clearly those of fearful men, and in them is exposed not the Soviet Union's strength but its weakness. It was almost with compassion that a Czechoslovak editorialist in Bratislava Pravda, before the censorship closed down on him, observed that "not Czechoslovakia, but the great power Russia, has arrived at the crossroads of history. It arrived with tanks, troop carriers and hungry and grimy soldiers who failed to understand why they were sent. Let us remember the philosopher who said...
...directed and inspired by radio stations that continued to operate secretly throughout the country?reportedly with transmitters provided by the Czechoslovak army?after the Russians had shut down the regular government transmitters. "We have no weapons, but our contempt is stronger than tanks," proclaimed one such station near Bratislava. The station suggested that its listeners "switch around street signs, take house numbers from the doors, remove nameplates from public buildings and, when a Soviet soldier asks you something, say that you don't understand Russian...
...flown off to Moscow in a Soviet military jet. The Czechoslovaks at first broadcast reports that Dubcek had been killed, but that was cleared up in one of the many weird, almost unreal vignettes of the week. Dubcek's mother marched in to see the local Soviet commander in Bratislava, demanding to know what the Russians had done with her son. Slightly dumfounded, the Russian officer told her: "We are negotiating with...