Word: czechoslovakia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...gambit failed. For one thing, the Christian Democrats were able to cut the leftist vote by warning that the Communists would turn the proud republic into "a Czechoslovakia." Even the importation of some 4,000 mostly leftist émigrés by bus, train and taxi could not salvage the Communists' hopes. For another thing, there were those 450 safe votes flown in from the U.S., which helped the ruling coalition to hang on to all but one of the 39 seats that it was defending in the 60-man council. If the well-heeled Christian Democrats thought...
...death in a protest against the continued Soviet occupation. At noon, to the cacophony of auto horns and factory whistles, traffic braked to a halt and many of the 50,000 people who jammed Wenceslas Square raised their fingers in the victory sign. In a show of defiance, Czechoslovakia stood still for 15 minutes...
Elsewhere in Czechoslovakia, there were both peaceful protests and violent riots. The situation was relatively calm in Bratislava, the scene of severe fighting in 1968, because police allowed the inhabitants to place flowers on the spots where a young Slovak had been killed by the invading Soviet tanks. In Brno, however, two consecutive nights of skirmishes left three demonstrators dead and at least 30 gravely injured...
...week's end, as an uneasy calm settled on Brno and the rest of Czechoslovakia, the government began to clamp tighter controls on the country. To justify the crackdown, Rude Prdvo, the Communist Party's paper, said that the riots were evidence of "counterrevolutionary activity as was known in Hungary in 1956." Many Czechoslovaks feared that the statement might presage mass political arrests and trials...
THOUGH water cannon and police truncheons kept last week's demonstrations in Czechoslovakia under control, mere force is not likely to suppress other aftereffects of last year's invasion. Reflecting on the developments of the past twelve months, TIME Correspondent, Jerrold Schecter reports from Moscow: "The invasion of Czechoslovakia is now regarded as an overt admission of the inability of the Soviet leadership to accept and deal with political and economic change in the Communist world. Though most Soviet citizens accept the official explanation that counterrevolution and the threat of West German aggression required the intervention in Czechoslovakia...