Word: czechoslovakia
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...Amid uncertainty and confusion it is good to write and read about a hero," Eda Kriseova writes in her preface to Vaclav Havel, the Authorized Biography. However, when her book was first published in Czechoslovakia, "literary critics attacked me for having written a pretty story, a fairy tale." It is good to talk about a hero in our times. If such a hero could exist, Vaclav Havel would fulfill the requirements. As a longtime friend, artist, and fellow political worker, Kriseova is well qualified to write about Havel's life. Her attitude towards him encompasses both familiarity and reverence. Kriseova...
Both sides of Havel's family were prominent and aristocratic figures in Czechoslovakia's Old Regime. Such a history only intensified the communist government's discrimination against Vaclav, even in his youth. The Havel family history is truly interesting, but Kriseova devotes too much energy to relaying stories about Vaclav's parents and grandparents. Likewise, her account of Vaclav's own youth tends towards the chatty and overly anecdotal. To be fair, many of these tidbits are surprising and intriguing, especially those about the beginnings of Havel's involvement with Prague underground literary circles...
Same Puzzles; Smaller Pieces. The Warsaw Pact has also broken up, with one former member, Czechoslovakia, splitting into two nations. Another, East Germany, has disappeared from the chessboard. The dirty cold war espionage battles in the middle of Europe have eased dramatically. "The information river is westbound now," says a former officer of the Czechoslovak security forces who is now a private consultant in Prague. "Until 1988, Polish agents were trained in Moscow," says Jerzy Jachowicz, a Warsaw journalist who covers intelligence matters. "Now they are trained in the U.S., France and Britain." That new westward orientation was emphasized last...
...Their main focus," says a report by the security service of the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, "will be information gathering in the scientific- technical realm." Agents from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania are still operating in Germany, says the report, as are those from China, "especially at universities." In a warning that probably applies to all industrialized nations, the German security report says Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria are running clandestine intelligence operations aimed at "the development of atomic, biological and chemical weapons...
McArthur says he didn't take the offer seriously until several months later. It was then, on the day after Christmas, that his boss--a Jewish immigrant who had fled the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia--came around to the McArthur home with gifts for the holidays...