Word: ruml
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...near Prague's Old Town Square, ready to disperse the young people gathered around the mournful statue of Jan Hus, the 15th century religious reformer who was burned at the stake as a heretic. Looking down on the tanks from his third-floor office on Parizska (Paris Street), Jiri Ruml tells me, "We failed. The next attempt at reform will have to come from the center, from Moscow...
...deputy editor of an irreverent weekly called the Reporter, Ruml, then 44, had chronicled the student protests that set the stage for the extraordinary reform movement known as the Prague Spring. He reported on the enthusiasm that Party Leader Alexander Dubcek's vision of "socialism with a human face" had aroused among factory workers, and wrote scathing pieces about the ominous Warsaw Pact army maneuvers taking place in Czechoslovakia that summer. On Aug. 21, those exercises had turned into a full-scale invasion...
When I saw Ruml again, two years later, the "Brezhnev winter" had descended on Prague. Ruml, along with 3,000 other journalists, had lost his job and been expelled from the Communist Party. His new career: working as a crane operator with a road gang. Ruml's wife Jirina Hrabkova had been removed as the moderator of a popular radio program, and was selling sausages at the Prague Zoo. Worst of all, their two sons Jan, 17, and Jakob, 15, were hounded out of high school and denied a university education...
...corner stood a typewriter. "It is the fifth in 20 years," he said. The police had confiscated the others in attempts to trace samizdat (underground press) articles critical of the regime. The harassment had brought on an ulcer complicated by other stomach ailments. After multiple surgery in 1980, Ruml was declared an invalid and retired with a monthly pension...
...Only then, the real dance began," he recalls. In 1977 his family had signed Charter 77, a petition that called on the Prague government to observe the 1975 Helsinki accords on human rights. Within a month, all four were arrested and held briefly for questioning. Ruml was frequently picked up by the police in the years that followed, and in April 1981 he and his son Jan were accused of organizing subversive activities, an offense that carries a ten-year jail term. They were kept in different parts of a Prague prison, seeing each other only once in 13 months...