No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
An Alaskan and a Siberian bear were grumbling about the decline in their living conditions – the oil pipes and the bustle in Alaska, the prison camps and the KomsomoI hearties in Siberia – when a Czech bear interrupted: ‘It's worse for me, though. In 1968 I was expelled from the Union of Free Bears; now I'm in Bohemia, training to be a cuckoo’.
AS IS WELL-KNOWN, THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE SOVIET INcursion of 1968 saw drastic purges in Czechoslovakia. The number of those expelled from the Party was put by Vasil Bilak, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, at 461,751; a high proportion of these lost their jobs as well. (Bilak in fact claimed that only 30 per cent of those expelled — about 150,000 — had lost their jobs; but as Zdenek Mlynif and Karel Kaplan were quick to point out, Bilak's statistics took no account of those who were still employed but with lower status: medical consultants demoted to hospital porters, bank managers as office cleaners — in general, professionals redeployed in unskilled labour.) Those expelled suffered in other respects as well; in particular, their children tended to be denied higher or secondary education.
1 Bilak, Vasil, interview in the Daily World (US Communist Party newspaper), 4 09 1975 .Google Scholar
2 Mlynar, Zdenek, ‘Open Letter to Communist and Socialist Parties in Europe’, 17 09 1975 Google Scholar; and Kaplan, Karel, ‘Open Letter to Vasil Bilak’, 27 09 1975 ;Google Scholar both reprinted (in translation) in Deutscher, et al. (eds), Voices of Czechoslovak Socialists, London, Merlin Press, 1976.Google Scholar
3 Payne, Peter, ‘Four Years of “Normalisation”: the Academic Purge in Czechoslovakia’, 0Index on Censorship, vol. 1 no. 2, Summer 1972, pp. 33–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Charter Document No. 12, ‘On the Position of Writers’, Published in translation in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, vol. 1 no. 4, September‐October 1977, pp. 7–8.
5 Ibid.
6 Kliment, Alexander, ‘Mr Feuilleton’, reprinted in translation in Index on Censorship, vol. 7 no. 3, 05/06 1978, pp. 37–8.Google Scholar
7 Levy, Alan, ‘The reed that bends but never breaks’, Index on Censorship, vol. 5 no. 3, Autumn 1976, pp. 23–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Vaculik, Ludvik, ‘Open Letter to Kurt Waldheim’, 29 07 1975 ; reprinted in translation in Riese, H‐P. (ed.), Since the Prague Spring, New York, Random House 1979, pp. 113–20.Google Scholar
9 See Moldau, George, ‘Patočka University’, Index on Censorship, vol. 8, no. 3, 05/06 1979, pp. 54–6. Moldau adds drily, however, ‘No doubt even secret policemen exaggerate their work achievements’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 See Tomin, Julius, ‘Inside the Security State’, published in translation in The New Statesman, 7 03 1980 , pp. 350–3.Google Scholar
11 Published in translation in Palach Press Bulletin for April 1980.
12 Tomin, Julius, ‘Open Letter to the Minister of the Interior’, published in translation under the title ‘Without Music, Mr Tomin…’, in The New Statesman, 16 05 1980 , p. 745.Google Scholar
13 Op. cit., note 10.