Suchergebnisse

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.

The emergence of unofficial seminars in Czechoslovakia since the 1968/69 U purges is discussed. The demotion of most faculty members to unskilled & insecure manual labor positions is reviewed, noting the restricted access to higher education allowed their children. The persistence of "underground" publication is examined; despite the guarantees of free speech provided by the 1976 Constitution, police harassment of writers & former faculty continues; the growth of legal resistance & defense committees is traced back to 1977. One case history of an "open" unoffical seminar, conducted by Julius Tomin from 1977 to 1980 is extensively documented, stressing its regular disruptions by the police, & the persistence of the participants in attending. Pros & cons of the underground vs openly dissident or extra-U approaches are evaluated, attributing much of the success of Tomin's seminar to its nonclandestine character. L. Whittemore.