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Unofficial Education in Czechoslovakia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
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.
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References
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
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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
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11 Published in translation in Palach Press Bulletin for April 1980.
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