> I've been to the Czech Republic myself.
I spent a great week in Prague in the summer of '79. Our tour guide had been a fervent believer in the possibilities of the Prague Spring of '68. Thrown out of the Party, of coarse, afterwards. Gave him my copy of Trotsky's, "Revolution Betrayed, " and an issue of Telos with an excerpt of a great book by Zdenek Mlynar, "Nightfrost In Prague, " Karz-Cohl pubs. Mlynar was a member of the CC of the Czech CP in '68 (and, Gorby's college roomate, see his, "Conversations With Gorbachev, " Columbia Univ. Press, recently.) The book relates the origins of the attempt to democratize Czech socialism, and, the chapters in particular, of Dubcek and the rest of the Czech Party "negotiating" w/ Brezhnev in Moscow, are quite interesting. Brezhnev, btw, telephoned LBJ as the Warsaw Pact invasion was being planned and LBJ said, in effect, you have your bloc, we have ours, we'll not interfere w/ any phony demogogy like we did w/ the Hungarian workers in '56, saying we'd counter-intervene through NATO.
In Chicago in '68 at the protests of the Democratic National Convention, New Leftists chanted, "Chicago '68, Prague, '68." Tanks there, tanks there. No tankie (Euro-Communist polemical term for Stalinoids.)
Michael Pugliese