CZECHOSLOVAKIA--A LOOK BACK

1946

May--The Communist rise to power in Czechoslovakia begins with elections. The party wins 114 of 300 seats in Parliament and dominates the resulting coalition government.

1948

May--Popular sentiment turns against the party, but before scheduled elections, the Communist leadership reorganizes the government in an effective Communist revolution that established a repressive Stalinist system.

1968

January--Alexander Dubcek is appointed Communist Party leader amid growing anti-Soviet sentiment as a result of alleged economic exploitation. He is known as a bold reformer.

April to June--Dubcek prods the party to adopt a program to restore a measure of democracy but runs afoul of Moscow. Dubcek is then asked to abandon his “Prague Spring” reforms, but refuses.

August--Soviet troops, with token units from other Warsaw Pact countries, enter the country on the night of Aug. 20-21 and effectively crush the reform movement.

1969

April--Dubcek is replaced by Gustav Husak.

1970

June--Dubcek is expelled from the party and goes on to live in virtual seclusion in his native Bratislava, working as a low-level employee of the state forestry services.

1987

Spring--With the rise to power in the Soviet Union of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and his declaration of economic and political reforms, Husak grudgingly accepts the need for some changes at home.

Meanwhile, Dubcek cautiously returns to the public eye. He appears on Hungarian television, accusing former Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev of deceiving him before the 1968 invasion.

December--Husak retires as party chief and is succeeded by Milos Jakes. Jakes is seen as a bureaucrat and party functionary whose speeches and personality make little or no public impact. It was Jakes, however, who presided over the purge of about 500,000 rank-and-file party members, including Dubcek, after the 1968 invasion.

1988

Jakes refuses dialogue with a growing number of independent political groups, although signs of discontent grow as the whirlwind reforms in East Europe blow across Czechoslovakia’s borders.