Abstract
The television journalist Vladimír Tosek broadcasted the occupation until the transmission was discovered, and he was forced to cross the border to Austria. He did not want to emigrate, but the radical political change, which culminated in April 1969, forced him to exile. The Czechoslovak authorities made him pay a heavy price for daring to defy the occupiers in 1968 by making public his previous collaboration with the state secret police. In doing so, the government sought to discredit Tosek and his colleagues in the mass media who identified with and defended vigorously the reform process.
Highlights
The attempt to reform the authoritarian regime in Czechoslovakia was aborted by Soviet-led military invasion in August 1968
The television journalist Vladimír Tosek broadcasted the occupation until the transmission was discovered, and he was forced to cross the border to Austria
In this article I wish to contribute to studies of the initial stage of the so-called ‘normalization,’ which followed the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops and which spanned the period from August 1968 to April 1969
Summary
In this article I wish to contribute to studies of the initial stage of the so-called ‘normalization,’ which followed the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops and which spanned the period from August 1968 to April 1969. ‘Normalization’ sought nothing less than to normalize an anomaly: the foreign military occupation of the country, which turned the historical clock back to the Stalinist era and which the reform process of 1968, the Prague Spring, ideally tried to overcome. This initial stage, dubbed Alexander Dubček’s ‘normalization,’ ended with his fall.. The era’s press and archives, and above all, Tosek’s personal correspondence provided the evidence to formulate and document my arguments
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