World: HISTORIC QUEST FOR FREEDOM

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Feeling guilty about the Czechoslovaks, the British allowed Benes to form a wartime exile government in London. Meanwhile, though they had offered no resistance at the time of the German in vasion, the Czechoslovaks waged an underground war against the occupiers. In one of their retaliation moves, the Germans wiped out the entire village of Lidice. After Germany's defeat, Benes took his regime to Prague and started anew. He faced tremendous obstacles. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill acceded to Stalin's demand that Czechoslovakia fall into his sphere of influence after the war. As a result, when General George Patton's tanks prepared to liberate Prague in the war's closing days, orders came from Allied headquarters to halt. The Russians got the honor of freeing the capital. In their wake came cadres of Czechoslovak Communists who had spent the war in Moscow. Aided by the presence of the Soviet army, the Communists infiltrated the government bureaucracy and went to work propagandizing the Czechoslovak people. In the 1946 elections, the Communists emerged as the country's largest single party. Benes formed a coalition government with them. In 1947, when Benes wanted to accept the U.S. offer of Marshall Plan aid, Stalin said no. Next year, in a Soviet-aided coup, the Czechoslovak Communists seized total power. Czechoslovakia's Western-oriented Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the country's founder, was killed in a fall from a window in the Foreign Ministry. Many Czechoslovaks believed that it was murder, and saw in his death the demise of their own freedom.

The first Czechoslovak party boss, Klement Gottwald, was a harsh ruler. He nationalized the country's entire industry, including even small artisans' shops, collectivized all farms, and subjected the people to a withering succession of arrests, show trials and executions of "Titoists" and "traitors." Fittingly, Gottwald caught a chill at Stalin's funeral in 1953 and died a few months later. An almost equally unbending Stalinist took his place: Antonin Novotny, who had been Communist boss of Prague. As the slight winds of liberalism blew throughout the East bloc following Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, Novotny tried his best to ward them off. Even so, the pressure for change built up. Art, especially literature and film making, experienced an underground renaissance. Artists and students demanded freedom of expression. Industrial planners and economists asked for freer and more effective ways of doing business. Last January, the new forces surging within Czechoslovak Communism culminated in the person of Alexander Dubcek, who ousted Novotny from power and instituted a series of liberal reforms. For eight memorable months, Czechoslovakia was one of the most exciting and hopeful places in the world.