extinguished in the name of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy , its art in the name of Socialist Realism .
Jews had a rough time as well , particularly in what came to be known as the Slansky Trial , when fourteen leading Communist Party members , eleven of them Jewish , were arrested and put on trial in 1952 . Rudolf Slansky , the most prominent member of the group , had been the secretary-general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party after World War II . The trial was characterized by historian Meir Cotic as “ the first anti-Zionist show trial in the communist bloc .” The defendants were accused of high treason and linked to an alleged international Jewish conspiracy involving Israel and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ( JDC ); confessions were extracted from them . All but three were executed . It may well be that this trial set the stage for the infamous Doctor ’ s Plot in the Soviet Union , which took place the next year and had strikingly similar parallels .
Fifteen years later , in August 1967 , the New York-based director of the JDC , Charles Jordan , was found dead in Prague . The death caused alarm in the Jewish world and speculation as to its cause , but for years the Czechoslovak government stonewalled . Only recently , files from that era have been opened , at least those files that did not disappear along the way . The longstanding theory that Arab terrorists operating on Czechoslovak soil were linked to his murder was given a boost .
Then there was a brief period in 1968 that came to be known worldwide as the Prague Spring and was led by Alexander Dubcek . While never renouncing Communism , Dubcek and his colleagues insisted that its true spirit entailed “ socialism with a human face .”
Tragically , like spring itself , it couldn ’ t last . In August 1968 , the Soviet Union , together with a number of Warsaw Pact allies ( Romania refused to participate ), sent in an estimated 600,000 troops to crush this challenge to tyranny . Their force was overwhelming . But during a brief window of opportunity , tens of thousands of Czechs , including than 6,000 Jews , left the country and resettled permanently in the West .
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