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The Ceauşescu regime in Romania, which sought to weaken Soviet influence in the country and deviated significantly in its foreign policy from the general line of the Soviet bloc, from the very beginning did not support Moscow's power pressure on the Czechoslovak reformers who initiated the Prague Spring. Ceauşescu and his team, who had no thought of making the «human face» of the Czechoslovakian or any other socialism, watched the events through the prism of their own national-communist doctrine. Thereby they viewed the Prague Spring only as a movement for the expansion of national sovereignty, and in Czechoslovak reform communists saw their potential allies in the struggle for Romania's full independence in the international arena, its liberation from the dominant Soviet influence. Sharply denouncing the intervention of August 21, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, the communist leadership of Romania did not exclude the military threat against its own country, adopting a whole range of defensive measures. Later, realizing that neither Tito's Yugoslavia, nor China, nor Western countries, will render Romania effective military assistance in case of an attack from outside, the Romanian leaders made efforts to renew a broad dialogue with the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Czechoslovak Communists officially declared the People's Republic of China second most important ally after the Soviet Union in 1949. The onset of collectivisation in both countries opened opportunities for exchange of experience in agriculture. Taking a twinning bilateral project between two agricultural cooperatives as an example, the article analyses various dimensions of Sino-Czechoslovak relations. Based upon Czechoslovak archival documents and an interview with the Czech participant in the twinning, it argues that while top political and economic contacts remained Soviet-supervised, on the personal level positive impression survived the Sino-Soviet split although the Czechoslovak Communists stayed loyal to Moscow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From two perspectives, the author presents a topic of maritime business-running in Czechoslovakia before 1989. Firstly, she discusses a brief history of the Czechoslovak Ocean Shipping Company in the period between 1959 and 1989. Secondly, the company’s history is complemented by life stories (memories) of former Czechoslovakian seafarers. The second part of the study is based on oral history interviews with seafarers, and it concentrates on their ‘double lives’: the first life they had lived with their families in a communist state behind strictly guarded borders; and the second life they had lived at sea, on ships, abroad, and in relative freedom, but without their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]