Dubček and the "Prague Spring"

When I lived in Bratislava in the mid-1990s, I lived in the rather grim high-rise bit called Petržalka, whilst I had some really good friends who lived in Karlova Ves. On one occasion, we all went up to Slávičie údolie cemetery to lay some flowers on the grave of Alexander Dubček.

It is now more than four decades since he came to power as leader of the then Czechoslovakia and started what was to become known as the "Prague Spring" or the Pražská jar as I learned to call it in Slovak.

Dubček was an amazing person, one thing I didn't know about him was how as a child he was among more than a thousand people who left Czechoslovakia in the 1920s to go and work in the Interhelpo industrial co-operative in Soviet Kyrgyzstan.
And the really cool thing about Interhelpo? It was founded by Esperantists and Idists (speakers of Ido, another international language).

Unfortunately, like many other goodly things, Interhelpo was liquidated (both metaphorically and literally) by Stalin in 1943.

Dubček, although deposed and kidnapped to the Soviet Union in 1968, had the last laugh, living long enough to see democracy return to Czechoslovakia