Soviets’ Czechoslovakia Pullout Set
Soviet troops will start leaving Czechoslovakia in 10 days, the Communist Party trade union newspaper Prace said Friday.
The Soviet Union has had 75,000 troops and some dependents stationed in Czechoslovakia since a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in August, 1968, which ended the “Prague Spring” liberalization era under Alexander Dubcek.
The paper said that the pullout would start Feb. 26 and that a substantial part of the Soviet force would be gone by May 31.
Czechoslovakia was the first Warsaw Pact state occupied by Soviet forces to open withdrawal talks. It flatly told Moscow it wanted the first contingent to go before June’s scheduled elections and the rest to be out by the end of the year.
Thousands of Czechoslovaks have demonstrated in recent weeks to demand that the Soviet troops leave at once.
The hard-line Communist leaders who invited Warsaw Pact troops to throttle the Dubcek-era reforms were toppled from power last November by huge street protests.
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