LondonGIORI did not share the Western public’s hopes and he was unmoved by the spirit of optimism and change which intoxicated the world in 1968.
‘Those were the days, my friend; we thought they’d never end’: Mary Hopkin’s hit song rang out later that summer from every radio set, but Giori was not carried away.
‘All days are the same for them,’ he said. ‘They will not allow even the little freedom that poor Mr Dubcek wants.
‘It is against their tradition. It is against the Soviet tradition… There can be no Communism with a human face. In Moscow they know it and do not care. They will not allow it.’
Month after month in the spring and summer of 1968 he was hard at work at the BBC analysing what was happening and what was being written in the papers and said by people in Czechoslovakia a
