Forty years ago in history...

Photo from Spiegel Online

Soviets march into Czechoslovakia and brutally put to an end the Prague Spring, catching the West by surprise.

Tags: Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia Prague Spring

Vaclav Havel on architecture.

Jan Kaplicky's futuristic design for a new national library
in the Czech Republic

Václav Havel: "I was delighted that Prague, which has so few beautiful or modern buildings, would finally have an interesting structure that would make architectural history. ... But my delight was premature. Mediocrity and triteness have once again won the day. ... Prague and all our other cities are spreading out like cancers in all directions and destroying large tracts of Czech countryside. ... If you leave Prague you can travel for miles without coming across a single town, street, village or woods - just supermarkets, hypermarkets, car dealerships, administration buildings, warehouses, huge car parks and other anonymous buildings. In sum: mindless nothingness. ... The library debacle is just one small example, but it's typical of these times and particularly of the Czech brand of capitalism."

Vaclav Havel Jan Kaplicky National Library architecture

A "righteous tree"...

"...a hollow 33-foot high birch that hid Jakob Silberstein as he escaped Auschwitz.
Polish-born Silberstein, 83, recently returned to the Czech countryside to recover the tree and had two segments shipped to Yad Vashem, where they are now on permanent display in the garden overlooking the Jerusalem forest.

"This tree, for me, is life. It saved my life," said Silberstein, whose shaking left arm still bears the concentration camp number branded into his skin.

Silberstein was deported with his family to Auschwitz in late 1942. His entire family—his parents and three brothers—were murdered, but he survived for more than two years. On a death march in early 1945 he escaped and fled to Czechoslovakia, where he found refuge inside the attic of Jana Sudova, in the village of Sunychl."

Read more about it here.

Yad Vashem Israel Holocaust Auschwitz Jakob Silberstein Poland Jana Sudova Czech Republic

"When a lion is sick, there will always be a monkey who pulls its tail."

The Russian lion, the Polish monkey, and "new Europe's" problem:

Russian lion is not just flexing its muscles.
It has opened an attache case of cash.

Russians have bought up the Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary and the Hungarian airline Malev.

They are fingering parts of the Czech energy giant CEZ and Hungary's biggest oil and gas firm, MOL.

They want Magyar Telecom and its subsidiaries in Macedonia and Montenegro. And that would give them access to the mobile phone calls and e-mails of a Nato member country.

This is not all new.

Six years ago, the Poles were shocked to find four fat fibre-optic cables running down a Russian gas pipeline, an information highway powerful enough to transmit the contents of 78,000 encyclopaedias a second - or simultaneously handle 38 million phone calls, according to newspapers at the time.

Read it all here.
Russia Poland Czech Republic energy oil and gas

A great American...

A must read story in the Smithsonian Magazine about Americans living in Prague, and the difference they have made. Jack Stack is one of them:

Behind the boom is a dramatic reform of Czech banking in which yet another American transplant, Jack Stack, has played a leading role. Like the rest of the banking system during the Communist era, Ceska Sporitelna, a savings institution founded in 1825, had fallen under state control. After the Velvet Revolution, Czech banks were expected to adapt quickly to the new market economy. Instead, corruption and chaos ensued. In the early 1990s, many businesses were privatized by shady promoters, who secretly sold off the most valuable parts of the firms. They then took out bank loans on the companies' money-losing remains, never intending to make repayments. In other cases, politicians pressured banks to make loans to large companies whose managers could deliver their employees' votes in elections. By 1999, almost half of all bank loans had failed. "The Czech economy was in bad shape, and investors were losing interest in the country," says Zdenek Tuma, governor of the Czech National Bank—the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States.

It was then that Stack, a lifelong New Yorker and veteran banker, decided to plunge into Prague's murky financial waters. He had spent more than two decades at Chemical Bank (now part of JP Morgan Chase) in a variety of management positions. "But I always wanted to run a bank, and I wasn't getting any further up the managerial ladder," says Stack.

Through a headhunting agency, Stack had been contacted in 1999 by Austria's Erste Bank, which was negotiating to purchase Ceska Sporitelna and was looking for a chief executive officer, a daunting assignment. According to a 2000 survey by international management consulting firm Accenture, Ceska Sporitelna ranked dead last among local banks in customer satisfaction. Though it was the most overstaffed bank in the country, its employees were the most poorly paid—and among the surliest, according to client complaints. Investments in technology were so low its ATMs failed to operate at times of greatest demand. Stack talked it over with his wife, Patricia. "She pointed out the bank was in such bad shape that I could only improve it—and the adventure began," Stack recalls.

Once installed, he decided to draw on measures that had worked well at Chemical Bank. He slowly reduced the bloated staff by a third. He offered the 10,000 who remained bonuses based on the number of new accounts they opened and the old ones they induced to stay. The interior design of branches was altered from state-era stodginess to a more relaxed free-market style. Gone are the long counters attended by clerks whose subliminal message to customers appeared to be: "Wait to be called by the authorities." In their place are curved desks set in small, open, individual spaces. Investments in new technology vastly improved the performance of ATMs, and Ceska Sporitelna's appalling 45 percent bad-loan rate has been brought down to less than 2 percent, thanks to risk-management policies that value clients' creditworthiness more than who they know in high places.

The same sorts of reforms have since spread throughout Prague's banking system. "Jack Stack played a very important role in this process," says Tuma, the Czech National Bank governor. "The turnaround he led at Ceska Sporitelna was a key milestone in the transformation of our banking system." For Stack, the secret of Czech banking's recent success has been to tap consumer demand that had been pent up for decades. Mortgages in Prague are growing at over 40 percent a year, and bank loans to small and medium-sized businesses are up by 20 percent a year. "Czechs want to make up for having lost so much time during the Communist era," says Stack. "People here and throughout Central Europe will become the engine of growth for all of Europe because they are more ambitious, harder working and are developing a real entrepreneurial spirit."

Stack won't be around to see Prague return to the lofty living standards of Paris and Vienna. At 61, he is moving back to New York this year to take some time off and catch up with old friends and family. "I'm very reluctant to leave Prague because I will miss it," he says. "But I'm also very sure it's time for somebody else to take over the bank."

[Jack Stack] [Ceska Sporitelna] [Prague] [expats]

Dissidents in Prague: Aznar, Havel, Sharansky and Bush.

President Bush addresses the dissidents.

Spent a very busy week in magical Prague, attending 2 events.

The first one, the Democracy and Security Conference in Prague was historically monumental. Did anyone report the standing ovation that President Bush got at the beginning of his speech as well as at the end of it?

No... but, fortunately, some of us were there to witness this event. Most prolific writing about the conference is Gateway Pundit.

There's an excellent description of all that happened at the conference, which was really a forum to allow dissidents from around the world to be heard, and behind the scenes.

Read it all at Gateway Pundit:

Prague Blogging- 2007 Democracy & Security Conference
Blogging From the Communist Parliament Building
Bush Rocks the Czernin Palace At Prague Democracy Conference
Democracy & Security: Day 2- Dissident Row

The only thing I found a bit odd in this meeting of giants is that there was only one Pole who attended the conference and participated as a panelist. It was, therefore, great to have President Bush specifically mention in his speech the visionaries Lech Walesa and John Paul II:

Behind these astonishing achievements was the triumph of freedom in the battle of ideas. The communists had an imperial ideology that claimed to know the directions of history. But in the end, it was overpowered by ordinary people who wanted to live their lives, and worship their God, and speak the truth to their children. The communists had the harsh rule of Brezhnev, and Honecker, and Ceausescu. But in the end, it was no match for the vision of Walesa and Havel, the defiance of Sakharov and Sharansky, the resolve of Reagan and Thatcher, and fearless witness of John Paul. From this experience, a clear lesson has emerged: Freedom can be resisted, and freedom can be delayed, but freedom cannot be denied.

[Prague] [dissidents] [democracy] [security] [Human Rights] [Sharansky] [Aznar] [Havel] [Bush]

Dissidents, democracy and security.

Am attending all this week the democracy and security conference in Prague. This conference is hosted by former dissident Natan Sharansky, and former Presidents Havel and Aznar. President Bush will deliver remarks.

Read more about it here.

[Prague] [democracy][dissident][Havel] [Sharansky][Bush] [Aznar]

Missile defense shield.

The European Left does not want a missile defense shield (MDS) in Polish and Czech soil, or at least, according to Reuters, Europe's left-leaning parties want the US to have more consultations with its allies about it.

Background consultations have ensued, and official ones will soon begin. Many well-read Poles (and other Europeans) are under the mistaken belief that the MDS will only protect the US. This is incorrect. MDS is meant to cover most of Europe.

The European Union is not necessarily against MDS. In fact NATO supports the idea.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Russia has neither been ignored nor side-stepped, and the US has engaged the leadership even to the extent as to propose to Russia to become involved in the MDS, which could protect Russia's European portion, including St. Petersburg and Moscow, against an attack from Iran or North Korea.

More information on MDS can be found here and here (in Polish).

[missile] [defense] [shield] [Poland] [Czech Republic] [Russia] [NATO] [European Union]