The Czech & Slovak Republics [antikvár]

m\\\ ! I NT R 0 D U CT t 0 N NTRODU The Czechs and Slovaks have rarely been in full control of their historical destiny. The Nazis carved up their country in 1938, only twenty years after its foundation; the Iron Curtain descended just ten years later; and in 1968, Warsaw Pact tanks trampled on the country's dreams of "socialism with a human face". Even the recent break-up of the country was cooked up by the intransigent leaders of the two main political parties, and went ahead against the will of the majority of the population, according to the opinion polls, and without a proper referendum. Yet the events of November 1989 - the Velvet Revolution - were probably the most unequivocably positive of all the anti-Communist upheavals in Eastern Europe. True to their pacifist past, the Czechs and Slovaks shrugged off forty-one years of Communist rule without so much as a shot being fired. In the parliamentary elections the following summer, the Communists were roundly defeated, and Vaclav Havel, a playwright of international renown with an impeccable record of resistance against the previous regime, was chosen as president. The euphoria and unity of those first few months evaporated more quickly than anyone could have imagined, and just three years after the revolution, against most people's predictions, the country split into two separate republics. In contrast to the political upheavals that have plagued the region, the Czech and Slovak republics have suffered very littie physical damage over the last few centuries. Gothic castles and Baroque chateaux have been preserved in abundance, town after town in Bohemia and Moravia has retained its old medieval quarter, and even^the wooden architecture of Slovakia has survived beyond all expectations. Geographically speaking, the two republics are the most diverse of all the former Eastern Bloc states. Together they span the full range of central European cultures, from the old German towns of the west to the Hungarian and Rusyn villages in East Slovakia. In physical terms, too, there's enormous variety: Bohemia's rolling hills, lush and relentiess, couldn't be more different fi-om the flat Danube basin, or the granite alpine peaks of the High Tatras, the beech forests of the far east, or the coal basins of the Moravian north. More accessible today than at any time since the 1930s, the major cities are now buzzing with a cultural and commercial diversity, and fail to conform to most people's idea of Eastern Europe. At the same time, the remoter regions are more reminiscent of the 1940s than the 1990s, and, outside Prague, neither republic is quite geared up for consumptive Western-style tourism. Inevitably, the pace of change means that certain sections of this book are going to be out of date even as you read them, such is the volatility and speed of the current transformation. The break-up of Czechoslovakia The sharpest division in tiie country before 1989 was between Party member and non-Party member; nowadays, the most acute problems are between ethnic groups - Czech and Slovak, Slovak and Hungarian, Slav and Romany. The Czechs who inhabit the western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia are among the most Westernized Slavs in Europe: urbane, agnostic, liberal and traditionally