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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: tejek who wrote (531455)	11/24/2009 11:27:23 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 1575764

"...Prague in spring 1990 was an extraordinary place. The stories told of what happened during the revolution were simple and consistent. Students who had been on the march the police attacked said how they had been beaten by the police (fairly lightly by totalitarian standards). It was their parents and older relatives who made up the mass of the people who gathered in Wenceslas Square in reaction. By consensus, the students mostly stayed away. The parents who went to the meeting expected the police to attack them. So did an organiser of the event that I talked with. But when he had a long struggle through the crowd to reach the speakers at Wenceslas' statue, he knew the protesters had won. In that spring nearly 20 years ago, the economic idiocies of the Communist regime were still very visible. Nobody fished in the river Moldava for a hundred kilometres below Prague. The engineers running the Prague waterworks still had not got the administration to change the crazy way they were paid - they could only earn a living wage if the quantity of water processed exceeded the Plan. So they were compelled to pump so much water through Prague's leaking system that it swamped the sewage processing at the other end; and the overflow killed most life in the river. The city stank of the brown coal used to heat it; and the square miles of lunar landscape where the brown coal had been extracted showed the unthinking results of that arbitrary choice of fuel. Ordinany shops were still virtually empty of goods. The old special shops for the Party aparatchiks were closed, some with stocks of better goods still in them. And so on. But what impressed me more deeply was the social carry-over from the old order. You automatically identified many of the old aparatchiks because they were socially different - from their assumptions about how other people would behave right through to their hair styles. They stood out like ci-devant aristos after the French Revolution. The formerly reserved spas and hotels were supposed to be open to the public, but taxi drivers refused to take you there out of a combination of contempt and wariness. Fear suddenly surged on May Day morning - the day of the former Communist grand celebration; to evaporate at the sight of a couple of groups of students in their old - too small - Young Pioneer outfits making fun of the old regime. The Govenment officals did not have the remotest idea of the conduct of orderly, non-arbitrary official business. The urge to get back to being normal Europeans was tremendous: the railway station clerk smiled with delight when we simply turned up at the ticket window to buy rail tickets to London via Berlin. He could now simply sell those tickets without asking for a mountain of papers first and the world was a brighter place for it. But I cautioned my Czech friends that it would take at least a generation to really get back to where the country might have been without Communism." meganmcardle.theatlantic.com

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