Students of European history know that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was involved in World War I on the German side (the “Triple Alliance”) from the very beginning – logically, since that Empire was dominated administratively by German-speakers. However, a large part of its soldiery was made up of Slavs, with no particular affinity for things German. (Which Hungarians, however, did have – but that’s another story!) Finding themselves on the Russian front, ordered to fight and kill fellow Slavs on the other side of the trenches, many of these soldiers soon found that they would rather just desert at the first opportunity – and indeed, then form into units on the other side that would fight for the Russians.

Strictly speaking, the label “Czechoslovak Legions” also applies to units on the Western Front in France, and elsewhere, made up of Czechs and Slovaks willing to fight for the Allied (i.e. Britain, France, USA) cause in exchange for getting the right to ask for their own country after the fighting stopped. But that label is mostly interpreted as referring to the “legion” with the most spectacular escapades, namely those units fighting for the Russians – since in 1917, that Russian government for which they were fighting ceased to exist. The legions then chose to fight against the Communist regime that replaced it late that year, meaning they were heavily involved in the cause of the so-called “Whites” in the Russian Civil War. The “Whites” lost, of course, but the Czechoslovak Legion held itself together the whole time, and actually managed to make its way all the way across Asia to Vladivostok – traveling mainly by rail, it must be admitted, although it’s also maintained that they were also transporting the Czar’s gold-treasure with them (and that gets heavy!) – and thence thousands of miles more by ship to a long-delayed homecoming to what in fact had in the meantime become an independent Czechoslovakia.

It was an epic adventure, and there’s little doubt that these soldiers’ efforts did contribute substantially towards the inclination of Western political leaders at the Paris Peace Conference to give them their brand-new state. On the other hand, they did fight the Communists, meaning that when their country was under Communist rule from 1948 until 1989 any recognition of their feats, or honor shown to surviving veterans, was taboo. That was all OK again after the Velvet Revolution, though, and today there’s a commemorative statue to the Legionnaires standing in Palacky Square located in downtown Prague on the east bank of the Vltava river.

So much for that. But now the Czech Defense Ministry has a new project called Legie 100 (“Legion 100″), intended to honor the Legions further as the 100th anniversary of their exploits approaches. It wants a proper museum, or else a commemorative train; it wants further monies for the maintenance of legionnaires’ graves, it even wants to make a film.

Sorry, Cant’ Afford It

In short, it wants Kč 600 million (€150 million) – but, as is the case most everywhere in the West these days, that sort of money is not just lying around. Quite the opposite, in fact: contemporary Czech politics is currently preoccupied not with the Legion, but with the struggle to finance ordinary government operations (plus a fresh attempt to put public pensions on a more-solid basis). In particular, the Czech government is now blazing new fiscal ground by proposing the abolition of the “reduced rate” value-added tax rate of 10% so that everything that is taxed at all when bought and sold is subject to the “high” rate of 20% – food, books, baby’s booties, you name it.

Even if you don’t follow Czech politics at all, that sort of proposal should be enough to convince you that the Gzech government feels itself in dire need of more tax revenues – meaning, on the other side, it’s not going to be very receptive to any new spending proposals. The Legionnaires – or rather, those who wish to honor their memory, since there are very few actual Legionnaires still alive – might just be out of luck. No less than the Czech Foreign Minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, has felt the need to put in his two-crowns’ worth: “The Legionnaires definitely had their significance, [but] that amount I regard as extravagant. We have problems that probably weigh on us more.”*

If the story of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires appeals to you, it’s likely you’ll have to be satisfied with setting a Google Alert for the private fujd-raising appeal for Legie 100 that will surely come soon. Also, the next time you visit Prague, do pay a visit to Palacky Square – it’s near a major tram-line intersection!

* If you’re now thinking “What business does the Foreign Minister have in making pronouncements about a domestic budget question?” then our two great minds do think alike. But there’s another angle: Schwarzenberg is actually Prince Schwarzenberg, with a personal family history that goes way back to the German-speaking nobility of the Austrian Empire. It’s even likely that, secretly, he dismisses the Legionnaires as having been no better than traitors to the Austrian cause!

                          

But are the two military undertakings, separated by four decades, really comparable? You could ask the Czechs themselves about that. Petr Šimůnek of the leading Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny devotes precisely 99 words to that question in a piece entitled, of course, 99 Words. (The allusion here is to the Two Thousand Words, a manifesto by a leading reformer of the 1968 “Prague Spring” that laid out the objectives of the Czech reformers.) He doesnt’ have much space to work with, then, but his point is that, yes, they are the same in principle: “A small land under the influence of Russia, which shows everyone by force just who is boss. Scenes of tanks, ploughing down the highways of the attacked state. A world that chastises the Bear, but doesn’t do anything. A violated land, that needs years to recuperate.” Naturally, Šimůnek urges assistance to Georgia: diplomatic, economic, humanitarian. “And next Thursday [i.e. the anniversary of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion] we will also remember Tbilisi, quaff Georgian brandy and boycott vodka. And we won’t forget.”

Ossetians = Sudeten Germans

Also writing in HN, Luboš Veselý of the Prague-based think-tank Associace pro mezinárodní otázky (Association for International Questions) prefers to find a parallel to the Russian intervention in Georgia in the Sudeten question that led to the abandonment of Czechoslovakia by her Western European allies at Munich in 1938 (Russians in a Georgian Sudetenland). His is a more measured view of the Caucasus conflict (perhaps because he gives himself much more than just 99 words to work with). He blames Georgian President Saakashvili for two mistakes: one, the incursion into South Ossetia by Georgian forces that he ordered – which meant not only firing on civilians but also on Russian troops residing in South Ossetia as “peacekeepers” – provided the Russian government with a perfect pretext to finally take care of this disobedient state on its southern flank, which prefered affiliation with the West (and specifically with NATO) to Russian hegemony; and two, in past years he never pursued seriously the real possibility of a political settlement with the two break-away regions within nominal Georgian territory. Particularly Abkhazia, Veselý claims, would have been open to political rapprochement: that territory is not so much under the shadow of occupying Russian troops and secret police, and assisting it in becoming a more open and prosperous society would have been a better route for attracting it back into the orbit of Tbilisi rather than Moscow.

In any event, it is clear that for the Russians have no more real concern for the affairs of the South Ossetians and Abkhazians than the Nazis did for the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia back in 1938: they are rather handy pawns that it can use to further its real aims, which involve the whole of Georgia, as can be seen in the Russian air attacks against Georgian military and civilian targets far from South Ossetia itself, in the hacker-attacks against the Georgian Internet infrastructure, in the sinking of a Georgian military boat on the Black Sea – and in the bombardment of the port city of Poti, which is where Azeri oil which has crossed through Georgia by pipeline is shipped onward to the EU. That last-named action hints that at least one of the main Russian war-aims is to assert its control over what had been an energy source for the EU outside of its control. For this reason, Veselý calls for a much more vigorous European Union reaction, demanding a pull-back of Russian forces from Georgian territory and even from Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well, and dispatching “a military or police mission.”

                          

In fact it’s a German name, of course, because back in those days of the very early 19th century German culture and the German language were dominant over Central Europe, as they had been since the Thirty Years’ War, and the major city outside of which the battle was fought was known as Brünn. Things changed somewhat in the twentieth century, after the First World War, when the country of Czechoslovakia came into existence, Brünn definitely became known as Brno instead, and the village that gave had given the 1805 battle its name became Slavkov u Brna. (Not to be confused with another Czech Slavkov, located to the northeast, near the Polish border and the town of Opava. By the way, Brno and Slavkov u Brna were not even “German” enough to be made part of the Sudetenland, i.e. the allegedly German-majority territories that Hitler managed to intimidate Neville Chamberlain and Czechoslovakia into returning to Germany in the Munich Agreement of 1938, before he moved his army in to take over the whole country the following year.)

Then came the Second World War, after which the Slavic nature of much of Central Europe was reinforced by the military and political hegemony of the Soviet Union. Not only did the name of the little village outside Brno remain Slavkov u Brna – i.e. with absolutely no resemblance to “Austerlitz,” so that if you were searching for where the battle took place you’d first have to look up somewhere the village’s new name – but the Communist authorities also understandably had little interest in commemorating some long-ago battle, especially one in which the Russians had been beaten. For that matter, even the Czechoslovaks after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution,” and the Czechs after the 1993 “Velvet Divorce” with Slovakia, had many more-important things upon which to spend their limited public monies. Yet somehow they managed to do just enough: Your very own beloved EuroSavant remembers driving down in the summer of 1995 from Prague to check out the battlefield (gross misuse of company car and associated gas station charge-card, I’m sorry to report), and being impressed with the rather large battlefield statue and associated explanatory plaques placed at the peak of the (not-very-high) Pratzen Heights, the strongpoint at the center of the Russian-Austrian lines which was the focus of the decisive French attack. That was it: there was no other indication anywhere else in the area that a battle had ever taken place but, then again, that area was still mostly woods and fields and streams, and, especially if you had a map of the battle, you could drive along well-placed country roads and gain a good appreciation of what had happened at the various points of the battlefield, not just on the Pratzen Heights.

Creeping Brno

But that was more than ten years ago, and in the meantime the Czech Republic has entered the EU (1 May 2004) and so become a full part of the prosperous European political economy. One thing that means is that its cities cannot help but expand outward, and so Brno is getting ever-closer to the fields and villages around Slavkov u Brna. As the leading Czech business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny, now reports (Slavkov, pardon, Austerlitz; the article is in its Real Estate section), a big Central European property developer now has its eye on bringing, let us say, a little proper civilization to the area. That developer is called Quinlan Private Golub (honest – check it out, those are the three first words of the article proper), and in its proposal for a new “multifunctional project” for the Slavkov u Brna area – to cost up to €250 million – QPG includes just about everything: office space; retail shops; 86,400 square meters of residential buildings, divided into three complexes to be named after the supreme commanders at the battle (Napoleon, Alexander, and František, i.e. Francis); and a luxury hotel, named Jurys Inn [sic] and to be run not coincidentally by the Quinlan Private hotel chain. Oh, and there will also be an Austerlitz Museum – in fact, the whole complex is to be known as “Austerlitz Centrum,” and the central avenue issuing out from Brno, around which everything will be built, is to be known of course as Třida Austerlitz, or “Austerlitz Avenue.”

“Austerlitz Centrum will be a pulsating quarter of the city with an exceptional atmosphere, which will of Brno’s southern part one of its most attractive localities,” declares a breathless press release from QPG. Everything will be done with the highest quality, of course, of both architecture and materials; and the developers will certainly take care to involve the local communities in every phase of the project’s development, adds Stephen Haigh (most definitely not a Czech name), QPG’s general manager for the Czech Republic.

To me, though, this sounds like the classic case of having the bulldozers move in to tear out all the elm, oak, and beech trees by the roots to prepare the space for housing tracts, which are then arranged along Elm, Oak, and Beech Streets. Via the marvelous resources of Wikipedia you can get a good sense of what the Slavkov u Brna area looks like here – you’re looking over the village of Prace (Pratzen) eastward towards the heights beyond much as the soldiers of Marshall Soult’s IV Corps did more than two hundred years ago as they advanced to take them. Take a good look, for soon that area may be covered by the usual Western urban sprawl, if the skyrocketing cost of gasoline and shrinking sources of credit for housing purchase don’t manage to rescue it. What Communism managed to preserve, even despite itself, rabid capitalism could soon take away.

                          

But delving into the news and commentary on both sides of the Belgian divide (i.e. Flemish/Dutch vs.Walloon/French) provides a more nuanced picture of the situation, as you would expect. For one thing, the Economist’s concern, “Time to dissolve Belgium?”, seems not to be the question at the forefront of Belgian political minds right now; rather, it is “What do we do now?” As the authoritative Flemish newspaper De Standaard reports (King sets confederate steps), that is a question that it is the immediate task of King Albert to decide – and he is expected to take until the end of this week, at least, to do that, in the meantime holding consultations like crazy with the country’s various political and societal actors. (One of the main assertions of the front-page De Standaard article is that the pattern of whom the king has consulted with so far suggests he is leaning towards finding a solution that would make Belgium a somewhat looser-knit confederation.)

Leterme @ Wit’s End

Theoretically, the king could simply decide to refuse Leterme’s resignation, but that’s really not the sort of thing you do except in a grave emergency, one that usually involves war in some way. The text of his resignation statement makes his position clear that he does not know what else it is that he could do: “It turns out that the opposing visions between the communities over the needed new balance in our state institutions cannot be bridged today. This indicates that the model for consultations at the federal level has reached its limits.” It’s also not clear that much of the country would welcome his staying on as Prime Minister, in any case. Commentators in the French-language papers are not pleased with him at all. In his editorial in Le Soir (A Country on the Edge of the Abyss), Luc Delfosse dismisses Leterme as “the little man from Ypres [a city in West Flanders]” and accuses him of selling out to his Flemish coalition partner, the N-VA (Nieuw Vlaams Alliantie, to gain power at the cost of giving full rein to the N-VA’s more stubborn Flemish-nationalistic political stance. (The Dutch-language financial newspaper De Tijd concurs in its lead article on the crisis, concluding from its analysis that Leterme indeed chose maintaining his party’s coalition with the N-VA over maintaining the government.) And in La Libre Belgique Michel Konen writes (Yves Leterme Leaves Without Glory) that “it is the nerves of Yves Leterme that ended up cracking.” There is no reason to make such a big deal of failing to meet the 15 July deadline, but, then again, maybe it’s good to finally see the back of the Prime Minister anyway: for the last 13 months of his time in office he has accomplished precious little, and has certainly shown absolutely none of the political courage that he breezily asserted he would bring to the job when he was originally approved for it.

Big Deal Deadline

Indeed, there does seem to be something to the point that, pace that Economist article, 15 July did not need to have such a cataclysmic significance. Yes, a new plan for federal power-sharing was supposed to be presented by then and, yes, it was nowhere close when the time came. But there was no crying need to make such a big deal out of it – that deadline was essentially of Leterme’s own making (and I don’t think I’m going way overboard if I speculate that missing deadlines for completed action like this is pretty much par for the course in Belgian politics). De Standaard has an excellent analysis piece on this (What Brought Yves Leterme Down?), which even terms the resignation “surprising,” as if no one really expected that Leterme would plunge the country again into crisis over a mere missed deadline. After all, the article points out, it had been pretty obvious for a long time that it was not going to be met, but there had been no real sign that Leterme was going to react like this – people probably just complacently assumed that he would not go so far as to resign. So why did he? Well, again, it was Leterme’s own deadline, and it turned out that he was serious about it, mainly (one can speculate) as a prod to get the other side (i.e. French-speaking/Walloon) to finally make some concessions to move talks forward toward “re-balancing” the Belgian federal government (code for “tipping the balance of power a bit more towards Flanders”). But it wasn’t working; the De Standaard article reports that the Walloon side seemed resigned to the stalled talks and looking forward to the next federal-level elections in 2009 in hopes of coming up with a new political alignment that would enable forward progress. This attitude was unacceptable to Leterme – either to him and/or to his coalition partner, the N-VA, which indeed has a more militant attitude about gaining power concessions for Flanders and gaining them soon. So you could say that Leterme did indeed choose maintaining his CD&V party’s coalition relationship with the N-VA over maintaining the government; or you could say that he had tried “brinksmanship” tactics – setting a scary deadline – to finally get some progress, the other side had called his bluff, and so he felt obliged to take the country over the brink.

In any event, whether 15 July really is supposed to mean anything or not, 21 July definitely does: that is the Belgian National Holiday (think the American 4th of July, or the French Bastille Day). How embarrassing to be in the middle of a government crisis that threatens to split your country apart on your National Day! Could that prospect move King Albert to quicken his deliberations and find some solution? More to the point, what will the streets of Brussels look like next Monday? The last couple of years the Belgian National Day has been marked by impressive solidarity demonstrations, especially in Brussels, of citizens marching to show their determination to keep the Belgian state whole. Will any more of those materialize next Monday in the shadow of this latest crisis?

Hitting Belgian Pocketbooks

De Tijd being the good business newspaper that it is, it also devotes an article to analyzing what the paralysis in the government means in practical terms for the Belgian electorate (What does the crisis mean for your pocketbook?). Quite a lot, it seems, mainly because all this hullaballoo is unfortunately occurring just when, in an ideal world, the government would instead presumably be devoting its energies to shielding Belgians from an oncoming storm of economic pain (including recent 5,8% inflation which the newspaper terms a “record” – but that can’t be right). Yes, the Belgian authorities have managed within the thirteen-month life of the latest government to divert themselves from inter-communal bickering enough to move forward on a number of economic measures, including raising pensions and even agreeing on a whole “social-economic program” for the period 2009-2011. The problem is that many of these still need to go through the final step of being formally approved by the legislature. Now that the government is once more in danger of falling – the PM has submitted his resignation, after all, even if that has not (yet) been accepted by the King – there is the real danger that these measures will have to start all over again with the legislative process.

Finally, indulge me for a moment as I bring into the record a perspective on this whole affair from outside Belgium, if only from its neighbor to the North, the Netherlands. Naturally, the Dutch are following Belgian developments with close attention, and the leading newspaper NRC Handelsblad even devotes an in-house blog to the situation there, whose latest entry is Navel-Staring in Belgium.

Unfortunately, the blog is not by-lined; but whoever is writing it does hope that Belgium could come up with some way to keep itself together as one country: “Seen from the North, Belgium is an interesting, prosperous, diverse and cosmopolitan land. As a cultural-economic twin-state it has more dimensions and options than the homogeneous Netherlands.” A split would simply result in two more islands of homogeneity, Dutch and French. More practically, as much as the Flemings and Walloons may want to claim they don’t need each other, in actual fact they are quite deeply intertwined economically, and wrenching that apart will inevitably carry high costs. And these precisely at a time when the winds of economic distress are rising! It is hardly a formula for the sort of peaceful “velvet divorce” (on the pattern of the split at the beginning of 1993 between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, of course) that some in the country may think is achievable. Any split could turn out to be more violent than people may expect.

                          

August 1968 saw another Soviet invasion of one of the USSR’s recalcitrant “allies,” just as happened in Hungary in October/November 1956, but the later event was rather different than the earlier. For one thing, in 1968 there was less bloodshed – the Czechs did not resist the invading armed forces to any degree the same as the Hungarians had done. There was also less bloodshed in the aftermath; in 1956 the Soviets packed up the rebel leaders and flew them to Moscow, and they did the same with the Czechoslovak leaders in late August, 1968, but the crucial difference was that many of the Hungarian leaders (Imre Nagy and his cohorts) were ultimately executed, whereas none of the Czech leaders were. They merely visited Moscow to be harangued and intimidated into signing the so-called “Moscow protocols” justifying the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia has having been “invited.” (And one of the 24 Czech and Slovak leaders carted to Moscow – namely Frantisek Kriegel – even had the balls to refuse to sign.)

Even more crucially, these same leaders, from Dubcek on down, returned to their posts when they returned from Moscow. Soviet authorities would have preferred not to have resorted to this expedient, but there was simply no one else available to take over running the country. These leaders (except of course for Kriegel) knew that they had done something humiliating, but believed that it had been a tactical necessity, as now they would be allowed to return and be left alone in their Czechoslovak leadership positions, and even to continue reforms – more carefully to be sure, but to continue them nonetheless.

This seems wildly delusional – Soviet troops, after all, were occupying the country – but it’s also true that there was still a high degree of freedom in Czechoslovakia even after the invasion. Students could still strike and demonstrate, even in favor of the occupying Soviet armies leaving; and there was still “freedom” of a sort in politics, as politicians identified with the “Prague Spring” were still allowed to sit in Parliament and government posts alongside their more hard-line colleagues. The Moscow Protocols weren’t even made public at first, so that the Czechs and Slovaks had no idea of the sort of after-the-fact approval of the invasion that had been given in their name – until those protocols were published in January, 1969, by the Czech magazine Svet prace (or “World of Work” – a great proletarian magazine title!), and that only as a reprint from the British magazine The Economist, which uncovered and published them first.

But gradually the political tightening set in, and the remarkable thing was that it was largely done at the beginning by these same politicians who had previously been at the “Prague Spring” forefront, above all by Dubcek himself. Prominent “Prague Spring” political organizations were forbidden; and in October, 1969, the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament approved the open-ended presence in the country of occupying Soviet troops by an overwhelming vote of 228 for, 10 abstaining, and 4 against (including our old friend Frantisek Kriegel). This was a much “better” vote – and at a much faster pace – than even Soviet officials had expected, Nemecek reveals. Why were these politicians so obedient, he asks? Among his answers: the parliamentary delegates simply wanted to avoid the bloody repression that demonstrations and any further defiance would inspire, and, after all, most of them had ultimately lived their political lives in an atmosphere of obedience to (and even admiration of) the Soviet Union.

The tightening went on: censorship started to take a firm hold again on the Czech and Slovak media towards the end of 1968, as journalists were instructed to take loyalty oaths, to watch over the ideological correctness of articles their colleagues wrote, and the like. The agreement to this by the national authorities basically amounted to a desperate (and hopeless) rear-guard operation; Dubcek and his “progressive” colleagues gave away concession after concession to Soviet demands, hoping that each would be the last. But to the public at large the way things were going was clear, and this was brought into sharp relief in January, 1969, with a serious of suicides by self-immolation, in Prague and in Plzen, started on the 16th by the Charles University student Jan Palach. Things reached the point where Czechoslovak president Ludvik Svoboda (another “Prague Spring” politician allowed to stay on) went on national TV to try to stop people from setting themselves on fire in public, promising that, as president, he would protect “all democratic freedoms.” Naturally, this was a lie; Svoboda himself was not to last in his presidential post for long.

March, 1969, came, and a victory by the Czechoslovak national ice-hockey team over the Soviets inspired wild jubilation in the cities of Czechoslovakia that in Prague turned into rioting, with the trashing of the local Aeroflot office. Maybe you thought this sort of thing started with the American “Miracle on Ice” at Lake Placid in 1980? In fact, this article is illustrated with a photograph of a demonstrator running out onto the ice (sans skates) during that international hockey tournament with a big sign posted around his body reading “We’re not afraid of the Russians in hockey, we’ll beat them and pay them back for August.” Respekt captions that picture “pucks against tanks,” and it does provide an eloquent depiction of how some consolation can be gained from the realm of the insignificant for losses suffered in the realm of the significant.

Then came April, and the return to repression really started to set in. Headlining this was the replacement of Aleksander Dubcek as head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (the excuse was his inability to contain the demonstrations set off by the hockey victory) by the Slovak lawyer Gustav Husák. Husák would turn out to be quite obedient to his masters in Moscow, would complete in short order the “normalization” process of returning Czechoslovakia to the repressive days of pre-1968, and would last in his post as head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party until giving up power to Vaclav Havel after the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. But none of this was clear at the time, and Nemecek notes the hope that Husák instead would turn out to be someone like János Kádár in Hungary or (briefly) Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland – that is, a local leader, moved into power after troubles in his country requiring some sort of Soviet intervention, who nonetheless demonstrates in short order the spunk required to stand up to the Russians (in a relative way, of course) to have them let him run the country with a bit of a softer touch. This hope was held by a number of prominent intellectuals. But it was not held by the man in the street, or by university students, who changed their slogan at demonstrations to “We are not for socialism with goose-bumps.” (Husák in Czech/Slovak means “he who takes care of the geese,” you see.)

And it was these latter who were right, of course. With the installation of Husák, right around the corner were incidents such as the massive armed suppression of demonstrations in August, 1969, which tried to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Soviet invasion. (Nemecek’s articles speaks of the the extensive use of tanks to intimidate the demonstrators, the only “combat” employment of tanks to occur in Czechoslovakia since the Second World War. From another accompanying illustration, I wouldn’t exactly call them “tanks” – they’re more like armored cars, or armored personnel carriers, and please remember that I’m a former US Army tanker myself – but I don’t think that this detracts from his point.) What’s more, extensive purges were set in place, as people in all walks of life had their actions and attitudes during the “Prague Spring” exhaustively examined. The Czechoslovak Communist Party itself removed more than 20% of its members from its ranks, and of course these purges influenced whose children could attend university and even who was to be permitted to continue to hold what job. It is mainly from here that the tales of highly-talented intellectuals working as window-washers, because of their actions and attitudes in 1968, start to arise. (Václav Havel, one of the most notorious of the “anti-government agitators,” was lucky to be assigned to haul raw materials at a Prague brewery.)

The whole import of Nemecek’s article comes together, I think, in the contrast between what happened in Hungary and Poland (Kádár and Gomulka) and what didn’t happen in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion. It got to the point that, when the next multinational crisis came around in 1989, Czechoslovakia was notoriously even more of a strict Marxist-Leninist state than the USSR itself, and certainly than most of its Central European neighbors. (Well, maybe not Albania.) But, as Nemecek relates, all of this was ultimately carried out by Czechs. His implied question: Just how secure is the love of the Czechs and Slovaks for “freedom,” even in adverse conditions? How little will it take for them to forsake it yet again for safety and comfort in the next crisis?