Running as a social democrat for the Senate in the Czech Republic is not for the timid. In my district, four voters out of five stoutly affirm social democratic values and virulently reject social democratic candidates. After forty years of …
When the Iron Curtain disintegrated, the newly freed lands of what was once the Soviet empire had to start from scratch. The civil structure of our societies was devastated, our political structures perverted, our perceptions distorted, our economies in shambles. …
There is no more Czechoslovakia, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future. The governments of the two rump states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, do not like to be reminded that there ever was …
This is the law: The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, its leaders and its members, are responsible for the way our land was governed in the years 1948-1989 and in particular for the systematic destruction of the traditional values of European …
Western media have dubbed Czechoslovakia’s breakup a no-fault divorce. Now the two newly elected protagonists, Václav Klaus, the prime minister of the Czech republic and architect of Czechoslovakia’s economic transformation, and Vladimir Mečiar, a former communist, now a nationalist and …
Prague is lovely in springtime when a cloud-burst clears the air and sun lights up the bright green slopes above the river and the pastel facades of the Old Town. The narrow streets fill with folk; there is music in …
Ten years from now, will there still be a Central Europe? Or will Europe’s center, suddenly reemerging as the Soviet tide recedes, find itself submerged once more by a Western tide? The end came so abruptly: what now? Amid the …
Fifty years ago Neville Chamberlain emerged from his airplane, gestured with his umbrella, and announced to his anxious countrymen that the abject surrender he had just signed in Munich would assure them what the Prayer Book pleads for, “peace in …
To speak the truth: that is the most urgent item on the next president’s agenda. We have been lied to, systematically and patronizingly, ever since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, deceived, manipulated, flattered and lulled by illusions. Call it glasnost, …
Though the headlines may tell another story, to anyone living in Vienna the most remarkable thing about Europe after Chernobyl is how most remarkably like Europe before Chernobyl it is. In the direct aftermath of the accident, Austria did join …
George Kateb’s “Nuclear Weapons and Individual Responsibility,” (Dissent, Spring 1986) achieves an instant credibility by his open acknowledgment of what we prefer to ignore—the possibility of nuclear annihilation and the anonymity of the powers that control that possibility, impervious to …
VIENNA – There is, at first, no culture shock. So much about Europe seems familiar. American civilization, after all, had followed a basically European pattern well into the 1940s. Still in the last years before the suburban dispersal, Boston, with …
The forcible super-imposition of Marxism as the orthodoxy of the Soviet state obliterated, for some three generations, the spontaneity of Russian thought, creating the unfortunate image of Russians as automatons printing out quotations from Marx and Lenin. In recent years, …
Behind the facade of Soviet ideology, there is a tremendous longing for the clear, pure word of truth. That, more than anything else, is the driving force behind the upsurge of literature, in typescript and carbon copies, emerging in all …
God, it seems, Is Not Altogether Dead, even in the countries whose governments consider themselves “objectively socialist.” To be sure, Viterslav Gardaysk), the Marxist philosopher who chose this for the title of his book, found himself transferred from the post …
