The Czechs in a Nutshell

This spectacle has been cultivated ad absurdum by Czech politicians. It’s almost unthinkable that he (yes, bar a few bright and thick-skinned ladies, they are all men) will say something like I am running for this or that position because I believe I'm the best. Instead, they will modestly point out that their personal ambitions are very, very small indeed, but that a lot of supporters want them to candidate, and, of course, it’s hard to let other people down, “so I’ll take the burden on my shoulders”.

How can a foreigner recognize that a Czech is doing or saying something just to express decorum? Unfortunately, there are no ironclad rules, but there are some clues — or rather patterns of accepted behaviour — you can cling to.

In addition to the widespread fear of giving an immodest impression, Czechs generally tend to avoid open confrontations. For instance, when somebody feels you have bothered him enough, he will — unless he’s a Friend of yours — probably avoid saying something like Sorry, I have to go, or even worse, Sorry, I haven't time to talk to you. Instead, he or she will use the fantastic Czech phrase Nebudu Vás už zdržovat (I don’t want to detain you), which actually might mean Bugger off; you're wasting my time! Equally classic, when you ask a Czech something and the answer is To je na dlouhé povídání (That will be a long story), you are politely, but firmly, being asked to mind your own business.

Last, but not least: when communicating with a Czech, you should also remember that many people, because of their experience with the hard-hitting communist dictatorship, are still wary of sticking their necks out with a clear and unequivocal point of view. This, of course, doesn’t mean they don’t have strong opinions. There are few people on the planet who have such a rich history of anonymous denunciations as the Czechs, and local web debates are notoriously nasty.

The point is that many people tend to behave significantly differently when they’re accountable for their actions, and when they’re not. Admittedly, that’s quite human. The surprising thing, though, is the formidable spread of this phenomenon in the Czech Republic.

Take, for instance, the Czech Parliament’s election of Václav Havel’s successor as president in February 2003. Prior to the voting, all Social Democrats in the Chamber of Deputies solemnly declared that they would certainly vote for their party’s own candidate. But how did it turn out? Just to complicate life for the party’s chairman, almost 30 Social Democrats used their secret ballots to vote for the opposition’s candidate Václav Klaus, who subsequently won the presidential elections with a slight majority.

The Czechs are probably not more duplicitous than people elsewhere, but because of decorum, you should not take it for granted that a Czech really means yes when saying yes, or no when saying no. When it comes to sex, the old — and now pretty outdated — adage went that a woman, when answering no, actually meant maybe, and when saying maybe, indicated yes...

So, the only piece of advise that a foreigner can take is: look out for hints, don’t expect people to support anything controversial in public, and tune your social antenna to a frequency considerably higher than what’s used in Western Europe!

Communism

The Czechs’ relationship to their totalitarian past is a pretty complicated affair. On one hand, they have taken stronger legal measures than the Poles, Slovaks and Hungarians against those who collaborated with the communists’ secret police, the feared StB (see: Lustration).

When it comes to widespread collaboration with the Communist Party, though, the attitude is far more complex. At times, an outsider may even get the impression that the majority of those Czechs who have any personal experience from this era behave as if the 41-years long tyranny is a rather insignificant event that took place sometime around the Battle of White Mountain.

Then you have a smaller, but quite vociferous group of people, who vividly remember the communists — or the Bolsheviks or Comanches (“ideological redskins”) as they are pejoratively called — but solely blame “Moscow” for all the horrors.

And finally, there is a small group of brave individuals who in the 1950s and 1960s served years in prison and forced labour camps for standing up against the regime, and now, legitimately, demand that their red tormentors should be punished. So far, the former political prisoners’ claims have not met any particular success.