The Czechs in a Nutshell

The descendants of the nineteenth century emigrants don’t bother anybody today. The Czech minority in Romania, for instance, has even aroused widespread sympathy for the way they cling to their old traditions, including a charmingly archaic version of the Czech language, amidst the dreariness of the Banat. Similarly, when the remaining Volhynia Czechs — the majority of whom had already re-emigrated in the 1920s — settled in the Czech Republic early after the Velvet Revolution, they were mainly met with understanding and sympathy. Who would, after all, like to live in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant?

The “problems” start with those who emigrated from totalitarian Czechoslovakia in two big waves — in 1948, after the communist takeover (see: Albright, Madeleine), and then 20 years later, following the Warsaw Pact’s brotherly invasion of the country. Today, it’s hard to imagine a place on this planet where there isn’t a Czech immigrant community. The largest groups are in Canada, Australia, Germany and the United States, but individual Czechs are reported in such incredible places as the rain forest of Costa Rica.

Sure, most Czechs are proud of countrymen who have made the American National Ice Hockey League look more or less like a competition between Czech clubs. When a foreigner mentions film director Miloš Forman, a Czech will almost certainly remind you that this respected artist was actually born in Czechoslovakia, and of course it’s not insignificant that people like Chicago’s mayor Antonin Cermak or Brazil’s president Juscelino Kubitschek were of Czech origin.

But what about the thousands of ordinary Czechs (according to some estimates approximately half a million people) who chose to leave the country instead of putting up with the Bolshevik regime? What were the real reasons for their decision to emigrate? Are the emigrants better than us, since they didn’t collaborate with the communists? Do they now have any moral right to criticize developments after 1989? And, most importantly, are these people still Czechs?

It’s easy to understand the feelings of both sides. Take the average emigrant, who had to build up a new existence practically from scratch. Most of them have been amazingly successful. In Sweden, for instance, several surveys show that the approximately 20,000 Czech immigrants, from an economic point of view, belong to the most successful of all ethnic groups represented in the country — including the Swedes themselves. The think-tank in Stockholm that conducted one of the surveys concluded that those who chose to emigrate represented the most active, ambitious and well-educated layer of the Czech population.

When these industrious people started to return to the old country after 1989, either as tourists or on a permanent basis, they were often disappointed with what they found: a country mired in bureaucracy and corruption, politicians wasting their time and energy in petty quarrels, and people still more prone to complain passively about all their problems (see: Hospoda) than to do something to solve them. Some emigrants even found that the houses they once owned were now inhabited by former communist big-shots, who were allowed to buy the properties for a song.

Nevertheless, when emigrants have dared to criticize — no matter how legitimately — the country’s state of affairs, they usually arouse wild and negative reactions. “It’s easy for you to fault us for being backward and incompetent,” the saying goes, “when you for the past twenty years have enjoyed all the advantages of a modern Western society!”

There might be something to this reaction. Under the rigid normalization of the 1970s and 1980s, emigration was a tempting option. But many ambitious and competent people, however fed up with the communists, resisted it for entirely unselfish reasons. Some could not bear the thought of leaving old and feeble relatives behind. Others felt so devoted to the Czech national identity and the country’s long-lasting struggle for cultural emancipation that they never wanted their children to grow up in a foreign country. And to many members of the political opposition (see: Charter 77), resisting the pressure to emigrate was a matter of principle: what makes the Bolsheviks believe they have more right to live in this country than I have?

In addition, the Czechs’ obsession with egalitarianism (some people would probably prefer the term envy here) also plays a certain role. Most of the emigrants, who have returned to the old country, are economically far better off than those who stayed. Being wealthy and smart — and moreover eager to demonstrate it — has never been a good way of making friends in this country.