The Czechs in a Nutshell

The Soviet Union’s implosion in the early 1990s led to an immense boost of organized crime. Mogilevich, who by now carried an Israeli passport, settled in Budapest, where he was protected against deportation through a marriage to a Hungarian citizen. Based in the middle of the Carpathian basin, “Seva” and the Solomon Mafia started, according to police sources, to entangle all countries in post-Communist Central Europe in a criminal web. Their alleged main activities were drugs, prostitution, arms, nuclear material, antiques, gold and jewels. The profits that this criminal activity yielded, the police reports, were laundered through a network of legal businesses — including The Dove restaurant in Prague — which all belonged to Mogilevich.

It was his extraordinary capabilities in money laundering that earned Mogilevich his nickname Don the Brain. There are even strong indications that he personally masterminded the Bank of New York scandal, which in 1999 linked the then Yeltsin regime to extensive money laundering. FBI’s forensic accountants started investigating the case, but no charges were ever raised against Mogilevich. This is Don the Brain’s comment in the interview with the BBC in late 1999:

“If there have been committed crimes and the police suspect that 1 have committed them, I can only say one thing. Please show your evidence. If I really had been involved in all those criminal acts and the police had disposed evidence of this, they certainly would have put charges against me. But they haven’t!”

So, officially, Semyon Yudkovich Mogilevich is only an extremely successful businessman trading in wheat, ceramics and shoes. To most Czechs, however, he remains the very icon of a Russian godfather and a kingpin in organized crime in Central Europe.

According to a Czech police spokesman, foreign mafiosi booked, in 2001, a turnover approximating 418 billion korunas, which corresponds to 20 percent of the whole country’s GDP. Even if this figure seems wildly exaggerated there’s no reason to doubt that organized criminals — with or without Semyon Yudkovich Mogilevich’s brains — are doing quite well in the Czech Republic.

Moravia

The Czech nation has from time immemorial been divided into three historic regions: Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. As in every other country on this planet, the Czech Republic has also witnessed a certain competition among its regions. A neutral observer may, however, quite often have the impression that the Vysočina, the highlands that divide Bohemia in the west from Moravia in the east, is a kind of buffer zone between two implacable rivals.

To be fair, the different character of the two regions is really eye-catching. Bohemia, occupying an area twice as large as Moravia and with almost twice as many inhabitants, is highly industrialized, deeply secularised (see: Religion) and completely dominated by Prague, the country’s unrivalled economic, political and cultural centre. Moravia is mainly engaged in agriculture or mining (see: Ostrava), the Catholic Church with its traditionalistic values represents a spiritual cornerstone, and the regional capital Brno is both a nice and pretty city, although its ultra-provincial character is impossible to ignore.

If this makes you think that the average inhabitant of Bohemia can’t stand the mug of the average Moravian and vice versa, you are probably too harsh (such a strong repulsion is mostly reserved for foreigners). Yet on both sides of the Vysočina, people regard it as a matter of honour to pester and insult the clowns on the other side of the highlands.

According to the Moravian stereotype, the classic cajzl (originally denoting a person from Prague, but today it applies more or less to anybody from Bohemia) is an arrogant, overpaid, beer-drinking fellow who goes to his cottage twice a month (see: Fridays) in Moravia to fix his car and bask in the sun. He knows everything better than the local boors, and his treatment of the Czech language is despicable. Logically, if you park a Prague-registered car somewhere in Brno, you can bet your boots that local police will give you a fat fine for some completely surrealistic offence.

The average Bohemian’s perception of the Moravians isn’t much more flattering. True, thanks to their rural roots, many of them are quite jolly and hearty (not least in combination with the locally produced wine), and lots of Moravians still have this funny physical resemblance to the Mongolian Avars that raided the area in the Middle Ages. But their strong religiosity is outdated and rustic, their dialect is ridiculous, and their inferiority complex about Bohemia is as huge as it is justified.