The Czechs in a Nutshell

Nobody will deny that it can be quite handy to know the right persons in the right places. Most people will probably also agree that, in a European context, the practical importance of personal connections grows stronger and stronger the farther south you go. Therefore, one might expect the Czechs to regard this phenomenon in more or less the same way as their Austrian and German neighbours.

But that’s definitely not the case. Because one of the communist dictatorship’s most characteristic features was the ostentatious way in which it bent rules and laws to hand out “advantages” to people who were loyal to them, personal connections became crucial to any slightly ambitious person.

Obviously, Party membership was the ultimate door opener to a high-powered career (it’s probably no coincidence that Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party had 1.8 million members, which relative to the country’s total population of 15 millions made it the largest in the former East Bloc after Romania’s Bolsheviks). A less compromising but still effective method was to ally yourself with a strejda (literally “uncle”, or an important person) who because of your personal relations and sometimes also an envelope stuffed with bank notes would use his influence to obtain certain advantages for you.

Because courts were totally controlled by the regime, it was often pointless for those who were discriminated against to take legal action (that is, unless they didn’t happen to be connected to an even more important strejda). Logically, the less people trusted state authorities, the more confidence they put into their personal relations — first of all their family, and then their friends and acquaintances. The Czechs themselves call this system “to have protection”.

Every reasonable person relied upon at least a handful of “protections”: you needed to personally know an auto mechanic (if not, your car might be repaired with used spare parts), a dentist (they were few and all working for the state, so why bother to do a good job?), a gynaecologist (some of them are still ill-reputed for sexual misconduct), a bookseller who put aside William Styron’s latest novel for you, and a nice teacher who fed your children with the absolute minimum dose of Bolshevik ideology.

Now, take a wild guess: did this system disappear with the communists? Of course it didn’t. Just as corruption, which is an extreme version of the protection system, still lives and thrives, so does also the importance of personal connections.

In fact, this tradition has become so ingrained that is doesn’t stir the slightest public outcry when politicians reward their ex-colleagues with prestigious state jobs or super-lucrative memberships on company boards of directors. When postings for Czech ambassadors are to be filled, formal careers and years of service are not always among the most interesting factors. Similarly, when a young woman was catapulted from total obscurity to a seat in Parliament in the late 1990s, most people found it completely natural, because everybody knew her political qualification was a previous stint as a private secretary for the party boss.

Needless to say, the protection system can be both a curse and a blessing. If you, for instance, find an interesting job announcement in the newspapers and decide to apply, you’re probably wasting your time unless you already have “protection” in the company. Logically, the more attractive, interesting and well paid the job is, the greater the need for a protector. On the other hand, if you only are a bit unscrupulous, personal connections can secure you huge advantages.

When, for instance, foreign journalists call a governmental institution’s spokesperson and ask some questions, they’ll probably get a useless answer a week later. But if they know somebody in the place personally, he or she might reveal tons of secrets over a few pints of beer in a cosy hospoda. In short: when it comes to personal connections and their importance as a tool for solving practical problems, the Czechs display a striking resemblance to those Balkan countries that they always take such great care to belittle.

Poles

In his bestseller The Mitrokhin Archives, KGB defector Vitalij Mitrokhin cites a conversation between the KGB’s resident in Warsaw and a Polish general in 1981. When the Russian spy indicated that Moscow was seriously considering invading Poland to curb the rebellious Solidarity movement, the general answered calmly: “If you do that, rivers of blood will flow. Remember, we are not Czechs, but Poles!”