My friend from grammar
school days, Jon Crosby, just wrote an excellent account of a student cultural
visit to Czechoslovakia in 1972: https://untroubledtravel.blogspot.com/1972/08/czechoslovakia-in-1972.html
Jon noted that the
Czech guides who showed his group around Prague freely expressed a deep dislike
of Russians. He also met East German visitors who made it clear that they
disliked their own country but loved Czechoslovakia. Education was very
state-planned and of good quality. The plan educated 30% of students for
academic university courses, 60% for technical education and apprenticeships,
leaving 10% for unskilled labour. I wonder whether this was rather better than
the grammar school/secondary modern system that had sent Jon and me to
Cambridge, but consigned many more young people than 10% to a future with
minimal qualifications. Jon noted that: “About
to start Part 2 of my degree, specialising in Materials Science, I find it
interesting that the country has a reputation for high quality engineering and
metallurgy, with fast development of plastics and that half of the 7M workforce
are employed in industry, including glass, ceramics and leather. This is quite
a contrast to the UK, where prospects for a career related to my subject are
rapidly reducing.”
Jon reminded me of two
visits to Prague in the 1990s, shortly after the end of Communist rule, while
Vaclav Havel was president. With a few colleagues I exhibited at the brand new
Prague Book Fair. We were fortunate that a colleague, Lucy, who had been one of
the editors of The Dictionary of Art, had moved to Prague with her
family. Her husband had set up an office there for a British architectural
practice, and she spoke Czech. Lucy told us of her husband’s experiences as a businessman
in a newly post-Communist society. For example, he had ordered carpet of a
particular colour for one of his buildings, but the carpet factory made that
colour only at a certain time of the year. It would not be available for months.
My journey to Prague
began with a foretaste of attitudes that, I would discover, had lingered on in
the newly democratic eastern bloc. I boarded a late flight on Aeroflot from
Madrid to Prague on a Soviet-built plane that really did bear a resemblance to
a tin can. When the flight attendant brought my dinner, she asked if I wanted anything
to drink. I was tired after a long day, and asked for a relaxing whiskey. The response
was “You’re not in first class.” I was to learn in Prague that a lack of
enthusiasm for customer service was a feature of post-fall-of-Berlin-Wall
Czechoslovakia.
While I was enjoying
Aeroflot hospitality, my colleagues had already arrived in Prague and had
bought tickets for the opera. These were remarkably cheap, but the printed
price had been Tippexed over and a new price (presumably much higher) written
in by hand. This was obviously common practice, since nobody at the opera house
questioned the validity of the tickets. The racket was remarkably unsophisticated.
The Tippexing was crude, and the ticket touts had not researched their market:
my colleagues would happily have paid twice the inflated price.
The Czechs who came to
the book fair were literate, enthusiastic and spoke good enough English to hold
conversations with us. We noticed that when we asked people what they did, they
would sometimes answer, rather cagily, that they worked for the government. We
were told that this usually meant that they had worked for some branch of the
government’s secret security services.
Our friend Lucy spoke
Czech. She offered to make us a reservation at a restaurant which had been a favourite
of the members of the politburo under Communist rule. This gave us an
opportunity for a stroll over the bridge the Charles Bridge with a good view of
the castle. Shortly after we had been seated at our table in an otherwise empty
restaurant, a well-to-do American couple arrived and announced that they had a
reservation. The waiters checked and informed them that they had no such
reservation. The husband insisted that his hotel had made the reservation and
that they did have a reservation. The discussion continued until the
waiters decided that they had given the couple a hard enough time and sat them
at one of the many unoccupied tables.
The second year that
we exhibited at the book fair, I was invited to talk at one of the sessions. I
forget the exact topic of my talk, but I do remember that one of my fellow
speakers was Vaclav Havel’s sister or wife (I forget which). Lucy had told me
that Czechs tend to speak in very even tones. The result can be that they sound
disinterested, even bored, to the foreign ear. Naturally, I did not understand
a word of Ms Havel’s talk, but was glad that Lucy had alerted me to this idiosyncrasy
of the Czech language, since to my ear she sounded distinctly uninterested. I
am sure she was not, to judge by the applause she received.
My other sortie to a
former Iron Curtain country shortly after the end of Communist rule was to
Poland. I had been sent to Gdansk, with William Shepherd, a veteran educational
publisher, as my consultant. We were to visit a new company that was producing
educational materials on CD-ROM. We were booked into a hotel on a beach on the
bay of Finland. William and I imagined fat politburo members lounging on the
beach with their plump wives. Here again, service was expertly disobliging, as
we discovered in the bar where we were grudgingly served a night cap.
Our putative business
partners were remarkably young. They explained, with disarming frankness, that
the technical university in Gdansk turned out large numbers of highly trained software
engineers. They demanded much less pay than their equivalents in other
countries (this was some considerable time before Poland joined the EU). They
had also not yet understood copyright law, so the proprietors of the company
easily persuaded them to sign contracts that vested all rights in the company.
The videos and other
materials on the CD-ROMs were of a very high quality. Unfortunately, the two
clever young men who discovered that they could pay their workers very little
and own the copyright had not thought of two important factors. All the people
in the videos were white. This was not acceptable in any country in which the
students were not likewise all white. The science videos showed experiments
very clearly (better than in her in-person class at school, my colleague Ruth
commented). However, school curricula are very prescriptive. Any textbook or
video must show the prescribed experiment, with the prescribed safety
procedures. The young Polish entrepreneurs had not realized this.
The next day we
boarded a nearly empty flight back to London. Across the aisle from us was another
business type, who took out from his briefcase a large plan: it was for a Tesco
supermarket in Gdansk. Capitalism was clearly coming to post-Communist Poland
at speed.
Shortly after the
reunification of Germany, I met, in Berlin, two German musicologists, one from
a university in the west, the other from the east. The east Berliner explained
that his university had a much higher ratio of staff to students than his
western colleague’s institution. He seemed optimistic that things would remain
the same in the newly unified Germany. I was not so sure. Whatever their many
faults, the Communist states of eastern Europe seem to have supported excellent
education systems. I wonder whether the rush to capitalist freedom destroyed
not just the oppressive apparatus of the Communist states, but perhaps swept
away the good things at the same time.
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