Word: skoda
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...million private cars, including even French-made Simcas as well as Czechoslovakia's own Skoda, jam the streets and roads of this small nation of 14 million people. Restaurants are packed with Czechoslovak and foreign tourists, swigging Pilsen beer and devouring pork-and fruit-filled dumplings. Perhaps as a result, the Czechoslovaks are now on a physical-fitness kick. One Prague sporting-goods store is doing a thriving business in exercise machines...
...face of Czechoslovakia's steadily sagging economy and its even limper national morale, Communist Party Boss Gustav Husak last week decided that the time was ripe for a good pep talk. Before 700 workers at the Skoda auto works in Pilsen, he admitted: "Quite a lot of people are falling into some sort of depression. They are spreading panicky moods, as if our state and all of our society were facing some sort of bankruptcy from which there is no way out." Husak thereupon assured his listeners that he would be better for them than either of his predecessors...
...before Husak addressed the Skoda workers, their boss, Plant Manager Jan Martinak, lost his job in the purge. He had been chosen before the invasion by one of the workers' councils created under Dubcek's program of partial self-management for industry. The councils are now "under analysis" by the government and are no longer active. Josef Pavel, Interior Minister under Dubcek and a main force behind the reforms, was "suspended" from the Communist Party-one step from expulsion. Ota Sik, architect of last year's economic reforms, was kicked out of the party. His fate...
Changing the Design. Long known as a munitions and armaments maker, and recently a manufacturer of anti-aircraft guns for North Viet Nam, Skoda is also an automotive pioneer. The firm built its first car, an open-top two-seater called the Voiturette, as early as 1901. After World War II and the Communist takeover, Skoda's major model was a small sedan called the Oktavia, which gained little popularity in the West. Yet it was only after a long fight that Skoda's management was given government permission to make the radical design departure from the Oktavia...
...insist that it must be marketed abroad by the state trading organization, Motokov. Pretty good at long-distance peddling, Motokov's Prague-based bureaucrats export an extensive line of products including bicycles, buzzsaws, machine tools and household appliances-far too many items for the sort of sales effort Skoda executives would prefer for the 1000 MB. Says one Skoda man, "Motokov has many very good people, but it isn't ideal to have them sitting far from the factory selling a car they know nothing about...