Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While the Czechs never tried to put up a bare-fisted fight against the mighty Soviets (as the Hungarians did in 1956), their brief experiment to reform socialism under Alexander Dubcek in 1968, crushed that same year with Soviet tanks, was the virus which infected Soviet communism two decades later...
There are several casual links. The first is Alexander Yakovlev, known as the architect of glasnost and perestroika, and Gorbachev's chief adviser. He had been in charge of re-imposing the Stalinist ideology on the Czechs after the Soviet invasion, finding it in his words, "one of the most horrible things I've had to do." His own idea of communism changed then, as he could not argue against the far more timely ideas of Dubcek's people...
...third casual link came from the non-communist forces that gained ascendancy during the Soviet democratization period of 1988-89, who agreed with the reform communists in their admiration for the Prague Spring and its principles. The dissident Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov was the leader of this democratic movement. He wrote in his memoirs that the crushing of the Prague Spring was one of the most tragic events of Russia's history, "but fire burned beneath the ashes," he concluded...
...Soviets found to their chagrin that "reform communism" is an oxymoron, and since coercion and state terror were the only gluing mechanism of the USSR, any reform experiment meant to give their socialism a "human face" was bound to destroy the very pillars of that system. It was the Czechs' and Slovaks' attempts to make sense of an alien ideology during 1968, however, and its eventual crushing by Soviet hardware, that infected the Soviet Union's politics 20 years later, leading to the sensational death of a bloody tyranny...
After the Soviet Union died, the Czechs once again were relied upon by decent-minded Russians to make sure communism never returned. The victorious Russians, fresh from overthrowing their Soviet overlords in 1991, realized that the best way to make sure the communists never returned was to quickly privatize all government-owned businesses and housing. This way, common citizens would have private property and an incentive to defend it. How do you privatize a Stalinist economy quickly? Well, the Czechs had been doing it for two years with the "voucher" system, devised by Jan Svejnar, a Czech-American economist...