Word: vaclav
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...book concludes with two interviews conducted by Reed--one with Vaclav Havel, the playwright-president of Czechoslovakia. The other is with Hubert Selby, author of Last Exit to Brooklyn and similarly gritty urban prose...
Capitalism has hit home in Czechoslovakia. In fact, it has hit the President's house. VACLAV HAVEL's Prague neighbors were startled to see an end wall of his apartment house blossom overnight into a colorful mosaic of Procter & Gamble billboards. Havel, who hopes to use the billboard fees to restore the building's crumbling facade, has shrewdly insisted on veto power over the content of the ads. P&G happily obliged with a politically correct mix of environmental messages that stress the company's commitment to cleanliness. Got any wall space in Kennebunkport, President Bush...
...vote, becoming the republic's first democratically elected president, he was regarded as a modern-day St. George who had defeated the dragon of Soviet imperialism. Given Gamsakhurdia's reputation as a distinguished literary scholar and his activism on behalf of human rights, comparisons with Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel did not seem too much of a stretch...
Germany could afford such a housecleaning because it has skilled noncommunists from the former West Germany to fill critical jobs. But other East European nations need the expertise of old bureaucrats and so are more tolerant of past party ties. In 1989 Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel appointed Josef Tosovsky, an apparatchik whose star rose under communist rule, to be president of his country's state bank. Other ex-functionaries have found comfortable posts outside the power structure. Jerzy Urban, who ran Polish state television during the last days of the communist regime, now edits a satirical magazine that mocks postcommunist...
...Albatros jet trainers, Czechoslovakia has been producing more than $800 annually per citizen, vs. $700 for the U.S. But with a dissident playwright as President and a mandate to undo the past, Czechoslovakia's postcommunist government is determined to dismantle the country's arms industry. President Vaclav Havel has ruefully noted that Czechoslovakia sent Libya enough Semtex plastic explosives in the '70s and early '80s to keep the world's terrorists supplied for the next 150 years. Just two months after the November 1989 revolution, Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier announced that Prague would "simply end its trade in arms," without...