Test Pilot Psychology

As an American visiting the Czech Republic for the first time, I pretty much took for granted that I would be able to just generally have the privileges that we have back in the States.  Sure, I know that Czechoslovakia was a Communist regime for over 40 years, but they so successfully established a parliamentary democracy and a free-market economy in just 20 years, I never really thought about the oppression that was the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

It was not until yesterday, when we had the opportunity to listen to Jan Urban, a journalism  professor from NYU in Prague, that I finally began to understand just what life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was like.  Having lived under the Communist regime, Mr. Urban knew just how oppressive the system was, noting several times that there was absolutely no way around the system.  The state was the Communist Party, and it controlled everything.  The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was by far the most centralized of the Eastern Soviet bloc countries, partially because the industrial nature of the country had a well-organized labor movement that provided the foundation necessary to support a Communist regime.

One of the most telling examples Mr Urban gave was that of parents trying to send their children to school.  Although children did receive primary education - for what it was worth - children’s ability to attend college, and even high school, was dependent on their parents’ political loyalty and nothing else.  Simply put, children were hostages of the parents.  The Party knew that parents would not risk their children’s education by doing anything that would seem to go against the Communist Party.  People knew that they basically only had one chance to resist because that would most likely be their last, as they would be punished either through their children, prison, or worse.