Mainer makes Putin's interrogation wish list

In today's Portland Press Herald, I have the story of how a guy from Maine wound up on Vladimir Putin's list of Americans he'd like turned over for interrogation, a request he made of President Trump at this week's summit in Helsinki and one that - to widespread horror - Trump appeared to entertain.

Kyle Parker, raised in Old Town, educated at the University of Maine, is a pretty big deal: the guy who by most accounts made the Magnitsky Act happen. If you don't know what that is and why Putin cares, please dig into the story, which includes an interview with Parker.

For a deeper dive into Magnitsky, Parker, and Putin, I recommend this November 2017 story from GQ.

Meanwhile, just to keep things strange, Maine Governor Paul LePage showed up in Montenegro earlier this month to meet with President Djukanovic, supposedly because of the Maine National Guard's 12 year old partnership with the Balkan country. LePage's office, as usual, is providing few details.

In Europe, talking US politics

I spent much of this past week in Europe, engaged in a whirlwind cultural exchange speaking tour to help explain U.S. politics and 2016 election dynamics to (often perplexed, frequently worried) Europeans. The tour, sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, had me and co-presenter Sewell Chan of the New York Times speaking at five events in three countries over three days, plus a few equally engaging dinners.

Arriving in Brussels -- where the airport departure hall and parts of the metro system were still closed on account of the recent terrorist attacks -- we kicked things off at the European Parliament, at a well attended talk sponsored by EU40 -- an organization of young members of parliament -- and the U.S. Mission to the European Union. Victor Negrescu, MEP from Romania, acted as our formal host, but the audience was a mix of diplomats, parliamentary staff, businesspeople, American expatriates, and European officials. Here and elsewhere, I kicked things off with a five-minute lesson on the Balkanized nature of the U.S., a country comprised -- as per American Nations -- of rival regional cultures, most of which date back to the colonial period.

The most frequent questions here and throughout our tour were about Donald Trump, who most West Europeans find horrifying and who their American counterparts had previously (and incorrectly)
assured them would drop out of the Republican nomination contest early. Would Republicans try to stop him at the convention? (I suspect not, as their runner-up would likely also lose the general election, meaning they'd be damaging their coalition without a clear pay-off.) Are Americans ready for social democracy on account of Sanders? (The younger generation in three or four of our regions may be, but they will likely have to settle for something more akin to New Deal national liberalism on account of the libertarian-minded nations: Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Far West.)

Later that first afternoon we presented and took questions from another full house at the German Marshall Fund's Brussels office, and the following morning -- traveling to France by train -- at their Paris office in St. Germain. I had a couple of hours free to roam the Seine, including the neighborhood where my wife and I stayed last I was here, in those glorious-if-less-consequential days before the kids. Won't be too long before they're old enough to make the trip.

That second evening we flew on to Belgrade via Air Serbia, a three-year old successor to JAT which serves a pretty decent late night dinner. Although I spent most of the 1990s in neighboring Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, I'd never visited Belgrade, first on account of the war and, later, because as successor to David Rohde at the Christian Science Monitor -- a fellow Mainer who won a Pulitzer for finding (and being arrested on) the Srebrenica mass grave sites -- Serbia wouldn't issue me a visa. I was just there one full day, but it was personally meaningful to be there, especially in a context where I could talk about the challenges to sustaining a liberal democracy (the topic of my new book, American Character.) There are a lot of souvenir merchants
selling Putin paraphinalia -- and even a few with t-shirts celebrating the mass murderer Ratko Mladic -- but there are also clearly a lot of people fighting for change, for integration with Europe (and, thus, weaker ties with authoritarian Russia), and a refutation of the Milosevic era.

As far as speaking venues go, its hard to beat Belgrade's Aeroklub, in a mansion that once belonged to the Serbian monarchy, with art deco details and frescos on the ceilings. There, hosted by the GMF's Balkan Trust for Democracy and moderated by GMF's vice president, Ivan Vojvoda, we fielded questions from Serbian journalists and civil society representatives.  No surprise that they instantly got the American Nations paradigm -- it was my time in the Balkans that helped me see the fissures at home, so it felt poignant to be bringing it back, full circle. That evening we gave a talk at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Political Science, which has a Center for American Studies.

Thanks to all of our hosts -- and to my excellent co-presenter Sewell Chan -- for a delightful and informative trip. I look forward to seeing many of you in future.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part II

For those not sure how to spend the rest of the spring solstice and Father's Day, let me suggest a review of the memoir of the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, Eleni Kounalakis.

Kounalakis served in Budapest for the first three years of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's rule, a period in which he's turned Hungary away from liberal democracy and towards something closer to Russia, Singapore and China. Her book is surprisingly frank and paints a disturbing picture of the direction of the Hungarian state.

The review, which appears in today's Sunday Washington Post, is my second piece this week on the situation back in Hungary, where I lived for more than four years between 1989 and 1996, and where I returned recently. The previous one -- on Orban's construction of what he calls the "illiberal state" -- appeared in Politico Magazine a few days ago.

My most recent review for the Post was of former Rep. Barney Frank's memoir.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part I

I was recently in Hungary, where I lived for some five years between 1989 and 1996, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been making good on his promise to construct an "illiberal state" inside the European Union. In Politico Magazine today you can read my dispatch on the situation there.

A teaser: most worrisome is that the only effective opposition to Orban comes from the extreme right Jobbik Party, which are on the ascent despite not long ago maintaining a jackbooted paramilitary group that marched through Roma neighborhoods wearing uniforms and symbols reminiscent of the Nazi-era Arrow Cross.

A sad state of affairs for Hungary, which when I first moved there was leading the drive for democracy and independence in the Eastern bloc.


For those with a focused interest in Orban's rhetorical argument, reading his full "illiberal democracy" speech is clarifying.

More on Hungary coming soon.... [Update, 6/21/15: That was a reference to this review of former US Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis's memoir of her term in Hungary, which ran in today's Washington Post.]

In Salzburg

I'm in the midst of a trip in Central Europe, the first in several years. I lived in this part of the world for the better part of the 1990s and it's good to be back.

A few observations after five years' absence.

1. The region has discovered "take out coffee." This is a good thing. I wonder if Starbucks, a relatively new arrival, is responsible for this long-delayed innovation.

2. The Austrians still hold the Post-Imperial Area title for motorway engineering. If we Americans spent as much as they must have to build sound barriers in even the most rural of areas, I suspect it would have paid itself back in improved property values alone. It's still jarring to go from limping across southern Moravia or south Slovakia to the meticulously engineered, tunnel-intensive autobahnen, where the original 1967 Mission Impossible television soundtrack is required driving music.

3. In Budapest, the trend has continued, and it is now nearly impossible to find good Hungarian food in restaurants. The best gulyas I've had so far in the region was in Štúrovo, an ethnic Hungarian community in South Slovakia. Somebody needs to give Budapest's chefs some remedial education in the old ways.

4. If you want to see a town defy Rust Belt-ism, go to Zlin in the Czech Republic, the former Bata shoe factory town-cum-Capitalist worker's utopia. I wrote about the city five years ago in the Christian Science Monitor and the trend has only continued. The old factory complex -- largely empty last I visited -- is now a thriving neighborhood of hipster lofts, university expansion buildings, and business start-ups. And if this rural corner of the Czech Republic can build a rapidly expanding public university -- with new buildings popping up every year -- why can't Maine manage to keep the University of Southern Maine from imploding? I suspect this has to do with leadership, municipal, academic, and state.

5. Hungarian politics are as bad as they say. One could ask, "Who votes for this guy?" But I'm from Maine, so I don't need to.

Remembering the Fall of the Wall, 25 Years Ago

I was living in Eastern Europe in 1989, and was in Berlin during the crazy week after the Berlin Wall came down, symbolically the Cold War.  Hard to believe it was 25 years ago.

Five years ago -- on the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet empire -- I wrote a series of posts here at World Wide Woodard on my experiences that breathtaking fall and early winter. Here, on the anniversary of the Wall's opening, is the piece I wrote about Berlin.

The full 1989-2009 series, for those interested, can be read here (start from the bottom and work your way to the top to read them in order.)

A quarter century later, it looks as if the Post-Cold War Era has ended, with an autocratic Russia again scratching menacingly at the eastern marches of Europe. Hopefully the world -- and the Russian people -- have the will and good sense to prevent a return to that bleak Cold War world.

Photos (c) Colin Woodard. All Rights Reserved.

Things to Watch, Hear, and Read, New Year's Editon

Welcome to 2011, and to the second anniversary of World Wide Woodard. To kick off the New Year, a few items of interest from the wider world.

Wikileaks - The Documentary: My blog got its start in Reykjavik, where Wikileaks made its first big pitch for sanctuary. I'm wondering if they'll be increasing their presence in Iceland if things get too hot and heavy in Sweden for founder Julian Assange. The most comprehensive documentary on the group's "history" -- if one can use that word for something so young -- aired on Swedish television last month. Friends and foes alike will learn something from setting aside an hour to watch. (The "Collateral Damage" helicopter tapes are still chilling.)

Ruins of Detroit: The Guardian has this arresting slide show of images from a dying American city. It provoked a lengthy capital vs labor blame game discussion when I posted it on my Facebook page. See what happens when you post it on yours. [Update, 1/5/2011: a friend-of-a-friend created this engaging video documentary, Detroit Lives, offering a second, more optimistic take on the Motor City,.]

Borders on the Brink: Speaking of Detroit, Ann Arbor-based Borders Books & Music is also in trouble. Publishers Weekly reported on Dec. 31 that the retailer has been cut off by one of the big six New York publishers after it stopped paying its bills. The Detroit News has this sobering follow-up, suggesting the firm may not survive.

Books on the Brink?: Will the Kindle and Amazon destroy the book industry or revive it? The Boston Review has an excellent and wide ranging article on the state of publishing, and what industry consolidation, big boxes, Amazon, and e-books have done to it. One of many depressing factoids: "It has become common practice for representatives of large retailers to weigh in on everything from book covers to sample chapters of manuscripts. In some cases, retailers even demand changes...Without their buy-in, the publisher is unlikely to go forward with a book." Perhaps Borders will be surrendering their seat to Amazon or Wal-Mart shortly.

Hungary on the Brink? Hungary's government is showing its true colors, and they aren't pretty. My friend Dumneazu has a comprehensive round-up of the situation from there. Good news is, I understand support for the farther-right Jobbik party -- subject of some of my not-so- recent reporting from the region -- has been on the wane.

Witnessing the Romanian miners' attack, 20 years ago today

I was looking at the calendar and realizing that my real, professional journalism career began with twenty years ago today, when the Communist retreads who'd seized power during the Romanian Revolution deployed an army of miners in Bucharest to beat the crap out of unarmed protesters, university students, and the opposition political parties.

Having gotten caught up in the 1989 events while an exchange student in Budapest, I'd returned to the region on a modest undergraduate summer research grant with a 21-year old's conceit that the truth about the Romanian Revolution could be uncovered with a couple month's field work.

When I reached Bucharest at the beginning of June, hundreds of ordinary Romanians were camped out in a tent city in the middle of University Square to protest the less than democratic behavior of Ion Iliescu's National Salvation Front, which seized power under mysterious circumstances after Nicolae Ceausescu fled the capital in an overloaded helicopter. (He and his wife were quickly betrayed, tried by a kangaroo court for their many (genuine) crimes against his people, and machine-gunned to death by their captors.) I rented a room from a working class couple in the city's outskirts -- among the kindest people I've ever known -- and through them and their friends and neighbors got to see Romanian life from the ground up on this and future reporting trips. During the day, I'd interviewed students, protesters, intellectuals, and opposition figures in the center, by night I'd hear stories of the trials and travails of day-to-day life under Ceausescu's Orwellian dictatorship, many of which were still very much present.

When the miners stormed the capital -- beating people half to death with clubs, crowbars, and other tools and trashing university and opposition offices -- I was in Brasov, the city I'd visited in the waning weeks of the Ceausescu regime. I saw the television footage of cars burning and detachments of helmeted miners clubbing their way through the capital, called my friends, and headed back on the next train, intending to stay away from the miners in the city center. Instead, I found myself face to face with them. When my train pulled into Gara de Nord, dozens of miners were waiting on the platform for us to disembark, smacking clubs in their hands and looking for likely victims. They were a grimy, wild-looking lot, behaving like caged animals who'd escaped from their subterranean prison and were looking for people to blame. Foreigners, perhaps, the sort with glasses, cameras, and notebooks. I felt lucky to have not been picked out as we walked the gauntlet to the subway entrance.

I returned to the center a day or two later, after watching Iliescu thank the miners at the national stadium on television. Opposition politicians showed me around the remains of their offices, where miners had spent the time to bash every typewriter to bits. At the University of Bucharest, students showed me through buildings where the miners had sacked everything, smashing even the porcelain toilets in every bathroom. Angry protesters returned to the streets, observed by lines of very frightened-looking army conscripts, guns at their side. Most of them had probably been caught up in the fighting the previous December and weren't looking forward to a sequel. I wound up covering it all for The Chronicle of Higher Education, kicking off my journalism career, which would have me based in Eastern Europe for much of the transition period.

Twenty years on, some of the mysteries surrounding the events of 1989-1990 have been solved, but many others have not.

Photographs (c) 1990-2010 Colin Woodard.

Who rightfully owns the plunder of war?

In recent decades, there's been an upsurge in claims for art and cultural objects seized in past conflicts or by occupying armies. Northern European museums face claims on their antiquities from governments in southern Europe or North African. Native Americans want stolen objects -- even bodies -- returned. Germany wants art taken by the Soviets during World War II and vice versa.

But returning wartime plunder to its rightful owner isn't at all straightforward, particularly for objects seized in the distant past. Who the 'rightful' owner is seems to depend largely on your point of view, and international law doesn't provide much help prior to the 20th century.

This is the subject of my cover story in the new issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, out on news stands shortly and online now.

Extreme right to enter Hungarian Parlialent

You're unlikely to know it if you rely on the website of The New York Times, but Hungary held elections yesterday, and the extreme right had a powerful showing, winning 17% of the vote.

As some of you know, I lived for several years in Hungary, and still report from the region once or twice a year. In recent years I've been following the rise of Jobbik and their uniformed paramilitary arm, the Hungarian Guard (Magyar Garda.) The latter marches around in intimidating formations in Roma neighborhoods sporting symbols favored by Hungary's fascist Arrow Cross during the Holocaust. The former won seats last year in the European Parliament, where one of their delegates arrived wearing the Magyar Garda uniform. The party advocates reopening the Trianon Treaty, which set the region's borders and created Slovakia. Roma leaders liken it to Nazism, though the party's slick, English-speaking communications staff claim they are merely patriots.

Sunday, nearly a fifth of the Hungarian electorate cast votes in support of Jobbik, which will now occupy 26 seats in the Hungarian parliament. Wednesday they're introducing the foreign press corps in Budapest to their candidates for ministers of economy, finance, and foreign economy. It remains unclear whether the party will be marginalized or coddled by the election's big victors, Viktor Orban's center-right Fidesz, which took 53% of the vote.

Watch closely to see what Mr. Orban says or does not have to say about Jobbik in the coming days and weeks.

[UPDATE, 13:11 EST: Orban just pledged to remove the "political and economic landmine" that strong support for Jobbik represents, the Associated Press reported minutes ago.]

Europe watches as Slovakia implements anti-Hungarian language law

Another story from my recent trip to East-Central Europe is up today over at Global Post, this one on Slovakia's draconian language law.

The country's Hungarian minority is upset because, read strictly, it criminalizes the use of any language other than Slovak in a wide range of public circumstances. The government says they're overreacting, but the government also includes a far-right party whose leader calls the country's Hungarian citizens a "cancer" which must be wiped off the national map.

Slovakia's an E.U. state, right? So what can the union do about it? As you'll read in the piece, not much. (Like most of my Global Post stories, this appears in their subscription Passport service, so you'll need to login to read it. If you care about international news, however, it's well worth the price.)

While we're in the neighborhood, Hungary's own extremist party isn't doing much to calm tensions between the two countries and is poised to enter the Parliament after April 11 elections. Jobbik, which has its own jackbooted paramilitary, has been trying to charm the foreign press corps of late, hoping to receive sympathetic coverage of their proposals to, among other things, revisit the peace settlement that ended World War I and created Slovakia. I'm on their mailing list and I listen to what they have to say: it's not charming.

Map: Hungarian minority in Slovakia (majority areas in red), Courtesy Nationalia.

Things to Watch and Read, March 22 edition

I'm still hiding out in my secret lair with a book manuscript, but a few things of interest crossed my desk over past few days.

Tea Party Bigots at the Capitol: The freedom-loving "Tea Party" folks who showed up at the U.S. Capitol to protest the health care bill reportedly shouted the "n" word at black civil rights hero John Lewis (D-Ga.), spit on Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), and screamed "faggot" at Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

"I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus," James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told the Huffington Post. Later that day, someone threw a brick through the window of Rep. Louise Slaughter's district office in Pine View, New York.

What's next: tarring, feathering, and burning down houses? That'll keep health care affordable.


The Hungarian "race": The Hungarian-American lobby sent out a press release with instructions for their constituency on how to declare themselves racially Hungarian on the U.S. 2010 Census, apparently believing the write-in campaign will increase leverage on lawmakers.

I'm not sure that Hungarian-Americans share a common policy position on events in their ancestral home: someone whose family fled the Nazi takeover may have different feelings about, say, the rise of a far-right party with its own jackbooted militia, than someone who fled the Soviet invasion in '56. But what if ancestral memory really does trump independent thought? To hedge my bets, maybe I'll declare my race to be "Anglo-Franco-Irish-Dane-Scot" and give the politicians something to puzzle over in the next redistricting effort.


Timbuktu Claims the Blues: My Monitor colleague, Scott Baldauf, has an interesting piece on how Timbuktu, Mali, the famous terminal of trans-Sahara caravan trade, asserts itself as the birthplace of the blues, preempting the American South.


Editor who Needs An Editor: For those in Maine wondering what's wrong with the former newspaper of record, the Portland Press Herald, here's another clue. Owner/editor Richard Connor -- whose possessions also include the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal -- appears to have no idea how to research and write something as simple as a personal opinion piece.

His contribution on health care in yesterday's Morning Sentinel is a case in point: a rambling and unfocused piece that features an uninterrupted 500-word block of quotes from a Gorham innkeeper to make the rather obvious point that insurance premiums vary by state. The innkeeper has some theories as to how to improve the situation, but rather than examine their merits, Connor veers off into some fuzzy ruminations about his companies' health care costs (replete with undigested statistics) before arriving at a perfect non-argument: what's done is done, so "it’s time for all of us to get on with our lives."

This is why directors shouldn't act in their own movies: there's nobody around who can tell them when when they're making an ass of themselves.

Czech Republic: How Zlin kept its groove

During my recent trip to Central Europe, I was able to revisit Zlin, the "model city" created in the early 20th century by the self-made Czechoslovak shoe tycoon, Tomas Bata. The provincial town in Czech Moravia is something of a pilgrimage site for enthusiasts of prewar industrial design, as Bata built nearly the entire place from scratch via a central, standardized plan. Along the way he created the world's largest shoe company, and exported the model just about everywhere else.

As you can read in my story now up over at The Christian Science Monitor, his legacy lived on in the Zlin region even during the Communist Era and many credit his (self-aggrandizing) social engineering with the city's relative prosperity and entrepreneurial spirit. (New to me was the tale of a Bata-inspired collective farm that managed to conduct a surprisingly capitalistic operation in the midst of the dour Brezhnev-era Warsaw Pact.) And his brother's famous office-in-an-elevator is still there, restored along with the Bata skyscraper to its 1930s glory.

Photo (c) 2010 Colin Woodard. All rights reserved.

Austria's banking worries

I was in Austria recently in connection with a series of stories on how the Great Recession is playing out in East-Central Europe. There many countries had only just emerged from their post-Communist recession when they got whacked hard by an uber-Capitalist one.

One of the casualties has been Austria, whose banks loaned heavily to the region during the go-go years, so much in fact that many experts say the country is vulnerable to a Greek-style meltdown. Read my piece on this topic in the Christian Science Monitor to find out more.

One thing to be aware of: reporters generally don't write the headlines and subheads that go with their story, and the ones the Monitor wrote for this piece don't accurately reflect the article. A better headline would have been "Austria fears wave of bad banks loans tied to Eastern Europe" and the subhead should have focused on the Hypo bank failure (in December) rather than the Austrian state's massive bank rescue (more than a year ago.)

Memo to journalists: always ask to see headlines and captions beforehand.

Has Eastern Europe's crisis peaked?

My old stomping ground in (what we children of the Cold War called) Eastern Europe has been hard hit by the Great Recession. So has the region's crisis peaked? That's the topic of my first piece from my recent trip to the region, which posted at Global Post today.

The story is for the Post's Passport section, which means they'd like you to subscribe, but it's well worth the bother. Remember all those newspapers that cut their foreign bureaus? A lot of their veteran writers file copy for Global Post these days.

More from Europe coming up....

In Prague

I'm currently on assignment in the Czech Republic (and, soon, neighboring countries), where they're still recovering from a weekend of blizzards.

As a Mainer, it's a little difficult to see what the fuss is all about: they received about a foot of fresh snow on top of what looks to have been a base of less than an inch. But two days after the snow stopped, trains are running late, stores are closed, and streets remain slick and uncleared. (Are winters usually very mild in Bohemia and Moravia? I thought they played hockey here.) It is quite beautiful, and I've enjoyed the atmosphere immensely, even if its hard to get around.

1989-2009: Romania's Revolution lifts off (as do I)

Twenty years ago this morning, I was being interrogated by Vienna airport security, along with just about everyone else intending to fly to New York with TWA.

I was grilled by a hawk eyed Austrian agent with a cold demeanor and a Mitteleuropean's clipboard. My answers seemed to annoy him. Where are you traveling from? (Hungary.) How long were you there? (Four months.) Where else did you go? (the Romanian Socialist Republic, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, twice to the Polish People's Republic, Yugoslavia three times.) What were you doing there? (Exchange student, Karl Marx University of Economics.) You entered Austria yesterday, where did you spend the night? (Sleeping on an airport ticket counter.) Why? (I can't afford your hotels.) Are you carrying any weapons? (No.) Are you sure? (Yes.) And so on. Vienna had been the site of a horrific terrorist attack four years earlier engineered by Abu Nidal, that decade's stand in for Osmama bin Laden. They weren't taking any chances.

While riding out to my aircraft in one of those giant people movers, I saw my first glimpses of the Romanian Revolution on a wall-mounted television. There was footage of protesters seizing control of Timisoara and talk of security forces mowing down thousands in mass graves. It had apparently been going on for two days, but I'd again been traveling on long-distance trains and this was the first I'd heard of it. I was shocked. I'd been in Ceausescu's Romania two months earlier and had come away with the sense that there was no chance of a popular uprising: the people were terrified, cold, and hungry, the security forces aggressive, heavily armed, and omnipresent. I'd expected Romania to hold out, North Korea-style, until their mad dictator succumbed to age or disease.

At home in Maine, I watched the revolution unfold on television. The events raised some provocative questions, particularly after a group of once-powerful Ceausescu regime apparatchiks seized control of the government. I would return to Romania that summer in search of answers, stumbling into a journalism career along the way. As in a bad mystery novel (or an X-Files episode), I only turned up more questions (along with a close call with a pack of government-guided miners brought into Bucharest to put down a new wave of protesters.)

Twenty years later, scholars remain divided on whether we yet know all the answers about what happened in Romania in December 1989, the subject of my feature that posted this morning over at Global Post.


For more on the 1989-2009 series -- including the opening of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, and visits to Ceausescu's Romania, late Communist Poland and inflation-plagued Yugoslavia -- click here.

1989-2009: A Czech town survives two utopias

The Czech city of Zlin has had a strange century.

One hundred years ago it was a village of less than 4000, seventeen years later, a centrally-planned industrial utopia of 45,000, the brain child of a local cobbler who would build the world's largest footwear company. Ten years, a world war, and a Soviet "liberation" later, it found itself part of another centrally-planned vision, this time guided by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin rather than a self-made industrial tycoon. In 1989 that second utopia collapsed, of course, and by the beginning of the 21st century the shoe industry that had built the city was gone too.

So how has Zlin weathered it all? Very nicely, thank you, not least because its peculiar past. Passport members can read all about it in my feature now posted at Global Post.

Scholars of the industrialist Tomas Bata will be interested to know that elements of his vision for a centrally-planned garden city were co-opted by the Communist regime, which also pressed Bata Company technocrats into service, creating the concrete panel buildings that ring many Czech and Slovak cities today.

1989-2009: Witnessing the Velvet Revolution

Twenty years ago yesterday, I stepped off an overnight train from Poland at Prague's Hlavni nadrazi at 6 am. Sixteen hours later I boarded another overnight train to Budapest. (I was in Czechoslovakia on a 24-hour transit visa.) It was one of the most vivid days of my life.

On December 9, 1989, Prague had entered the ecstatic final phase of Velvet Revolution, which had begun with a student protest on November 17th and escalated into million-man marches ten days later. The Communist regime was frenetically backpedaling. They'd already repealed laws guaranteeing the Party a role in the nation's political life and were about to announce a new coalition government. As it turned out, December 9 would be the last full day of Communist rule. President Gustav Husak announced he would resign the next day, when a new government would be sworn with a non-Communist majority. Dissident poet Vaclav Havel was widely expected to be the next president.

But at 6:30 in the morning, the streets of central Prague were completely deserted. My companions and I walked to Old Town Square before dawn. It was a surreal scene. There wasn't a soul there, but there had obviously been many thousands only a few hours earlier. "It looked like a neutron bomb had gone off," I scribbled in my journal hours later. "There were no people to be seen, but someone had left behind an entire encampment: guitars, food, coffee pots, chairs, jackets, pastries and hundreds of still-lit candles." The famous statue of Reformation martyr Jan Hus had been turned into a candle-lit shrine covered in Czechoslovak flags, portraits of Alexander Dubcek, assorted printed announcements, and photographs of demonstrators being beaten by police. Seemingly every building in central Prague was adorned with dozens of national flags, which hung from nearly every window.
After sunrise, people began emerging from their homes, nearly every one wearing a Czechoslovak ribbon on their jacket in a show of support for the Revolution. There were many signs declaring "Havel to the Castle!" (He would be there soon enough, seated in the Presidential office there.) Demonstrators returned to their chairs and guitars to begin another day of Velvety goodness.

Slowly the streets became busier, although heavy snowflakes began gently falling in mid-morning, giving the already gorgeous city a magical quality, as if everything were under a goodly spell. We spent the next few hours seeing the sites -- it was the first time in Prague for all of us -- and by the time we got back to the Vaclavskie Namesti (Prague's half mile-long central square), it was packed with hundreds of thousands of jubilant demonstrators. There were cheers and chants, a lot of waving of flags and flashing of the V for Victory hand sign. New to the country and not understanding Czech, it was difficult to figure out exactly what was going on. I later learned I had taken part in a public celebration of Husak's resignation.

By the time our train reached the Hungarian border we were several hours over our visa, but the Czechoslovak guards seemed caught up in the spirit of '89 and didn't make a big deal out of it. (They even dispensed with the usual ritual of making us prove we still had all of our cameras, Walkmans, and other popular western gadgets with us, on the theory that every American was desperate to sell theirs on the black market.) At 8 am we were back in Budapest, reading western and Hungarian news accounts make sense of what we'd seen the day before.


For more on the 1989-2009 series -- including the opening of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and visits to Ceausescu's Romania, late Communist Poland and inflation-plagued Yugoslavia -- click here.

1989-2009: Poland on $10 a day

Twenty years ago today I was in Poland for the second time, taking advantage of the end of classes at my exchange program to take a trip lasting more than three days. I'd been to Krakow earlier in the fall and, like so many other visitors, was captivated by city's medieval charms, the intensity of its Catholicism, and the J.R.R. Tolkien-like flavor of Wawel castle, where Poland's kinds and queens rest in elaborate tombs.

I'd been to Auschwitz on my previous visit, but on this one I had time to wander Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, which was then literally in ruins. For reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me, the entire neighborhood appeared to have been left exactly as it was in 1945: blocks of gutted, bombed-out, or abandoned buildings whose occupants had been sent to the Auschwitz's ovens when the Nazis liquidated neighborhood. I returned a few years later to report on the neighborhood's rebirth for the Christian Science Monitor; Schindler's List had just come out and there were already bus tours for the tourists. I gather the place is thriving today.

The Nowa Huta steelworks -- Stalin's questionable gift to the Polish people -- were still working full tilt in those days, smothering Krakow in toxic pollutants. Friends told me not to go out at night because that's when the most dangerous emissions took place; pregnant women were allegedly told to leave the city until after birth. My landlady advised me not to brush my teeth with the tap water as it was known to corrode metal. Rain was so acidic it was melting away the statutes and gargoyles adorning the city's buildings. If you wanted to see what the U.S. would have been like without the Clean Air Act, Communist Eastern Europe provided a lot of sobering scenes.

As a penniless student, Poland had an additional attraction in those days. Dollars could be exchanged for an absurd quantity of Polish zloty, giving one the spending power of a millionaire, so long as what you were buying was priced in zloty. Hotels required hard currency, but if you could rent a bed in someone's home, everything else might as well have been free. I spent my 21st birthday with four friends at Krakow's most famous restaurant, Wierzynek. I had Chateaubriand, sauteed mushrooms, beetroot soup, pastries, imported Czech beer, ice cream and tea, was served by a wait staff of four, and paid a bill for the equivalent of $2.50, tip included. (We ate there three more times that week.) And while I stocked up on Christmas gifts and albums (vinyl and cassettes in those days), there were some things you just couldn't buy: toilet paper, fresh fruits, meat at the butcher's. When these things appeared, people stood in long lines to get them, and horded huge stashes. Every apartment I saw had an entire closet filled with toilet paper rolls.

Aside from the restaurant, we were hardly splurging, but rather living like adult travelers on a budget. But I calculated that I was spending a typical Poles' monthly wage every two to three days. A Polish friend with a good sense of irony related his favorite line from Trading Places. Eddie Murphy has just been given a $5 bill by Dan Aykroyd and he says "Gee, Thanks. Now I can go to the cinema....alone." At the time, $5 represented several days' wages in Poland.

On my last day in Poland, my travelling companions and I went out to Nowa Huta, where Stalin had built a centrally-planned city around the enormous steel works. There was a huge statue of Lenin in the middle of the suburban town. Students had tried to attack it the previous night and had been driven away by police with water cannons. Lenin was flecked with paint stains and broken bottles were strewn at his enormous feet. The square was covered in ice from the water cannons.

We were to leave Poland on December 8, but we weren't going straight back to Hungary. Instead, we planned to get the most out of our 24-hour Czechoslovak transit visas. There was a revolution underway in Prague, and we would see it happen.


For more on the 1989-2009 series -- including the opening of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and visits to Ceausescu's Romania and inflation-plagued Yugoslavia -- click here.