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Šik, Ota (1919-2004)
Czech economist and politician. He was the man behind the 1968 economic liberalization plan and was one of the key figures in the Prague Spring.
Šik was born in the industrial town of Plzeň, Czechoslovakia. Before the Second World War Šik studied Art at Charles University of Prague, and studied politics after the war.
Following the German annexation of the Sudetenland, and the partition of the whole nation in March 1939, Šik joined the Czech Resistance movement. However, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. At Mauthausen Šik’s fellow inmates included Antonín Novotný, the future president of Czechoslovakia who was succeded by the leader of the Prague Spring Alexander Dubček, and Dubcek’s father, Stefan.
The connections that Šik made at Mauthausen proved useful in his post-war political career. In the early 1960s he attempted to persuade the harline president, Novotný, into loosening his rigid adherence to central planning, which had been crippling the economy. Šik, who by this point was an economics professor and member of the Communist party, wanted to bring market elements into central planning, to relax price controls and to promote private enterprise in the hope of kick-starting the stagnant economic climate. It was around this point that Šik was elected to the party’s central committee and was made head of the economics institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Šik’s reforms were launched in 1967, before Dubček came to power, bet were heavily watered down by party apparatchiks who worried about losing control of the factories. The only palpable, and certainly the most popular, result of the reforms was the appearance of private taxis on the streets of Prague. In December 1967, at a party meeting that was a precursor to Dubček’s coup a month later, Šik publicly denounced Novotný’s regime. He demanded a fundamental change to the Communist system and a new leadership, two decades before Mikhail Gorbachev he announced that economic reform could not be separated from fundamental political change. By this point Czechoslovakia had the lowest living standards in the Soviet bloc, whereas previously it had been the economic backbone of the Habsburg empire.
Following Dubček’s successful coup, Šik was made a deputy prime minister in April 1968 and he was the architect of the economics section of Dubček’s action programme. Šik claimed that if his policies were followed then Czechoslovakia would be on an economic par with neighbouring Austria within four years. However these plans were never followed out after the Prague Spring was brutally ended in August of the same year by the tanks of the Red army.
When the tanks rolled into Prague Šik was on holiday in Yugoslavia, with the threat of arrest looming he never returned to his homeland. Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Communist Party’s propaganda machine singled Šik out for particular attention. In August 1968 TASS issued a press release calling him an agent of U.S. imperialism and “one of the most odious figures of the right-wing revisionists.”
Šik left Yugoslavia in October 1968 and moved to Switzerland. He became an economic professor at the University of St. Gallen in 1970, he held the post until he retired in 1990. Even after the Velvet Revolution Šik never returned to the Czech Republic, he became a Swiss citizen and lived there until his death.
See Ota Šik Archive.
Sinclair, Upton (1878-1968 )
American socialist, novelist, essayist, playwright, and short story writers. His most famous books is The Jungle (1906), which brought about a government investigation of the meatpacking plants of Chicago, and change in the food laws.
Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a liquor salesman and drank himself to death; his mother came from a relatively wealthy family. When Sinclair was ten, the family moved to New York, and he started to write dime novels at the age of 15. In 1897 he enrolled Columbia University, while producing one poorly paid novelette per week.
By 1904 Sinclair was moving toward a realistic fiction. He read Socialist classics and became a regular reader of the Appeal to Reason, a socialist-populist weekly. He was never a Communist, but he was often portrayed as a violent revolutionary. In 1934 he resigned from the Socialist Party.
He gained fame in 1906 with The Jungle, a report on the dirty conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. Jurgis Rudkus, the protagonist, is a young Lithuanian immigrant. He arrives in America dreaming of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. Jurgis finds work from the flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards. First he likes his work, and is astonished when his comrades hate it. Gradually his optimistic world vision fade in the hopeless “wage-slavery” and in the chaos of urban life, and he becomes a criminal, and then a Socialist.
The book won Sinclair fame and fortune, and led to the implementation of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. It had the deepest social impact since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. President Theodore Roosevelt received 100 letters a day demanding reforms in the meat industry and Sinclair was called to the White House. The proceeds of the book enabled Sinclair to establish and support the socialist commune Helicon Home Colony in New Jersey.
See The Jungle.