Thatcher and Czech privatization

Margaret Thatcher's death yesterday came at the tail end of a new debate in the CR on whether Czech privatization was intentionally designed to make a relatively few people stinking rich. Jan Stráský floated the idea in HN, and Václav Klaus, Dušan Tříska, Karel Dyba and others then pooh-poohed it. Interestingly, the discussion began just as patriotic Russian writer Alexander Prokhanov was declaring on Russian state TV that perestroika was a CIA special op that included the passage of three laws that brought chaos to the Soviet economy and destroyed all symbols and constants of the nation. It's often said that the CR is just a smaller, lower-octane version of Russia. When Czech privatizers such as Tříska say they consulted everything with Thatcher's people, it's a clever way to hide the fact that Czech privatization should be seen much more in the Russian context than through the Thatcher frame of reference.