Lady Respekt of the Karlín District

As paradoxical as it might sound, Josef Stalin would likely be a satisfied reader of Respekt. True, the magazine sees nefarious Russians behind every bush at the Castle and in Průhonice, and it certainly doesn't rate the Stalin reign highly, but in some ways it promotes a Stalinist view of the world. He would delight in Respekt's contribution to the "decadence" of the West through its anti-colonialism, its wide-open immigration agenda, its general liberalism and its tacit approval of criminal capitalism. Yet many of Respekt's loyal readers think it went too far by revealing the size of the ransom paid for two Czech women abducted in Pakistan. The outrage has been just as exaggerated as the adulation was before. It's almost like the article "Muddle instead of Music" in Pravda on Jan. 28, 1936. It condemned Shostakovich's popular opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" for "tickling the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music." Respekt can take comfort in knowing that unlike Lady Macbeth, it won't have to wait 30 years to return to the domestic stage.