This book aims to introduce the reader to all aspects of the development of corruption in post-revolutionary Czech Republic and Slovakia, i.e. after 1989. “And why after the Velvet Revolution?” the reader might logically ask. The answer is pragmatic. Each stage of history, and this is doubly true for the history of corruption, is quite characteristic. If we wanted to write a history of corruption in the First Republic, we would have to somehow divide this period as well, naming the players, the influences of the previous period, such as the relationship to public property under the Habsburg Empire, the social phenomena in the form of the Great Depression at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, or – for example, in the chapter on the second half of the 1930s – to jump to the issue of the pernicious Sudeten German erosive influences on the legal state of the Czechoslovak Republic. This publication has no such ambition.
However, the above temporal demarcation to the post-revolutionary period does not mean that the period of the history of corruption after the Velvet Revolution is separable from the influences of the previous era of one party’s rule or even the influences of earlier ones. The opposite is true. Without the individual factors that developed in the preceding decades, the current system of corruption linkages would not have emerged. Not that a system of corruption would not have emerged at all, but it would have taken a very different course.
This chapter can therefore be imagined as a kind of corruption cookbook. We will explain what disgusting ingredients were already in the corruption pot at the end of 1989, where these ingredients of the corruption cocktail came from, and what properties these ingredients have. After all, even individual factors are not necessarily inherently bad. If we recall Capek’s legendary culinary feat from The Dog and the Cat, neither the ingredients in this cake – sweet or sour – are harmful. However, when cheesecake, cocoa, cabbage, and candy with vinegar all get together in one dish, the result is an indigestible concoction that the evil dog who devoured it would snarl under the bush for weeks. The consumer in our case is the state and the taxpayer, who has been unable to digest the mixture of ‘goodies’ for over thirty years.
The following chapters are therefore intended to make clear what was in that container after November. The following chapters are then intended to explain chronologically what was gradually added to the pot of corruption, or what flavours gradually disappeared and why.
