Prague Adjusts to High Price of Freedom

Sober suits and briefcases fill the charming city where witty people in jeans used to drink beer and chat for hours to relieve the drabness of the Communist years.

Crime is surging, and with it the market for handguns.

Huge billboards advertise investment funds and the latest daily newspaper, which espouses the free-market politics of Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus.

Ads for the newspaper show a gray-suited businessman peering into a copy over half-glasses, looking as if he belongs in Frankfurt, not Prague.

For 41 years, Praguers wanted to be part of the West. Some are enchanted now that it’s happened, but many others struggle to avoid sinking into what President Vaclav Havel calls “a lava of post-communist surprises.”

In the playwright president’s freewheeling Castle headquarters, aides mutter few regrets that the boss may be out of power by midsummer.

Then, they say, they will be able to quit government and get on with making money, “like everybody else.”

Gone are the wacky days when Havel received rock star Frank Zappa, rode a child’s scooter through the Castle corridors and grooved at a private concert by Lou Reed, the New York balladeer.

Now, politicians are preoccupied with the crimes, real or imagined, of alleged agents of the Communist past and with the depressing failure to solve a dispute between Czechs and Slovaks that could tear the country apart

“The Czech and Slovak problem paralyzes the whole of Czechoslovakia,” said Zuzana Blueh, deputy head of CSTK, the national news agency.

Everything “is in a state of suspension,” she said, because the national dispute overshadows economic and other debate, creating a “downward spiral where people are losing any kind of horizons.”

Depression is tangible in the countryside and the dour provincial towns. That is where most Czechs and Slovaks live, far from the gleaming stores and tourist boom that are transforming central Prague.

Out there, the news is not that the old nobility flocked to a ritzy Opera Ball given by Ivana Trump in the capital’s Smetana Theater. It is that real income fell 28% last year and unemployment reached 6% nationally, double that number in Slovakia.

Murders increased from 185 in 1989 to 322 last year. Burglary, robbery, car theft and rape soar because of poverty and the end of totalitarian control. It is almost modish to own a gun.

“Most people buy the gun not for their defense, but for the fun of having it,” said Jarmila, 37, an artists’ manager whose boyfriend bought one last year and leaves her with the worry of minding it when he is away on business trips.

Jarmila said boys at her 15-year-old daughter’s Prague school talk a lot about their fathers’ guns.

The “Wild East” is kind to some, notably the thousands of young Americans and other Westerners here for adventure and fortyish members of the once-repressed arts scene who can learn how to make money.

Soviet tanks drove the zest underground in 1968, but the people of Prague preserved the spirit of those times.

When combined with a ‘60s nostalgia craze in the West, it makes some of Prague’s beautiful people, and their hangouts, far richer in undefinable “cool” than their Viennese neighbors.

Humor abounds, as always in Prague, catching the spirit of a confused time.

“Yes, this used to be a cabaret,” a maitre d’ informed a customer in a cartoon on Page 1 of the daily Lidove Noviny. “Now, it’s a state theater of the absurd.”