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I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the true horrible reality of Communist Russia.
The average married worker had to make do with less than half as much bread and flour and less than two-thirds as much sugar as his counterpart in St Petersburg in the early 20th century. People were short of fat, milk and fruit. Meat and fish consumption in the 1930s was five times less than at the turn of the 20th century. Well, the Russians were better off under the Tsar than under Stalin.
In Penza, thousands of villagers who have travelled 200 kilometres to buy bread sleep outside shops. 'We queue for bread from midnight, and even if you are starving, they give you a kilo loaf at most,' wrote a woman from a collective farm in Yaroslavl to her husband. Yes, in the supposed workers' paradise of the USSR, there were queues for hours for this basic foodstuff, and it was not even certain that people would get it. They often ended up starving and dying. And, of course, other goods were not available either, such as milk, butter, vegetables, not to mention meat. Even fish in areas with developed fishing couldn't be bought, because somehow they weren't. Even such common things as salt, soap and matches were missing from the shops. In the early 1930s, even vodka was impossible to find. Clothes, shoes and other consumer goods were also hard to find. In the factory canteens, workers queued not only for food, but also for cutlery, because there was a critical shortage of that too.
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Venezuela’s planned vote over territory dispute leaves Guyana residents on edge
SURAMA, Guyana (AP) — Congregants of an Anglican church in a sparsely populated rainforest village in Guyana gathered recently to bid on a bounty of bananas, squash and other produce during a community event. They sang hymns and rang a bell after each successful bid.
They offered grateful devotions typical of a harvest festival but also asked for peace for their community amid what they see as an existential threat. Their village, Surama, is part of Guyana’s Essequibo region — a territory larger than Greece and rich in oil and minerals that Venezuela claims as its own and whose future it intends to decide Sunday with a referendum. The practical and legal implications of the vote, which among other things calls for turning Essequibo into a Venezuelan state, remain unclear, but the referendum has left area residents on edge.
“We are praying, we are hoping and we are having faith that nothing negative will come,” said Loreen Allicock, who led the congregation during the harvest festival. “We want to continue living a peaceful life in this beautiful land of ours.”
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While I was being cleaned up in the psychiatric hospital that protected me from being arrested again, the Supreme Court met and rightly ruled as follows: "The judgment of the District Court for Prague 1 of July 3, 1962 is annulled for violation of the law, since the sentence that the President of the Republic, Antonín Novotný, is an ox cannot be considered a cultural activity."
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I found the book while sorting through my ever-growing library, as if it had been waiting for me. I read it again. It is so well written that you can read it "in one breath". Vladimir Škutina's style just won't let you go until you finish it. I met him only once, in Zurich on 8.7.1989 at a discussion with Pavel Kantorek, which he moderated (I recommend the audio recording of the discussion!). JŠ
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Page 70: Then I experienced another case in my neighbourhood. A mathematics professor who was spending his fourteenth year in prison. He was withdrawn, made friends with no one, and patiently carried out all orders, even those that were absolutely nonsensical. Once I was sitting next to him while stringing coral and the professor confessed to me that I looked an awful lot like his son. I knew that the professor didn't receive any letters and didn't write any letters. He was arrested for espionage and treason. He had served as an airman in the RAF in England during the war and was arrested just after the Forty-eighth and had not yet had his trial in 1962. Much later I learned that his son had been shot trying to cross the border illegally, his wife died of cancer in 1949 and his daughter committed suicide.
The professor was terrified of amnesty. He dreaded the thought of leaving the prison gates and returning to the people. He was afraid that he would have to go to the places where he had lived and from where he had been dragged away for no reason. He knew he would never be able to return to his mathematics...
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Pharmaceutical firm Pfizer sued Poland this month over its refusal to pay for vaccines the Polish government bought under a contract between the European Commission (EC) and Pfizer for 1.1 billion doses for member states.
The exact wording of the contract, including the price of the vaccines, is officially secret, but according to the Financial Times, the value of a single dose is said to be around €19.5. Given that Poland has not taken delivery of 60 million vaccines, the total amount recovered can be expected to be around €1.2 billion. The contract with Pfizer was signed by the EC in April 2021, with the support of EU member states. They have committed to buy 650 million doses from Pfizer in 2022 and 450 million doses in 2023. However, demand for vaccines has fallen sharply over the past year.
Central and Eastern European countries, except the Czech Republic, have asked the EC to amend the contract
In 2022, CEE governments began to argue that they had a large stock of vaccines. And if they buy more, they say they will have to destroy millions of doses as the guarantee expires. This has led to the shredding of millions of vaccines in this country too. According to our investigation, vaccines worth a total of CZK 11.6 billion have been purchased in the country. The largest share of these were vaccines from Pfizer. A large proportion of these vaccines were disposed of. More than 7 million doses, worth more than CZK 3.5 billion, had to be destroyed at taxpayers' expense. In the summer of 2022, a coalition of 10 countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) asked the EC to negotiate a contract modification with Pfizer. According to these countries, it was, among other things, "a waste of public funds that cannot be reasonably explained to the public". Contractual changes were agreed between the EC and Pfizer and the revised contract from May this year will allow countries to buy fewer vaccines but at a higher price per unit. Except for Poland, all nine countries have signed the revised contract.
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From the book ROBERT'S RULES OF ORDER - Attempts to publish this book in the Czech Republic lasted fifteen years. It was published by the Institute for Political and Economic Culture with the support of the VIA Foundation under the "CEE TRUST - Strengthening the Nonprofit Sector" program and the Embassy of the United States of America in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, we still lack the real elite that we have liquidated ourselves, and therefore the necessary strength to implement the ideas below. A job for generations with an uncertain end. JŠ
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I don't believe in own Czech way
I do not believe that the prevailing atmosphere of skepticism and small-mindedness needs to be overcome by patriotic pride. Indeed, there is nothing worse than false pride and the idea that a positive attitude towards the place and community in which we live is incompatible with a critical attitude towards oneself and one's fellow countrymen. False patriotism brings xenophobia, provincial self-centeredness and isolation from the outside world.
In other words, I belong to those unpatriotic people who believe that the main task of the Czech intelligentsia is not to seek its own Czech way, not to discover the discovered, but to humbly seek solutions that exist in developed societies. For I dare to distinguish between higher and lower civilizations, more advanced and more backward societies.
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