A week in Czechoslovakia July 1989

This piece was first published in Planning 21 July 1989 and is reproduced by kind permission of Haymarket Publications. Because it ran over 2 pages it has to be reproduced here as two separate items

The „Diary“ tells of a week spent in meetings with planners in what was then Czechoslovakia. It was written just a few months before the Velvet Revolution in November 1989 which swept away the communist regime. The diary provides a first hand account of the tribulations of day to day life at the time which undermined the regime. It also shows how planners were working in the strange period of reform under perestroika led by Gorbachov and pressed on a reluctant Czechoslovak administration.