Poland had Lech Walesa Czechoslovakia Václav Havel.

Questions about postwar Europe's juridical order go beyond the former Czechoslovakia.

In July 1992, Slovak lawmakers blocked his reelection as Czechoslovak president.

Shenyang Steam Locomotive Museum, with 16 steam engines from America, Japan, Russia, Belgium, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and China.

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country s pre World War II past.

The air of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was electric with the imported sounds of the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa s Mothers of Invention.

An aluminum factory in Czechoslovakia was filled with carcinogenic smoke and dust, and four out of five workers came down with cancer.

The peaceful Velvet Revolution in 1989 saw the dissolution of Czechoslovakia as a communist state, forming modern day Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

After Havel's election as president, first of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic, Reed visited him in Prague.

In the absence of a credible democratic left party, Czech center right politicians had the upper hand, and were relatively united, until 1997.

If so, the dénouement came on December 29, the day Vaclav Havel became a free Czechoslovakia s new president.

No strong social democratic party in Czechoslovakia could emerge from the rigid Czechoslovak Communist Party.

International basketball The International Basketball Federation was formed in 1932 by eight founding nations Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland.

Where central planning was alive, as in Czechoslovakia, it may have made it more difficult to break the mold of loss making state enterprises. In largely agricultural China, huge state industrial enterprises had been less important, so their reform could have been postponed, and reliance could be placed on starting afresh.

But the Soviets attractiveness as liberators was destroyed by the way they later used their hard power against Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Where central planning was alive, as in Czechoslovakia, it may have made it more difficult to break the mold of loss making state enterprises.

Until 1989, only five state travel agencies were allowed in the former Czechoslovakia Čedok, Sporturist, CKM, Rekrea, and Autoturist.

Trung s parents came to Slovakia when it was still part of Czechoslovakia, their journey not so different from others.

The failed revolutions in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 foreshadowed the eventual failure of the Soviet empire in 1989.

In former Czechoslovakia, as the first country in both Central and Eastern Europe, IBM founded its branch in 1932.

The Visegrad initiative worked to some extent, though it was temporarily paralyzed by the disintegration of Czechoslovakia just over a decade ago.

Speedy privatization, for example, especially the mass voucher schemes in Czechoslovakia, Russia, and many other former Soviet countries, did not work.

A great paradox of the socialistic period was that citizens of the socialist block (i.e. Czechoslovaks too) were not allowed free individual travel within the socialist countries.

Nor would internal reforms work, because the Soviets would intervene to save the system, as they did in 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

Moreover, while the Munich Agreement cynically blessed Hitler s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, it was a public document that meant what it said.

There is little historical precedent for the peaceful breakup of a state, with an exception like Czechoslovakia s consensual split in 1993 occurring in unique circumstances.

On the contrary, there are lessons to be learned from the demise of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and even perhaps especially Czechoslovakia, which negotiated its break up without violence.

NEW YORK Seventy years ago this month in Munich, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, signed a document that allowed Germany to grab a large chunk of Czechoslovakia.

The 1993 division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia the famed velvet divorce imposed no significant or lasting costs on either successor state.

Ukrainians note that Russia justified its invasion of Georgia, as the Nazis justified their dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, as being necessary to protect a minority to whom they had just given citizenship.

Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the Czechoslovak communists and the symbol of the Prague Spring, personified hope for democratic evolution, real pluralism, and a peaceful way to a state governed by law and respectful of human rights.

Tomas G. Masaryk, Czechoslovakia s first president after its establishment in 1918, used to say that his country was a democracy, but so far, without democrats.

When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, it undercut the soft power that it had enjoyed in Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

It reminds me of the jingle of keys that rang out on Prague s Wenceslas Square and later around the rest of what was then Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1989.

If a Czechoslovak citizen wanted to travel, as an individual, to, for example, the Soviet Union or Poland, an invitation letter from the country was necessary otherwise, individual travel was impossible.

Thousands of his countrymen had written letters petitioning for his release, at a time when declaring solidarity with Czechoslovakia s most famous dissident was a clear and dangerous act of civil disobedience.

The Soviet Union had a great deal of soft power in the years after World War II, but destroyed it by the way the Kremlin used its hard power against Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

PRAGUE The fifteenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on November 17, 1989, which brought an end to 41 years of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, is an opportunity to ponder the meaning of moral behavior and free action.

Political developments in Czechoslovakia during the last 20 years of communism set the Czech Republic and Slovakia apart from both Poland and Hungary.

It was a network made up of the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia (led by Josip Broz Tito, it was expelled in June 1948).

Ethnocentricism, xenophobia, and anti Semitism flourished, together with corruption, nepotism, hypocrisy, and opportunism. The post communist turmoil led to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Czechoslovakia, fueled Yugoslavia s wars and ethnic atrocities, and brought forth authoritarian rule and imperial revanchism in Russia.

But very different choices for better and for worse were made in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, in the Baltic states, across the former Soviet Union, in Central Asia, and in East Germany.

However encouraging, Czechoslovakia s peaceful velvet divorce into two states has not been the norm in Europe or elsewhere.

The post communist turmoil led to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Czechoslovakia, fueled Yugoslavia s wars and ethnic atrocities, and brought forth authoritarian rule and imperial revanchism in Russia.

Moreover, Czechoslovakia s fearsome secret police, who had every interest in silencing or compromising the famous dissident writer, never used the incident to blackmail or expose him.