Comrade Josef Skála from the Prague branch of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) gave two insightful talks this weekend, the first in Birmingham on Saturday evening, and the second in central London on Sunday.
In his talks to members of the CPGB-ML and the Stalin Society, Dr Skála recalled his youth in socialist Czechoslovakia and described the vast social and cultural progress that the Czech people made under socialism.
A huge growth in the Czech economy, a twelvefold increase in production in the years following the Nazi occupation, the building up of the Czech machine-tool industry and the fraternal assistance rendered by the Soviet Union in the post-war years were topics of interest and lively discussion.
It was notable, said Dr Skála that meat consumption in the Czech Republic has yet to return to the levels before the ‘velvet revolution’, and the GDP of the country took 15 years to recover to the levels it had reached before the counter-revolution.
Josef Skála joined the Czech communist party a few days after turning 18 in the fateful year of 1968, and his insights into the handling of the ‘Prague spring’ delivered in London will be made available on Proletarian TV soon.
In a long and distinguished political life, Dr Skála acted as the president of the International Union of Students, in which capacity he met Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi amongst other revolutionary leaders, as well as traitors such as Mikhail Gorbachev.
A well-read, multilingual worker-theoretician, he continues to write, teach and play an active role defending the honour of his homeland and the revolutionary teachings of Marxism Leninism.
