Activities and affiliations

Economy, finance and planning Czechoslovakia 1895–1958 → Died in exile

Postwar foreign trade minister who resigned in February 1948 and went back into exile

On 20 February 1948, Ripka joined non-Communist ministers in resigning amid a government crisis over police appointments. President Beneš accepted the resignations; after the Communist takeover, Ripka went into exile again.

A journalist turned National Socialist politician, he went to England in 1940 and became secretary of state in the foreign ministry of the London exile government. Returning in 1945, he became minister of foreign trade and sat in the Constituent Assembly from 1946 to 1948. One of the non-Communist ministers who resigned over the police purge in February 1948, he left the country again when the Communists took power. In exile he wrote on Czechoslovakia, Munich and the events of February 1948, and he died in London in January 1958.

Economy, finance and planning Czechoslovakia 1919–2004 → Died

Czechoslovak economist who designed a 'third way' between plan and market

At the December 1967 Central Committee plenum, Šik became the first to openly demand Antonín Novotný's resignation, declaring that economic reform was impossible without political change, two decades before Gorbachev.

A Czechoslovak economist and politician who was the architect of the Prague Spring's economic reforms. His 1964 book on socialist commodity relations outlined a New Economic Model combining planning with market mechanisms, and in December 1967 he publicly denounced the Novotný regime before the Central Committee, arguing that economic reform was impossible without political change. Appointed deputy premier in Dubček's 1968 cabinet, he was on holiday in Yugoslavia when Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and spent the rest of his life in Swiss exile, theorizing a 'third way' between capitalism and Soviet-style socialism.