Czechoslovakia seen by a Romanian

A former Romanian diplomat to Prague remembers his experience of Czech life during his stays there.

Steliu Lambru, 28.04.2025, 14:00

Although they are relatively close geographically, Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks have a fairly short official history. After 1918, Romania and Czechoslovakia became closer, building solid friendly relations in a relatively short period of time.

In 1949, Nicolae Fotino was appointed first secretary, that is, number two at the Romanian embassy in Prague. He had been there before, as a student, when he attended the great World Student Congress of 1945. In a 1995 interview with the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, Fotino recalled that during his first visit he wanted to find out more about the daily life of people in Czechoslovakia:

“I think the first place I went to in Prague to try to find out more about how people there lived was to a butchers’ school. I was able to see, from the moment the meat arrived, everything that happened to it: how it arrived at the store, was cut into different pieces, weighed, packaged and sold, and, at the same time, I was present at all the discussions that can exist between the buyer and the customer. How you were advised what you could buy, what was better to buy, which I confess surprised me to see all this manner and attention that was given to the guilds and their way of behaving, in general.”

Foreigners’ perceptions of a place are formed when they live among locals or use their most common everyday goods. Nicolae Fotino found in Czechoslovakia quality consumer goods that had become famous beyond the country’s borders:

“The second thing that amazed me was the Prague Fair, which was absolutely famous. There I found that Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic in particular, is a huge economic force. Apart from Skoda, which was a huge factory and which made everything from tanks, weapons, heavy trucks to these cars that we all drove back then, I saw a huge, very diversified light industry. There were fabrics and clothing made to the taste of Americans, to the taste of Asians, to the taste of Russians. I knew in Bucharest that there was a big store, Czechoslovakia, where you went if you wanted to dress well. But there, when I saw that huge variety, it seemed formidable to me. I saw the shoes and the Bata factory, one of the largest shoe factories in the world. When I went to the Bata factories, I couldn’t believe how much was produced for Latin America. There was also the food industry, starting with Pilsen beer, Prague ham, which the whole world knew, chocolate, everything you want. There was famous porcelain and Bohemian crystal, exceptional things.”

Things changed, however, by the time Nicolae Fotino went back to Czechoslovakia:

“I also experienced a terrible atmosphere in Czechoslovakia, when this whole thing fell apart. When the communist government came to power in 1948, the situation changed at the request of the Soviets. Czechoslovakia was supposed to become a force in heavy industry, in the weapons industry. And then, everyone was focused on heavy industry that was supposed to work for the Soviet Union, for the socialist bloc in general. I saw this when I travelled to a small town in the Czech Republic called Nahod, where about three or four thousand inhabitants worked at a weaving factory. It was an old factory, in the center of this town there is a castle, in that castle there was a nobleman who owned this factory and everyone worked for him. And, at the end of my visit to the weaving factory, I remember a worker telling me with tears in her eyes that the factory was being closed: ‘And where are we going to go? Because that’s what we know how to do. Are we going to make tanks?’”

Small nations have always been caught up between two empires, the Romanian one even between three, the Ottoman, the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian. The Czechoslovak nation was caught between the German and the Russian empires and it believed that sympathy for the Russians would shelter it from the humiliations suffered from the Germans. Nicolae Fotino:

“At the time sentiments were favourable towards the Russians. They loved the Russians. I think this was the country where sympathy for the Soviet Union was very great and very strong. This is because the Russians played a fairly large role in winning the war against Germany. Their hatred, on the other hand, against the Germans was terrible. During the period when I was still a student there, as a participant in the organisation of the congress, I was told: ‘if you know German it is preferable not to speak it. Here maybe, with us you can, but on the street you should not speak German. Yesterday, they threw some people who were speaking German out of the tram.’ There was a terrible hatred towards the Germans, and great enthusiasm towards the Russians.”

A Romanian’s perception of Czechoslovakian society on the border between two worlds, the one before and the one after 1945, is subjective, like any perception, but it does tell us something of the past.