Success Quote by Vaclav Klaus

Klaus’s line is a bid to redraw the moral map of late-communist Czechoslovakia: it argues that reformers inside the system and dissidents outside it weren’t rivals but parallel forces, converging on the same destination. The key word is “brinkmanship,” a term borrowed from Cold War hardball. It casts his own maneuvering with “party economic bosses” as calculated risk, not quiet complicity: he’s claiming courage without claiming martyrdom. That’s the tightrope many technocrats walked as the regime softened but still punished dissent.

The sentence also performs a delicate political fusion. By pairing “people like me” with “open dissidents who were being arrested,” Klaus acknowledges the asymmetry of danger while refusing to let that asymmetry become a hierarchy of legitimacy. He wants credit for helping crack the system from within, without ceding the revolutionary narrative to those who paid the higher price. It’s a unifying gesture, but also a strategic one: in post-1989 politics, who gets to say “we made the change” determines who gets to shape what the change becomes.

The subtext is about ownership of the transition. Klaus, associated with rapid market reforms, is staking a claim that economic liberalization wasn’t an opportunistic pivot after the fact; it was part of the same anti-regime arc as street-level dissent. Framed this way, later battles over privatization and austerity can be sold as the continuation of a shared struggle, not a departure from it.