Ota Šik, (September 11 1919-August 22 2004), was a Czech economist and politician. He was the man behind the revolutionary New Economic Model and was a key figure in the Prague Spring.

Early years

Sik was born in the Bohemian industrial town of Plzen shortly after Czechoslovakia was carved from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire following World War I. Before the Second World War Sik studied Art at Charles University of Prague, and studied politics after the war.

Following the German annexation of the Sudetenland, and the partition of the whole nation in March 1939, Sik joined the Czech Resistance movement. However, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. At Mauthausen Sik's fellow inmates included Antonin Novotny, the future president of Czechoslovakia who was succeded by the leader of the Prague Spring Alexander Dubcek, and Dubcek's father, Stefan.

Political career

The connections that Sik made at Mauthausen proved useful in his post-war political career. In the early 1960s he attempted to persuade the harline president, Novotny, into loosening his rigid adherence to central planning, which had been crippling the Czech economy. Sik, who by this point was an economics professor and member of the Communist party, wanted to bring market elements into central planning, to relax price controls and to promote private enterprise in the hope of kick-starting the stagnant economic climate. It was around this point that Sik was elected to the party's central committee and was made head of the economics institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences .

Sik's reforms were launched in 1967, before Dubcek came to power, bet were heavily watered down by party apparatchiks who worried about losing control of the factories. The only palpable, and certainly the most popular, result of the reforms was the appearance of private taxis on the streets of Prague. In December 1967, at a party meeting that was a precursor to Dubcek's coup a month later, Sik publicly denounced Novotny's regime. He demanded a fundamental change to the Communist system and a new leadership, two decades before Mikhail Gorbachev he announced that economic reform could not be separated from fundamental political change. By this point Czechoslovakia had the lowest living standards in the Soviet bloc, whereas previously it had been the economic backbone of the Habsburg empire.

Following Dubcek's successful coup, Sik was made a deputy prime minister in April 1968 and he was the architect of the economics section of Dubcek's action programme. Sik claimed that if his policies were followed then Czechoslovakia would be on an economic par with neighbouring Austria within four years. However these plans were never followed out after the Prague Spring was brutally ended in August of the same year by the tanks of the Red army.

After the Prague Spring

When the tanks rolled into Prague Sik was on holiday in Yugoslavia, with the threat of arrest looming he never returned to his homeland. Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Communist Party's propaganda machine singled Sik out for particular attention. In August 1968 Tass issued a press release calling him an agent of U.S. imperialism and "one of the most odious figures of the rightwing revisionists".

Sik left Yugoslavia in October 1968 and moved to Switzerland. He became an economic professor at the University of St. Gallen in 1970, he held the post until he retired in 1990. Even after the velvet revolution Sik never returned to the Czech Republic, he became a Swiss citizen and lived there until his death.