Tag Archives: Czech Republic

The coronavirus pandemic has continued to have an effect on numerous aspects of our lives. A large number of NGOs have also been affected by it.  A significant number of processes have gone online – seminars, conferences and presentations have been cancelled, postponed, or reformatted taking into account the new realities. A number of NGOs were practically forced to cease their work; others, on the contrary, successfully learned or developed new technological approaches and continued their activity in new formats.

Many NGOs are successfully overcoming technical difficulties and the pause in travel. Some of them are beginning to work with new topics – for example, human rights under pandemic conditions or the NGO’s digital transition. Changes in approaches to strategy, planning and communications are being discussed actively.  All this has yet to be comprehended in detail, so this study is intended to provide a preliminary overview of the current state and possible topics for future research.

More than 100 NGO representatives were interviewed in the process of this research both through surveys (a survey with 27 questions and more than 100 options for answers), as well as through interviews of leaders and representatives of NGOs (10 questions in each). More than 50 publications were monitored devoted to the problems NGOs faced in the pandemic. Thus, the methods of monitoring, survey and expert interviews were used. NGOs from Germany, Czech Republic, Lithuania, the USA, Russia (more than 30%), Ukraine and Kazakhstan took part in the research.

The stance of the Czech people toward Russia is characterized by ambivalent and complicated attitudes rooted in the history of the 20th century. On the one hand, the invasion of Czechoslovakia carried out by the Soviet Union and its allies to crush the liberalizing trends in the country’s politics remains one of the major national traumas for the Czechs and determines negative views of and distrust toward Russia as an heir to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, many people are still nostalgic about the socialist times (which is manifested, in particular, in the popularity of the largely unreformed Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia that until very recently was the third largest party in the country) and this nostalgia about socialism is often translated to the legitimacy of pro Russian views. However, the significance of this legitimacy should not be exaggerated: the majority of the Czech people are (still) very skeptical about Russia. 1 Continue reading Russian-connected Advisor Maintains Influence Over Czech President