Valtr Komárek

Valtr Komárek ( born August 10, 1930 in Hodonín, † May 16, 2013 in Prague) was a Czech economist, forecasters and politicians. He was an honorary chairman of the Czech Social Democratic Party. After the Velvet Revolution Komárek was the first vice chairman of the Czechoslovak government.

Career

Valtr Komárek was born to Jewish parents, his parents survived the concentration camps. He himself survived the concentration camp because he was able to escape and then stopped hiding until the liberation of Czechoslovakia. After the war he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and studied economics, including in Moscow. He then worked at the State Planning Commission of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. 1964-1967 he was in Cuba, where he advised, among others, the Acting Minister of Industry Che Guevara. Within the economic policy in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, he was among the reformers to Ota Šik, which sought to impose a socialist market economy in the wake of the reforms of the Prague Spring. In the spring of 1968 he became Secretary General of the Economic Council of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1971 but transferred to the suppression of the Prague Spring to the customs administration. In 1978 he was a research assistant at the Academy of Sciences and in 1984 director of the Prognostic Office of the Academy of Sciences. Here he worked together with the later Czech President Milos Zeman.

During the Velvet Revolution, he was appointed in December 1989 to the Deputy Prime Minister in the Czechoslovak provisional government under Marián Čalfa that office until the first free elections in 1990. Komárek resigned from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and was elected in 1990 for the Civic Forum in the Czechoslovak parliament. In 1991, he resigned in the wake of the dissolution of the Civic Forum as a deputy in the social democratic CSSD and was the top candidate of the party in the Czechoslovak parliament elections in 1992, in which he was able to defend his position. As part of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 1 January 1993 went out the mandate. Komárek retired then returned from political life. In 2011 he was elected honorary chairman of the CSSD.

Komárek died on 16 May 2013 following complications after heart surgery in Prague.