The Anarchic Interlude: IN 1990s PRAGUE, WONDERFUL THINGS HAPPENED IN THE CHAOTIC SPACE BETWEEN THE END OF COMMUNISM AND THE RISE OF ITS REPLACEMENT.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Czech Republic

"SHHHHH!!!" I SLURRED to the Amsterdam-based American jazz pianist who was at that moment bellowing out a profane interpretation of the "Star-Spangled Banner" while swigging from a bottle of cheap Moravian wine at around 3 a.m. on a weeknight in Prague's Old Town Square. It was August 1990, nine months after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, and I had just spotted two armed men in red-accented military fatigues veering in our direction with sudden interest. My lubricated 22-year-old brain, facing the prospect of confrontation with the Red Army, lapsed into a panicky pop culture tailspin--War Games, Red Dawn, Amerika... run!

The expat ivory-tickler, seasoned enough to have dodged the Vietnam draft, did not share my apprehension. "WEEEeeeeLLLL," he offered, in leery adaptation of Steve Martin's 1970s catchphrase, middle fingers beginning to jab defiantly upward, "FfffffUUUuuuUCCCKKK... YOUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!" I blinked dumbly in shock, too paralyzed to thwart the ensuing (and in retrospect inevitable) soldier-directed Heil Hitlers.

You never know while living through history how things will turn out in the end. Prague felt free (if poor and polluted) that summer, but the same had seemed true in the summer of 1968, until very suddenly and violently it was not. Warsaw Pact troops had brutally extinguished similar liberatory flickers in 1981 Poland and 1956 Hungary. Mikhail Gorbachev had just been elected to a five-year term as president of the Soviet Union, was vowing to give communism "the kiss of life," and in five months' time would dispatch tanks to crush protesters in Vilnius, Lithuania.

So I clutched my passport and steeled myself for the gulag. Instead, one of the soldiers smiled, made the universal tiltedhead-on-two-hands people are sleeping gesture, and pointed toward the bedroom windows overlooking the magnificent plaza. The piano player threw a friendly arm around the grunt's shoulder and planted a sloppy kiss on his cheek, then we stumbled off cackling into the night.

BREAKING THE SPELL, EXPLORING THE WRECKAGE

WEIRD AND WONDERFUL things spring up in the untended spaces between an old system collapsing and a new one taking its place. Totalitarian structures don't just vanish overnightlaws, bureaucrats, cops, and even politicians can remain the same for months and years on end. But the spell of their power is broken, and everyone knows it. When authorities no longer have authority, the resulting atmosphere can be dislocating--and euphoric.

Prague had many claims to being the life of the post-Party party. Czechoslovakia's fairy-tale revolution, more than the others in what was still called the East bloc, had been spearheaded by high school and college students, who now streamed into the big city to gorge on previously forbidden cultural fruits. Their president, a chain-smoking playwright/dissident who had spent much of the 1980s in jail, delighted in welcoming international icons into the Mitteleuropa mosh pit: Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, the Dalai Lama, etc. The capital of Bohemia, after an unnatural, four-decade attempt to stifle the same culture that helped produce Antonin Dvorak, Franz Kafka, Karel Capek, Milos Forman, and Jan Saudek, was ready to release some pentup expression.

Rushing in from the other side of the breach were thousands of bushy-tailed Westerners like me--raised in the dull, horizonless stalemate of the Cold War, seeing only a big black smudge on the map marked "Iron Curtain," until that magical month of November 1989 when the veil was lifted and the bugle sounded. Imagine a world before the commercial internet, where your best travel information came from annual guidebooks that had been rendered obsolete overnight: Every peek down a neglected alleyway carried the promise of fantastical discovery. Especially in a city that beautiful, with beers that cheap and bars that packed with people your age who had just toppled totalitarians without firing a shot.

So what did these two worlds do upon colliding, now that governments no longer artificially obstructed their paths? They explored. And played, and created.

ELEPHANTS IN THE STALIN SPACE

MUCH OF THE Prague skyline at the time was choked with soot and scaffolding. The dingy latticework outside the famous (and famously grumpy) U Vejvodu pub, around the corner from the office of the English-language newspaper some friends and I launched in March 1991, was rumored to date from the 1950s. The physical deterioration of arguably Europe's most architecturally significant never-bombed metropolis--the entire city center was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992--had posed a conundrum for the Communist government that owned and mismanaged most property: How to keep up appearances, and appeal to tourists with much-needed hard currency, without soaking up too many scarce resources? Enter the Linhart Foundation. Or more accurately stated, enter the dissident architects who, having been barred from creating their own works, were grudgingly allowed in the 1980s to spruce up some of the regime's grimy buildings and crumbling statues, gaining invaluable knowledge along the way about what was underneath all that scaffolding. When the commies were driven from power, this underground group of artists and engineers formed one of the most potent--and mischievous--countercultural organizations in post-revolutionary Prague, constantly probing and colonizing abandoned spaces, testing the limits of the law, and igniting "actions" that mesmerized all those lucky enough to take part.

The Linharts (named after a flying elephant, because why not?) were officially organized as a foundation about 10 days before my Old Town Square episode, with the initial, urgent aim of getting the city some damn rock clubs. Czechoslovakia was only then beginning the process of removing the state's central role in commerce, sorting out property rights, and rewriting the legal code to enable the most basic of enterprise. Back then all the grocery stores were still called "groceries" ipotraviny) and fruit and vegetable stores were "fruits and vegetables" (ovoce a zelenina), and you'd be lucky in the latter to find anything besides potatoes and onions come November.

The laws as written required countless stamps from various sluggish ministries to launch much of anything, let alone an...