Authors

Rosamund Johnston¹;  ¹ Research Center for the History of Transformations, Austria

Discussion

A promotional video urging English-speaking business travelers to “make it Prague, make it Omnipol” in 1980 showcased the state arms export monopoly’s newly constructed late modernist headquarters. Juxtaposing its façade with shots of the newly-built, luxury Intercontinental Hotel (where the film’s protagonist was expected to stay), and one of the city’s first skyscrapers, the Motokov building completed in 1977, the film presented an image of a high-tech and high-gloss metropolis, with Omnipol at its heart. 

This paper takes the Omnipol headquarters (1974–1979, Zdeněk Kuna, Zdeněk Stupka, Milan Valenta, Jaroslav Zdražil), and specifically the way it has been portrayed in such films and other corporate materials (e.g. brochures, posters, and books), as a starting point to ask whether we can talk of an “aesthetics of the arms trade”—in late-socialist Prague and beyond? It reflects, furthermore, on the politics of Omnipol’s changing locations in the former Czechoslovak capital, most notably the decision to move the foreign trade organization out of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. What difference might this change in topography have made, when institutional hierarchies and staffing structures remained the same (i.e. Omnipol’s head was always a deputy foreign trade minister)? By following the map presented to prospective clients in this and other corporate materials, and by using secret police materials showing how the Omnipol building on Nekazanka Street (and these clients) were surveilled, this paper ultimately considers the extent to which we might characterize Prague as a Cold War “fiscal-military hub” made up of precisely such key nodes as the Omnipol headquarters.