About us
FinalWord.
This is the new website of the Final Word, a free internet and e-mail service of comment and analysis about the Czech Republic. The Final Word was first launched in 2001 by Erik Best, an American who has lived in Prague since 1991. The starting point was the Fleet Sheet daily news business, which first went out by fax on Feb. 22, 1992. Our new Final Word website was launched in Aug. 2026.
The Final Word concentrates on Czech political, business and social developments and seeks to put them into international perspective. It’s published Monday through Thursday in English and Monday through Friday in Czech, except for national holidays.
Our target readers are people who want to go beyond the headlines and understand what is really happening in the Czech Republic and the world. Our emphasis is on analyzing, explaining and defending Czech interests in an environment in which major geopolitical changes are taking place rapidly.
Our new website provides easy access to each daily commentary as well as to our complete archive. Readers may visit the website at their leisure or may sign up for e-mail notices of new articles in either English (here) or Czech (here).
Below are links to several of our most-read Final Words since 2001. They should give new readers a sense of what our publication is about.
Josef Baxa's revolutionary call to action
Chief Justice Josef Baxa of the Constitutional Court was groomed for years by the mainstream media for his current position, but he wasn't very kind to them in his address at the Terezín memorial service on Sun. He said that today's era is a painful reminder of the world 90 years ago and of the storm clouds that were gathering. He alluded to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, spoke of abuses of international law and of aggression, and said that never before have so many deliberate lies been presented as truth. Most surprising was Baxa's assertion that instead of a negative reaction to this, what we hear is an indifferent silence. "Yet whenever words of dissent are replaced by silence," he said, "and whenever comfort prevails over conscience, we lose a piece of what the victims of Terezín bequeathed to us." Baxa seems to be calling on just-minded people, and not only those in the media, to use the full force of their positions to oppose what is happening. That's quite a revolutionary call to action from the nation's top judge.
Year Two of the Great Devaluation
For decades Czechs celebrated the Great October Socialist Revolution of Nov. 7, 1917 (Oct. 25 under the old calendar), known in Czech as VŘSR. For those who believed in the Communist takeover, it was a true reason to celebrate, as it was for the nomenklatura and intelligence agents who benefited the most from the system. For others it was no reason to celebrate at all, because Marxism-Leninism destroyed value, demotivated the workers and created a class of undemocratic leaders who did with the people as they pleased. Czechs are in a similar situation now as they mark the second year of the Great Devaluation of the Czech Crown (VDČK) of Nov. 7, 2013. It too destroyed value, demotivated the people and benefited mainly a group of true believers in the pseudo-capitalist system and the oligarchs who came to power because of their ties to the old regime. For a select few it is a true reason to celebrate; for others it is a day of sadness.
Legalized tunneling at OKD
A classic case of tunneling is when the owner or managers of a company strip out assets and leave the empty shell and a mountain of debt to the creditors and employees. MUS's former managers are being prosecuted for a version of this in Switzerland. If there were any justice in the world, some top managers and overseers of ČEZ, Czech Railways, ČSA, Lesy ČR and other state-owned companies would also be put before a tribunal or funeral pyre. In its rawest form, tunneling is straight-out theft, but Zdeněk Bakala and his partners at OKD did their tunneling the legal way. Before the IPO in 2008, they loaded the company up with debt and paid themselves dividends of €1,487,639,000. That's Kč 38.7bn at today's exchange rate. Thanks to this form of legalized Wall Street tunneling, NWR now has debt that is more than twice its market value ... and the company is just a few steps away from bankruptcy.
Erik Best
Erik Best, publisher
Erik Best, who writes the Final Word with the help of a small team, has an educational and work background that, given the direction the world ended up taking, almost predetermined his future profession. It wasn’t planned that way, but his education and experience in journalism, foreign affairs, political science, foreign languages (Czech, Russian, French, German), business management and investment banking provided the basis for starting publications that touch on all of these areas.
Although he was born in North Carolina in 1962 and had no family connection to Central or Eastern Europe, he wrote a school essay on Czechoslovakia when he was in fourth or fifth grade in Montana, where his family had moved when he was 11. While still in high school, he started writing sports articles for the local daily newspaper, The Missoulian. He started studying Russian at age 17 at the University of Montana.
From there he went to the summer Russian program at Middlebury College, where he received an MA in 1985. He also graduated that year from Georgetown University, where his concentration was Russian and Eastern European Studies. In 1987 he received an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, in investment banking and management consulting before moving to Prague in Feb. 1991. A year later he launched the Fleet Sheet daily news bulletin. In 2001 he started the Final Word, and in 2011 he began writing the weekly Friday Edition analysis in English.
Erik Best and his wife, Dita, have four children.