When the keys started clinking 17 years ago, and truth and love triumphed over lies and hatred, I was in the third grade. We, the pupils of a primary school that specialized in languages, equated the fall of the communist regime with the fall of the reign of terror of our strict Russian teacher. After half a year of terror, we considered English to be our salvation. What a surprise it was when that January our strict and cold teacher, a wife of a Belorusian partisan, said, "Good morning." Even as a child, one realizes that life is full of paradoxes.

The adults clinking their keys on Letná and Wenceslas Square with the enthusiasm of newly gained freedom were to discover this life's truth a bit later. People didn't trust the communist regime for a long time, but there was no one courageous enough to kick into its imaginary wall. Students with their ideals are usually good for such work.

The future rarely turns out as we imagine it, wearing our rose-colored spectacles. The key clinking hadn't even stopped yet and some personalities of very obscure moral qualities could be seen climbing the platform to stand next to the dissidents and student leaders. However, there was no one to boo them off.

And while the world was celebrating the smoothness of the Velvet Revolution, there was not much happening under the surface. It is not possible to change all the state structures in one day. However, it was possible to exclude personalities who lost their credibility — but there has been no one willing to do so since the very beginning. People didn't want drastic changes: They wanted an Eastern system, but money and freedom like in the West.

Many who feathered their nests during the communist regime are still having a great time, only that now the nouveau riche emerging from wild privatization have joined them.

Clinking of keys can't simply build a modern democratic society, because people stay the same. It demands a lot of work and, above all, time.

My former Russian and English teacher is a cause of some poor kids' stomach ulcers, Tomanová writes.

Party hawks at the weekend Civic Democratic Party (ODS) congress called for early polls in 2007 without any deal with the Social Democrats (ČSSD), but their flight was over the minute it became clear that not one of them was able to say how this could be achieved without ČSSD support in the Chamber, Pavel Verner writes in Právo Nov. 20.

Chairman Mirek Topolánek's blood pressure must have gone up rapidly when he heard some fellow party officials' speeches. One gets the impression that the congress's main task was to expel ČSSD Chairman Jiří Paroubek from human society.

But since nobody came up with a ČSSD-free way of reaching early polls, Topolánek got a sufficiently strong mandate to try for a broader government coalition. And with a new first deputy chairman, the ambitious and pro-Klaus Prague Mayor Pavel Bém, who called on delegates not to be afraid of trying to set up a purely ODS government, that means a third Cabinet-forming attempt.

However, Topolánek doesn't seem to have full confidence in his own deputies. Worried that they might fail him in the third attempt, Topolánek will have to reach agreement with Paroubek so that neither of them loses face, Verner writes.