Deputy Prime Minister 
for the co-ordination of the foreign,
interior and defence departments

Egon T. Lansky

     Born on July 23, 1934 in Trencin (Slovakia), divorced.

     Passed school leaving examination in Trencin in 1953, then expelled successively from three university-level schools.

     Graduated from Charles University in Lund, Sweden, majoring in political science, history of science and philosophy, history of literature and poetics with specific regard to drama, theatre and films. Stockholm School of Journalism, 1979.
 
    As a child, Mr.Lansky experienced wartime internment (Auschwitz, Terezin, etc.), and his family suffered persecution after 1948. He was repeatedly expelled from schools. He worked, i.a., in the Konev SONP Kladno Ironworks, later at Dental Prague, in the years 1967-1968 at the Economic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In 1968 he co-founded the KAN Association of Committed Non-aligned Citizens, and went into exile in September of that year and settled and acquired citizenship in Sweden.
 
    While in exile Mr.Lansky was emloyed as a press distributor, night-shift nurse in a mental home and hospitals, press secretary for the Committee of Solidarity with Israel in Nordic countries, representative of the Israeli Histadrut trade unions in Scandinavia, free-lancer and editor of several newspapers and magazines, and editor-in-chief of a number of other periodicals; he helped to found the Committee of Solidarity with Eastern Europe. In 1981-1984 he was a staff-member of the Czechoslovak desk of the BBC in London, and he then served with Radio Free Europe in Munich. In January 1991, in response to an invitation from Vaclav Havel and Jiri Dienstbier, Mr.Lansky returned to Czechoslovakia to serve as spokesman of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, co-founder of the 1992 Democrats for a Common Country movement, ambassador, and as Czechoslovakia's permanent delegate to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

     After the Federation ceased to exist, Mr.Lansky left the civil service in 1993 to become a freelance columnist, consultant and political analyst. From 1995  he was the CSSD spokesman and adviser to Mr.Zeman, first in the latter's capacity as Party Chairman and then, from 1996, as Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the CR Parliament. Since November 1996, Mr.Lansky has served as Senator of the CR Parliament and, since July 22, 1998, as Deputy Prime Minister of the CR Government for foreign and security policies.

     He holds Erasmus and Spinoza in particular regard.
     Interests:  literature, art, sports but, above all, humans.