Ota Šik (11 September 1919 – 22 August 2004) was a Czech economist and politician. He was the man behind the New Economic Model (economic liberalization plan) and he was also one of the key figures in the Prague Spring. Early years Šik was born in the industrial town of Plzeň, Czechoslovakia. Before the Second World War Šik studied Art at Charles University of Prague, and studied politics after the war. Following the German annexation of the Sudetenland, and the partition of the whole nation in March 1939, Šik joined the Czech Resistance movement. However, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. At Mauthausen Šik's fellow inmates included Antonín Novotný, the future president of Czechoslovakia (who was succeeded by the leader of the Prague Spring Alexander Dubček), and Dubček's father, Štefan. Political career The connections that Šik made at Mauthausen proved useful in his post-war political career. In the early 1960s he attempted to persuade the hardline president, Novotný, into loosening his rigid adherence to central planning, which had been crippling the economy. Šik, who by this point was an economics professor and member of the Communist party, wanted to bring market elements into central planning, to relax price controls and to promote private enterprise in the hope of kickstarting the stagnant economic climate. It was around this point that Šik was elected to the party's central committee and was made head of the economics institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Šik's reforms were launched in 1967, before Dubček came to power, but were heavily watered down by party apparatchiks who worried about losing control of the factories. The only palpable, and certainly the most popular, result of the reforms was the appearance of private taxis on the streets of Prague. In December 1967, at a party meeting that was a precursor to Dubček's rise to power a month later, Šik publicly denounced Novotný's regime. He demanded a fundamental change to the Communist system and a new leadership, two decades before Mikhail Gorbachev he announced that economic reform could not be separated from fundamental political change. By this point Czechoslovakia had the lowest growth rates in the Soviet bloc, whereas previously it had been the economic backbone of the Habsburg empire. Following Dubček's election as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Šik was made a deputy prime minister in