Ore mountains - region and history: Difference between revisions

The communist regime, established in 1948, made a cunning use of the people’s disappointment with the Western allies at the Conference of Munich, the anti-German nationalist feelings and its ideology to carry on the psychosis of fear and enmity towards the West and bind Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union. The Ore Mountains and the basin below became an unprecedentedly cheap source of uranium, coal and power for the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia’s national economy, renowned in the First Republic for its balanced proportion of heavy metallurgical, chemical and engineering industries with the light and processing industries and a high rate of valuation of input raw materials, became the “forge of the socialist camp” with a dominance of metallurgical and other raw material and energy-intensive heavy industries. This orientation severely harmed all of Czechoslovakia’s national economy, devastated certain regions of the country and was most abominably manifested in the Sokolov-Cheb and North Bohemian Basins. Vast tracts of the landscape, spanning hundreds of square kilometres, were devastated due to opencast coal mining and sinking of underground mines, extraction of kaolin, gravel, sand, ceramic clays and construction stone, erection of gigantic power plants, power and heat distribution systems and repositories of power plant fly ash. The landscape character with the round hillsides and plateaux of the Ore Mountains, covered with forests and peat bogs, both the basins with fertile farmland and clear watercourses, preserved in a harmonious form until the World War, was transformed into an “industrial landscape” filled with new land formations due to shifting millions of cubic metres of rock and earth, industrial and storage buildings, deposits and dumps. The dense network of linear transport and technical infrastructures cut the once continuous country into fragments difficult to access and manage, upset its harmony, liveability and passability for both game and people. Natural plant societies disappeared, replaced by weeded patches and invasive non-native plant and animal species. Towns and villages where tens of thousands of people once lived were wiped out, along with thousands of cultural and natural heritage sites wiped out due to coal mining and the power plants fuelled by the extracted brown coal - to be precise, 106 municipalities, including the 650 year old royal city of Most were eliminated this way <ref name = Riha></ref>(see [http://www.zanikleobce.cz/index.php? Exctinct villages]).