Action Z

Initiative Z (Czech: Akce Z) was a nationwide program of a volunteer, community-improvement unpaid manual labor by population, which was officially recognized as volunteer work which ran for several decades, mainly on the projects where the 5-year planned economy had encountered substantial delays.

Participation in the Akce Z program was de facto a kind of civil conscription, because those citizens who did not participate - and therefore their names did not appear on the lists - were questioned, and in many cases found themselves subtly threatened with possible disadvantages such as reduced choices regarding future education or difficulty in change of employer.

Typical activities ranged from garbage removal and planting trees to construction of some public-service facilities, such as children's playgrounds, cultural centers (Kulturní domy, Houses of Culture), municipal pipelines or sewage lines, numerous grocery stores in small villages (for example grocery store Smíšené Zboží in village (Hůrky coordinates 49.049331 N, 15.133108 E) near Nová Bystřice) etc.

In the late 1980s when the planned economy was in the latest phase of its struggle, even technically advanced projects were attempted to be progressed by sending numbers of unskilled volunteers to help under the umbrella of Initiative Z.

Many participants recalled being ordered to perform "busy work", such as having to move a large pile of sand from one spot to another 20 meters away with shovels and wheelbarrows, just to witness it being relocated by a machine to its original location the next day.