Propiska (Russian: пропи́ска) was both a residency permit and migration recording tool in the Russian Empire before 1917 and from 1930s in the Soviet Union. It was documented in local police (militia) registers and certified with a stamp in internal passports. Residing anywhere without a permit was prohibited.

Depending upon the terms of residence, in the USSR there was a difference between permanent (прописка по месту жительства or постоянная прописка) and temporary (временная прописка) propiskas. The third type—business propiska (служебная прописка) was an intermediate type, when a person and his family could live in an apartment built by an economic entity (factory, ministry) as long as he worked for the owner of this housing (similar to inclusion of house rent into a labour contract). In the transition period to the market economy the permanent propiska in municipal apartments was considered to be a sufficient condition for the emergence of private property rights during the privatization (those who built housing at their own expense obtained a permanent propiska there by definition).

Václav Klaus (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːtslaf ˈklaus]; born 19 June 1941 in Prague) is the second President of the Czech Republic (since 2003) and a former Prime Minister (1992–1997).

An economist, Klaus was the principal co-founder of the Civic Democratic Party, the Czech Republic's largest center-right political party. Klaus is a eurosceptic, but he reluctantly endorsed the Lisbon treaty as President of his country. He has been called the "Margaret Thatcher of Central Europe".

Klaus was born in Prague during the Nazi occupation, and grew up in the large (up to 1948 middle-class) Vinohrady neighborhood. He studied what was then called "economics of foreign trade" and graduated from the University of Economics, Prague in 1963. He also spent some time at universities in Italy (1966) and at Cornell University in the United States in 1969.

He then pursued a postgraduate academic career at the State Institute of Economics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, which he was forced to leave in 1970. However, he soon obtained a position in the Czechoslovak State Bank, where he held various staff positions from 1971 to 1986. It was reported that he obtained a limited permission to travel mainly to so-called socialist foreign countries. This might have been a small privilege at that time. In 1987, Klaus joined the Institute for Prognostics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.