Vilém Prečan

“The search for the right path, my personal freedom, liberating myself from the yoke of Communist ideology, that - one could say - belief in a righteous world, was powered by two factors. The study of history. The deeper understanding I gained of how things really were - and that they were different from what we learnt about them, what they told us at lectures, what tradition claimed, and what was the official line in the History of the CPC and in school books. Secondly, my personal experience with society and politics. That is, the way I saw people living, the way things really were, what the Party organs were like, the political profiling policy, who was actually in power, and what the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was in reality. And at the same time all those political struggles, both overt and covert. The de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union, first and second stage.”

“I was always glad that circumstances had led me to stay in the country until ’76, that I didn’t emigrate in ’68. Because when looking from a distance, I’d never have believed that the turbid torrent, that whole normalisation process, could not be stopped. I would have thought - if we had stayed and done something, organised something, things wouldn’t have been so bad. For instance, as late as spring 1969 I was convinced - and I spoke about it at a conference in Oxford - that people will not let themselves be robbed of the freedom of media and the freedom of press. That they’d defend their journalists, editors. I thought that they’d enter a general strike or something of the sort. That’s how deluded I was. Bit by bit I found out how powerless one is. How we, opponents of normalisation, were atomised. Everyone had to earn a living somehow. They were very clever to fire us, so that we all had to start doing various manual jobs for measly wages, to feed our families, and so on.”

“As grammar school students, for example, we lived politics from our childhood. The elections were in May 1946. I was thirteen years old at the time, my classmates were getting on toward fourteen. We organised our own elections in the class - sometime at the beginning of May - who would vote for whom. So of course, I voted for the Communists, and my classmate, who sat next to me, was an avowed National Socialist, who carved something into my desk just to spite me. So that’s how we lived, we debated about politics. [Q: Did you know any details about the Soviet Union, the Soviet regime?] We didn’t know a thing. How would we find something out? Even those who spent the whole war there didn’t tell the truth.”