Professor, Ing., CSc. Pavol Balgavý
* 1944
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"Peter Zajac has come out, you probably know him. So Peter came out, we didn't know each other until then. Because Martin Bútora told me that Peter is in charge of this. I told him, we came to ask who is coordinating the university teachers. And Peter, as a pope, laid his hand on my shoulder and said, 'No one coordinates it. Do it. ' So Peter Zajac, without knowing me, commissioned me to coordinate university teachers throughout Slovakia. We went to Carlton to sit with Professors Jozef Tomek and Ivan Benedikovič and debated how to do it. And Ivan had a brilliant idea. So I knew what we had to from the debates from Poland. Firstly, all political parties must be expelled from universities. This is the first step because everyone was mentioning it- Hungarians, Poles, East Germans and Russians. The moment the party organizations are allowed into colleges, conflicts start to arise between them. They will be competing for students. The environment would be split, and you won't be able to fix it in many years. Because there were already KDH and VPNs, and they were different. There were already many different groups. All of this shall be expelled. It must be absolutely non-political, it must be academic. So we decided to establish the Academic Forum of Slovakia. "
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"Michut denunciated him. It was preceded by such "history". On the mountain railroad, which collected wood, was a gasoline engine and it was miserable in the 1940s. My father was there since 1945, since passing of the frontline. Also that Mihut in question worked there, he stole and sold the gasoline. My father found out, but instead of denunciating him... well, we have to put it into context. It was in 1947, my father was a sportsman, he was 30 years old, he was a gymnast, so instead of denunciating him, he slapped him in the face. And he considered the problem solved. But Mihut was the director-general of forests of western Slovakia and he took revenge on my father after 1948."
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"That's when I learned what a socialist youth construction is. The socialist youth construction was based on this- there were young men such as my Slovak group, whom I call golddiggers. They worked there because they could have earned nice money. Then there were people like me who tried to improve their political profile there. And then there were thieves and, excuse my French, little whores from Prague, who were collected on the street and sent there to become better socialist citizens. So, that was the youth construction. But we earned an unbelievably high wage, in that time, 2000 to 3000 crowns. I never earned so much money in my life. Only after many years."
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Full recordings
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Veľké Leváre , 20.02.2020
(audio)
duration: 02:36:14
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Veľké Leváre, 20.02.2020
(audio)
duration: 02:36:14
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Pavol Balgavý was born in 1944 in Malé Leváry. His father was a forester in Rohožník. His mother came from a protestant family, she was a housewife. During communism, his father was sentenced to nine months in prison. The family had to move to his uncle in Malé Leváre, where the witness completed primary school. He continued studying in Veľké Leváry and graduated from the Ján Žižka Military High School in Trocnov in Moravská Třebová. To improve his political profile, he worked for a month at the Youth Construction at the caoutchouc chemical plant in Kralupy nad Vltavou. From 1961 to 1963, he studied mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Science of Comenius University in Bratislava and from 1963 to 1968 at Faculty of Physics at Lomonosov University in Moscow. After his mother’s death in 1968, he returned to Slovakia with his wife and first son. He worked in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Institute of Biology and the Institute of Experimental Oncology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. After the invasion of Soviet troops, he collaborated with the illegal magazine Echo since he could move freely thanks to the Soviet passport. From 1974 he lectured at the Faculty of Pharmacy of Comenius University. In 1989, he joined the general strike, although he was in a spa. He became the chairman of the Academic Forum of Slovakia. In the first free elections in 1990, he was elected to parliament as representant of the VPN party. After passing of the lustration bill in 1991, he resigned, since he was listed as an agent in the National Security Archives. He agreed to sign the collaboration before leaving to a research fellowship to United Kingdom. In 2002, he became a professor of physics. He founded the Laboratory of Biophysics at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Comenius University, where he is still a professor emeritus. He is also an honorary member of the Slovak Physical Society, the Slovak Biophysical Society and the Slovak Pharmaceutical Society.
