Václav Bartuška

"For most of them, we striking students were the ones who were subverting the regime. And on the first day we pulled camera shots from Národní třída. That was released, it was twenty minutes of footage. And I have to say that it made a terrible impression on the ordinary MPs because suddenly they saw something that... It all started with the fact that before we released it, there was a member of the Czech National Council. She was such a nice lady, she baked delicious cakes. She was an awfully nice woman from the people, who asked what we were going to investigate, that in her district there was talk about the students attacking Public Security on 17 November, beating them with scaffolding pipes, throwing paving stones at them. If that's what's going to be investigated -- that student violence against Public Safety. We were looking at her like, what is she talking about. And then we played the footage, the woman had tears in her eyes. And then she comes up to me and says, 'They lied to me!' I said, 'Well, yes. And are you surprised?' And she says in a broken voice: 'The comrades lied to me!' And I said, 'What did you expect? Of course. Yes.' She adds, 'They kept telling us that you had these scaffolding pipes and that you were beating up the comrades. That they were badly wounded members of the Public Security Service and that they were now in hospital.' This narrative was dropped by the Communists in the first days after the November Revolution. I took it as a completely bizarre thing. But I think that if it hadn't been for our going out into the regions, going out with that testimony of what happened, that it might well have been the narrative that that power would have successfully implanted in the country. Fortunately, that didn't happen."

"For me, Monday 20 November was an amazing moment. I still get goosebumps when I think about it. We went to the school at seven in the morning with the idea that we would barricade the entrance, the entrance to the faculty, that we would not let the dean and other such notorious bolsheviks in, that there would be an occupation strike, that we would even sleep there. We had the idea that we would arrive there at seven in the morning and by seven thirty the police, the Public Security, would be there to arrest us, or the State [Security] would come and arrest us. And that in the afternoon we would be in the prison somewhere. And nobody came. Not at half past seven, not at nine, not at ten. On the contrary, news began to come that other faculties were going on strike. And I really went into it that morning, thinking that we, the Faculty of Arts, DAMU and maybe some art schools would be on strike. And that was about it. Then all of a sudden somebody tells you that the lawyers are on strike. The Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Medicine - then all the medical faculties. Then CTU, and then the news started coming in that the non-Prague [faculties] were on strike too. Brno, Ostrava, Hradec, Budějovice. Suddenly you wonder what's going on... Bratislava, Žilina, Košice. It's noon and you see that something has happened across the country. I still bow to the people who started the strike outside Prague. Because for us it was easy - we experienced November 17th. But for those who started the strike in Olomouc, in Bratislava, in Brno, in Budejovice - I bow to them, because they were great guys. They didn't have the experience that we had. It was only on the basis that we were going on strike that they went along with us. And if it wasn't for them, they would have broken us, of course. Prague alone couldn't have done anything."

"It was bizarre in that they were looking for organisers. And in some of their model of thinking, I fell out of it, like I was one of the people putting it together. For one thing, I was a student - a journalism faculty at that - and I was actively running and actively present at that demonstration, so they somehow put me in the category of people who were involved. Which was not true. And for those five hours [of interrogation] they kept droning on about who organized it, how I was in contact with them, who it was, who was paying us, who was doing all this. I said, 'I don't know about anybody. I don't know anybody. Nobody pays me anything. I just went downtown and then I went with other people, with the crowd.' And they thought I was some kind of terribly smart guy who knew how to talk in an interrogation, which was not true at all. I was telling the truth. I just didn't know anybody, I wasn't there with anybody. And after five hours, they gave me a choice. They said, 'Either you sign here to cooperate with us, or you go to jail.'"

"The number of people from the practice was minimal. You were lectured by people you never read anything from and never expected anything from. There was a famous script called Propaedeutics of Journalistic Practice, or preparation for practice, which had sentences like, 'We divide newsrooms into ground-floor, two-storey and multi-storey buildings.' It was completely bizarre in that way. On the other hand, there was excellent Czech. I actually had five semesters of Czech plus credits and a very tough exam. There were several lecturers who knew foreign and Western media and knew something about it. There was a decent history of journalism - how it developed historically. We were very lucky that we didn't even get to the stage where there was scientific communism. But we did have that history of the MDH - the history of the international labour movement - which was fascinating in that I knew the history of Czech socdem quite thoroughly, thanks to my grandfather and my dad, because my grandfather founded it. So when there was a lecturer who was teaching us the history of the CSSD, about its founding, I would correct her because she knew it wrong. Like then during the interrogations, I experienced [at school] this kind of decomposed socialism. There were people lecturing at that faculty in 1987 and 1988 who largely had no business being there. They didn't know much. I guess they were okay in terms of cadre profile, but they had hardly any knowledge."

"I grew up thinking I would never visit West in my life. My mother went to Vienna once - in 1961 or 1962 - for three days. I listened to that my whole childhood. She had been to the West once in her life. My dad hadn't been once. And I grew up thinking that I might go to Ulaanbaatar one day, but certainly not to Munich or Vienna. There was one half of Europe that didn't exist at all. Then there was our half - the Eastern Bloc. And there was a kind of timelessness. When I started to come to my senses a little bit, I experienced the series - we called it the 'Kremlin series' or the 'Kremlin funerals' - when Brezhnev, Andropov and Cernenko died shortly after each other. And the futility, when you see that the regime no longer has any... We were lucky to be neighbours of both West and East Germany. You saw a Trabant and a Volkswagen parked side by side on the street. And it was clear which regime was successful and which was not. You heard of someone who had fled to the West or whose parents or friends had fled. And it was clear to you that people were fleeing from us to the West and nobody from the West to the East. So the feeling that you were in some unhappy part of Europe was there. At the same time, materially we were doing decently well. We had relatively enough of everything. There was meat in the shops here and there was food. There were so many years of waiting for a car and queues for trips to the seaside and queues for oranges... Queues - just queuing for everything. Asking if something had been brought in yet, if something was coming."