Bohumil Doležal

„We wanted new people, we cared a damn whether they would be dissidents or not. In the Democratic Initiative, we rather talked to friends of friends and in most cases, those were people with only marginal experience with the dissent. There was no system in recruiting, we did it wherever an occasion presented itself. This way, we got some members in Cheb, Plzeň, Brno, České Budějovice, Ústí nad Labem and Ostrava and around these cities. When in 1990 [sic! Should be 1989], larger demonstrations started, we used them to recruit new people. For example, I went to put flowers on Jan Palach’s with Mandler and Martin Litomiský. We got busted right at the train station, obviously, but it was very enriching because there, the Plzeň group of the Democratic Initiative gained quite a handful of new members.“

„We organised a walk on the occasion of the Day of Human Rights. It was announced at the Radio Free Europe which was not being jammed at that time any more. It was an informal event. From two till four in the afternoon, at the Národní and Příkopy streets, nothing else was to be done but walk from one end to another. That event was extremely successful because there were about a thousand people and the police could not do anything at all! There were no shouting, no banners, they just walked up and down. There were the Charter 77 signatories, of course, we did not avoid each other. Mr. Ruml Senior for example. On the other hand, there were people who would not participate at such events, such as my daguther, at that time, she was seventeen and she came with four friends.”

“When this post-November 1989 system in here began to… I must say that it is my system; I stick to it tooth and nail. I did not do a big career in it but I really tried to do something to build it as opposed to many others who had worked in various institutions back then. I hold on to it and care about it greatly. I saw it all going to hell, people giving in to various demagogic ideas – hysterical fantasies about everything needing to be torn down and built up again – acting like those in 1945. When me and a couple friends saw it we set up an association which we named ‘Club for the Defense of Democracy’. An impulse for its establishment was Miloš Zeman’s election as President and his inauguration speech in which he stated that he wants to fight islands of negative deviation with the creation of islands of positive deviation which will liquidate the negative ones. Apparently, among the negative deviations he had in mind was freedom, although he did not say that openly. So I initiated a petition addressed to all the representatives of the status quo – PM Nečas, Chamber of Deputies’ president Němcová, Senate’s president Štěch… – asking them how was it possible for them to sit tight, listen to such President’s talk and even applaud him. Though it was not formulated so aggressively. In this matter, I approached many of my former colleagues from the Democratic Initiative and the responses were good. Some of the readers of my News joined in. There are not too many of them but at the time of my biggest fame, two thousand people would be visiting daily which is not bad for a private blog without any external support. This is how the Club for the Defense of Democracy came to life.”

“People from the Democratic Initiative found it difficult because post-November media were very much focused on authorities and it was not so easy to publish back them… Václav Klaus blew this structure into pieces and since I had worked for him as chief adviser I found it very handy. It allowed me to publish in Mladá fronta Dnes and later also in Respekt magazine. This became my field of expertize, apart from lecturing at university. It was everyday newspaper journalism. However, I was never employed in there – I would always just write two or three articles for them.”

“Since summer of 1992 I had worked as head of Prime Minister Klaus’ advisory team. They also asked me to run for office in the Federal Assembly which was formally possible but I nevertheless turned them down because I had no interest in bonding with the Civic Democratic Party. I was in agreement with Václav Klaus concerning two important matters – the need to rebuild the party system and the need to split the Czechoslovak federation… I thought he was right in pursuing that and I do to this day. Later I didn’t find the job perspective anymore; I had no intention to break ties with Mandler and the others. So I left that job and found my place at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague where I had lectured as an associate professor for the next ten years.”

“Havel brought into the editorial board of Tvář magazine other people such as Věra Linhartová, a renowned author, or Josef Topol who was then a member of the board for a long time. These people served as a shield against the Writers’ Association and helped us out. When the Communists realized that the Association didn’t work as they imagined it would, they took the situation into their own hands and exerted serious pressure on the Association. Harming themselves above all, in the summer the Association decided on a change of editor-in-chief and a part of the editorial board…. The unwanted ones were Mandler, Němec, Hejdánek and Nědvěd who was then editor-in-chief. The others were up for discussion. We responded in a way quite unheard of back then. We all unanimously turned the demand down and said that if the other were forced to leave we would also give up on the whole thing.”

"There was quite a lot of tension between us and Havel at the time. The tension had its roots in the past, it got a lot stronger before the revolution, and as a result the Democratic Initiative found itself on a by-road after the revolution. In other words it existed within the framework of the Civic Forum [CF], because we didn’t really have an alternative than to join the CF as a basically insignificant group. There was a special cot of sorts for political parties, for us, the KDS [Christian Democratic Party], the ODA [Civic Democratic Alliance] and so on. That made a big mark on my political life, because I was a rather insignificant politician, fortunately. And the fact is that although Havel, at least according to what Štindl told me, was almost hysterically assuring Štindl that if we thought any one of us would be getting an appointment, we could forget it, that we wouldn’t get even the smallest of appointments, but then it was for some reason essential to at least give us seats in the co-opted Federal Assembly and the national council. So me and Mandler got ourselves into the Federal Assembly as members of parliament, and Štindl got into the (Czech) National Council. And we remained there after the elections, because the CF didn’t expect that it’s election result would be so enormous, and so by mistake they basically put some of the people from the LDS [Liberal-Democratic Part] in unelectable places for the Czech National Council, which then became electable, so we had our own political club there. In this way we stopped being as insignificant as Václav Havel originally planned for us to be."

"The founding of the Democratic Initiative. Where did the idea spring from? It was really simple. For everyone who saw what was going on in Russia, who saw the terrified panic with which the Bolshevik establishment here reacted to that, it had to be clear that if it keeps up like that in Russia, then Bolshevism is coming to an end. The question was when, in how much time, and whether it would keep up. And whether it would keep up - that question was getting smaller and smaller. In this situation, sometime in the middle of 1987, we agreed that it would be good to go public in a political way more or less - and really to go public, because the anthologies were produced like this: we had people transcribe them on a type machine, and we gave them out among our acquaintances, then they’d give them back to us and we´d pass them on again. We didn´t want to publish them in Svědectví [Testament - transl.], say, on principle. We didn´t want to put them on [Radio] Free Europe. Because as soon as we´d do that, we´d put ourselves behind the dissident fence, and we didn´t want that. The situation as it was, keeping apart from them, had the advantage that you could be in touch more with normal people, on the work place for instance, you could talk to them, give them the articles to read, you could ask them what they think of it. I mean it all had it´s advantages and disadvantages. I still think even now that the advantages were greater. As far as the Democratic Initiative was concerned, we wanted to create a group that wouldn´t be based on the traditional dissent, where the same names keep repeating themselves again and again. We had the ambition to draw in people who we´d been in contact with the past seven or eight years and who´d never taken part in any dissident activities, but who were now under the impression, just like us, that something should be done publicly. That even they have some sort of an option to be active publicly somehow. Some of those we addressed joined us, some of them were more afraid. So then we got together with Havel and the people around Havel and we made a joint declaration which tried somehow or other to reflect upon the new situation. And this declaration was signed by a number of people who´d never signed any dissident text before. Their names weren´t anywhere. And this time we didn´t hesitate to use all the means of publication there were, because we couldn´t have done it otherwise, it wouldn´t have made any sense. So we got in touch with the Voice of America, we got in touch with Free Europe. That started up another independent group, an independent initiative. We thought for a long time, what it should be called, so we called it the Democratic Initiative. It was a group that was basically founded on all the heaps of work we did throughout the Eighties, on the anthologies and the participation of both those people who had already done this or that or signed the Charter [77] say, like me or Nedvěd, and of those who had a completely civilian job, clerks, workers, I dunno who all, but those who wanted to get organised somehow. It was very loosely organised, it had some sort of leadership of course, but it wasn´t possible to democratically elect the leadership very well, because we didn´t even have a means of meeting up. Or rather, if there were more of us gathered, we´d move over to Bartolomějská [Bartholomew Street] or some such quite inhospitable location, and that was that. But some of our meetings were quite big."

"The only form of distinct persecution that I experienced, was that they took me into a forest and beat my mug in. But just a little bit, I must say. But on the other hand they took me out into a rather hostile forest. It was like this: I used to go occasionally to visit this one acquaintance of mine, who was simply put quite a bit active in the Charter [77], and that was Ladislav Hejdánek. Ladislav Hejdánek had, as it was for a person so active, his own surveillance. There was a cop there, a man in uniform, and he wrote down who came in and who went out. It was unpleasant, of course. I kept on going there, and because I had too many marks, and they happened to start up that operation, I don’t know who came up with it at the State Security HQ, that they’d intimidate people with actions of a more brutal character, so the day before it happened to me, they got a grab on Ivan Medek and took him somewhere into a forest, there they punched him in the abdomen and left him to his fate. Ivan Medek later emigrated. Well, and the next day I had the awful good luck that before I went to visit Hejdánek, I found out the exact scenario, how they... some acquaintance stopped me on the street and told me what had happened to Medek. So afterwards when I went there, the StB men [State Security] arrested me, took me to Bartolomějská [Bartholomew Street, the infamous State Security HQ], and after that I looked on in horror as the same scenario was enacted on me. Because they did it so, that they kept me there until about eleven p.m. for no reason. That was interesting, because the operation chief, the one who was in command, he was completely drunk. As a doornail, simply. He could hardly articulate. He was telling me something about dicks or something of the sort. There were three boys there guarding me. Two of them were dead embarrassed, one of them was kind of keen. Then they sat me into a civilian Škoda [Czech car], to take me home they said. I told them I didn’t want to, but they said: no, no, this and that has to be done. I knew what it meant. They took me to Římská [Roman] Street, I said: 'I don’t live here.' They said: 'No matter, you said Římská, out of the car.' So I got out, and the StB man was handing me my ID card, I tore it out of his hand and started legging it like crazy. Now that complicated the scenario somewhat, as it took them quite a while to catch me. And that surprised me, as the three of them were quite the muscle, and when they caught me in the end, they were awfully tired and out of breath. I thought the policemen had to have some sort of training or something. They caught me at the corner of Římská and Italská [Italian Street], where there were people normally passing by. They pretended to be terrorists. The one chap had his hands on them and tried to defend me, and they told him: 'Keep going, keep going!' That’s odd, when terrorists speak like... And then there were some girls standing to the side, watching and they said: 'Surely they can’t afford to do this!' So it was obvious to them. I could’ve escaped them, easy, they couldn’t have kept on chasing me there, there were lots of people walking about, even though it was at night. But I reckoned that I had it coming in any case, so I let them grab me, they pushed me into the car, blindfolded me, put on the shackles, and drove me off somewhere, I didn’t know where. They drove about an hour, after the hour they chucked me out of the car, gave me a bit of a beating. They were pretty mad, they hadn’t counted on having to run around after me. Maybe I could’ve given that a miss. I don’t know if anyone got into trouble because I tried to defy them, I’d be deeply sorry for that. So they chucked me out and drove off. I was really glad when I saw the red lights leaving. Then I had to find out where I was, I had no idea where I was. So I found out I was between Příbram and Sedlčany, I found out which direction Příbram was in, it was closer as I found out from the bus stops, so I walked to Příbram, got on a train there, I had to wait about three hours in the night, and I made it back to work just right, at seven in the morning. That’s the biggest adventure I experienced with State Security throughout the whole functioning of the Charter. Afterwards, after 1987 I had all sorts of different experiences with them, but none so colourful as this."

"The petition protest against the ban of Tvář [Face, a literary magazine] was something completely unusual, and in a way it was a breakthrough, because there might have been some [petitions] before, but this one garnered a huge amount of publicity, and from this point of view it was such a matter that even the politburo concerned itself with it, and apparently even the highest representative of the Bolshevik regime himself, Antonín Novotný, reacted to it in some way. I heard this one sentence, but I can’t vouch for it, it should be checked in the minutes, it was that there’s this problem with one magazine which has been seized by a Catholic, an Evangelical, and a Jew. By whom they meant Jirka Němec, Láďa Hejdánek, and Emanuel Mandler. The appalling baseness of those bigwigs, who were, as my neighbour from the cottage would’ve said, Antichrists, but at the same time anti-Semitic pigs, well it’s just unbelievable. But they really did have to concern themselves sub specie [under the aspect] that they couldn’t really lock us up very well. Because that would’ve been a big big mess-up. The regime was already getting a bit chewed up at the time, and so consequently had its knickers in a twist."

"Tvář was a very strange magazine. The youngsters - members of the writers’ union - made it happen. The writers’ union was this kind of elitist organisation that put together writers who were either, I would say, tolerated, but mainly those created and protected by the communists. And because in 1962-63 Bolshevism started to fall apart here, and that dissolution showed itself most of all on the cultural level, so parallel to the dissolution there was this opening up and loosening of the writers’ union and the effort to open up publishing options. And a group of young authors, Jiří Grůša, Josef Hanzlík and others, they were simply able to get themselves their own magazine. František Vinant was the editor-in-chief, he got the position because previously as a poet apprentice of sorts he’d cooperated with Květy [Flowers], that was a magazine that had been banned by the communists previously, something of a magazine for revived communists. František Vinant was quite a nice man, but unfortunately as far as managerial matters went, he was completely, completely incompetent. It must be said about Tvář that it was a picture of terrible cluelessness and an awful mess right from the start. The magazine was such that it was difficult to publish it regularly. Those people had won themselves a magazine, they had no idea what they wanted, no idea what they should do with it, they just knew they wanted something new that hadn’t been here before. Those people were basically communists. Now the question arose, what to do with the magazine so it wouldn’t die off. And because Jan Nedvěd became an editor of the magazine, it was pretty much Nedvěd, Lopatka and me who tried to get in touch with people it would be possible to cooperate with normally, and who would be in some way or other intellectually consistent. One of those who’d already been cooperating with Tvář, was Jiří Němec, a highly educated person, a Catholic intellectual who was in contact with a lot of other people, with Zbyněk Hejda, Ladislav Hejdánek, an Evangelical philosopher, those were decidedly non-communist elements. And somehow or other we managed, I think through Marie Šolleová, who also worked as an editor at Tvář for some time if I know right, to bag the historian Emanuel Mandler, who then became the main driving force of the magazine. Mandler’s contribution was decisive, because he had some sort of a clear and defined idea, how to make the magazine and how to put this diverse jumble of people together. We, for instance - to start with there was a great amount of mutual distrust between us and Jirka Němec, because Jirka Němec had these strange manipulative manners, due to which he appeared worse than he actually was to people who didn’t know him. So Mandler deserved the credit for putting all of this together, and in time a magazine was created that was, as far as the staff and the concept, simply what we wanted to be doing, as far as that went, it was compact; it was a magazine which was decidedly non-communist, and it was a magazine from which the original young poets who started it fled as fast as hens from a coop that a skunk climbs into. It was very quick. I had my part in the matter as well, because I didn’t like the works of the young unionist authors not one bit, I considered them to be something which had nothing to do with poetry, and although I don’t take an interest in the subject anymore, I still think so to this day."