Petr Dutko

“Vladimír Hučín is quite a character. An unguided missile. I remember when we once negotiated with the Chief of the state security district administration, Zela, who was a real choleric, so I, Plšek and Hučín were there on behalf of the Civic Forum and we were solving several questions. And Hučín steadfastly argued so that he would punish this and that member and the one, who closed his hand in the door, and how one or the other was still there. I saw the vein on his forehead started to turn green and he began to turn red. So I whispered to Mr. Plšek: 'Mr. engineer, after all, he has a gun, he probably shoots us all here.' Those were such high-tensed moment. Vladimír Hučín has always been a character, he pursued his goal directly and without compromise. What he was convinced was right, he went after without any compromises. The problem is that if we all defenced our opinions that hard, we would probably kill each other within just about ten minutes. So there a certain degree of compromise is necessary; we need to come to an agreement. Vladimir Hučín could never do that. But on the other hand, when he told me what he had suffered in the 1980s, I wasn't surprised anymore…”

“It was a time when I might have slept four hours a day, but it was nice. On the other hand, at least in the first week, there were certainly concerns that there could still be a counter-revolution. The military, the People's Militia, the police, would try to destroy this democratization process. So I had a canned pork and beef at home, and a loaf of bread. If the Velvet Revolution were to be liquidated, I had a cottage, rather a shed, in the Beskydy Mountains, where we went to the Brontosaurs Forest Brigades, and there I thought I'd survive a few weeks before the situation calmed down.”

“At that time, the communist party committee was in a relatively deep defensive, so they tried to organize a people's camp. There was a protest movement against that at the Hvězda cinema, just a hundred meters away. In Přerov there was mainly the singer Jaroslav Wykrent, who, for example, opened the first account of the Civic Forum in Česká spořitelna. He provided the sound system and people could hear either side. I think that people started at the communist party committee, and if they heard the same phrases of the then Secretary-General then they moved on to Jarda Wykrent.”