Milan Kňažko

“The revolution worked out well. It fulfilled its meaning and purpose, so the free elections were repeated and we gained freedom of speech and the press. However, it is a daily struggle for keeping it in a form, which can satisfy as many people and groups of people as possible. We achieved what we had wanted. And every elections move it somewhere, but that’s what I don’t want to describe. It is normal, natural development, even though that forty-year handicap, that boulder is still tied to the legs of those, who experienced it. The young generation is a bit different; however, it again grows up in the world distorted by those who still have the lead ball tied to their legs. Actually, it is not about their legs, those are free, it is about their heads; their mind is burdened with the Bolshevik deformations.”

“To the totalitarian regime, as I retrospectively assess it today, after twenty years, it really was a daily dissembling. Then, the joke was said about Czechoslovakia having thirty million inhabitants, out of whom fifteen were for socialism and fifteen million were against it. You know, everyone lived a sort of inconsistent life. People had to dissemble if they wanted to achieve something professionally of if they didn’t want to go directly to prison. So we used to live in an extraordinary hypocrisy. It was a period of daily fear, humiliation, and oppression.”

“We haven’t coped with our past yet. In 1989 I suggested that people like Biľak and members of the Central Committee should have stand trial, be sentenced – as it is possible in some other countries – to 250 or 300 years of imprisonment. We could have released them after three weeks, or reprieved them, but we should have let the justice be done. We should have made them move from the villas, which they had stolen, to those small flats built for the working class in blocks of flats, where the nursery should have been. You know, there were many prominent State Security members and Bolsheviks. And we haven’t dealt with them yet.”

“My generation was hit by it literally to the full. I was born in 1945 and in 1950, it was a second part of your question, it affected me personally, because my father was arrested and sentenced to thirteen years of imprisonment for cooperation with the CIC, for subverting the socialist state, and for other nonsense. The trial was fabricated. He spent 28 months in a remand centre, which was more than two years, indeed. Eventually, he was threatened with much stricter sentences such as the life imprisonment or the death penalty; however, he got thirteen years, out of which he spent only seven in prison. I speak about it in details maybe because since I was five I have had no problems with my mindset and attitude towards the regime. Among family members and close relatives we didn’t use to mince words about the fact that my father was imprisoned by the communists. Though I didn’t know what the word communists meant as I was only five, I remember very well how they came for my father and did a house search and my father told me, ‘Well, Milanko, you will be five soon!’ However, we didn’t celebrate my fifth birthday together. During the seven-year period of my father’s imprisonment I saw him only twice, once in Ilava and once in Leopoldov prison.”

“This shouldn’t be forgotten. We mustn’t forgive those who established and preserved the regime, moreover, I presume we have to still remind the young generation of that era, and I regret that there hasn’t been an opportune time to declare the communist terror illegal, as it was in case of Nazi terror. I am persuaded it is a mistake because nowadays, young communists come up and though they want to do it differently, they are also based on the theories of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Marx, Engels and similar deviants.”

“Today, nobody really cares about it. I am always shocked, when I meet people or when I read in a newspaper that people recall the past regime with nostalgia because at that time everybody had a job and so-called social securities. To be honest, no other state or institution offers bigger social securities than being imprisoned or sent to the concentration camp. People could even get a cell in southern part of the building or near the radiator, so amazing it was, such security they had. Czechoslovakia and the whole socialist bloc represented something very similar to that, only a bit nicer, demarcated with the barbed wires, in inverted commas. So if somebody misses the prison, the reason is that the value such as the freedom of speech means nothing to him/her. Probably, those people had nothing to say or didn’t want to. Their problem. The freedom of movement, travelling? They didn’t travel anyway. Neither then, nor today and they also never will. I understand this kind of people, it could have been better for them then. Similarly, maybe it is better for sheep not to live in the wilds but let the shepherd take care of them, milk them, stroke them and cut their fleece. I understand people with this mental state why they nostalgically recall the past regime. But if only people want to take that gift called life they got into their own hands and do something with it, then they consider that era to be something horrible, disgustingly repulsive and unacceptable.”

“I also experienced a really strong pressure and blackmailing about the cooperation with the State Security in 1975. I was thirty and I seriously thought about emigration, but finally I resisted and said to myself that after all I was home here. Then, I couldn’t use my passports, both the private and the service one, for several years as they were scrapped. They reissued them for me and gave them to me every time the Minister of Culture Válek vouched for me that I would behave adequately abroad. However, the pressure was immense.”

“It is necessary to be careful and keep explaining to the youth that the communism is probably good as a marginal folklore element in a political spectrum in a democratic country, but should never be a part of the government. It mustn’t take power in a country because we can see really frightful examples from countries where it was done and if we counted the dead or rather killed people, the communists, unfortunately, would have more victims on their conscience than the Nazis. Of course, I don’t want to advocate Nazism at all, but I tar them with the same brush. Maybe we all were a bit of cowards, some bigger, some smaller ones. I don’t see how people can change overnight, just like in 1968, when there was an amazing solidarity among people fighting against the occupation, an amazing openness, when people showed only the best in them, and it all came to the surface also in 1989. This was what the two mentioned periods had in common. The people’s ability to achieve more than anybody could have expected.”