Ing. Jiří Lávička

* 1940

Svědci lokálních událostí z éry komunismu
19. 6. – 23. 6. 1948 – The Sokol Gathering, 21. 8. 1968 - Invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops
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    We're a laboratory. Period, done.

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    "I was on vacation and my colleague Polák came to pick me up at 2 a.m. in his company car and told me that Director Podlaha and Deputy Ouřada wanted me to come to the workplace immediately. This was in Kárané here near Prague. We managed to drive through Vinoř and somewhere we had to make way for the soldiers, so at three o'clock in the morning I was already sitting at my desk and we were already working out what to do and how. We had information from Ouřada, how he had been at Hofman, how things were going. And directly Podlaha and Ouřada said, 'Don't turn off, don't turn off anything, turn everything on.' I then moved to the radio exchange because I knew that was the main centre. There was a reconstruction going on there, they were building new racks from Tesla, electroacoustics, and they had two power supplies - a power supply for the equipment itself and a power supply for the signal bulbs. We shut that all down. I said, `Guys, we put the assembly plans on the racks, and when somebody comes in, we're a laboratory. Period, done.´ There was also an officer with two guys with machine guns, saying: 'Shto yest?' [What is this?] I think, they confirmed it later, they said: 'You, Jirka, we've never heard you speak Russian so well.´ Just: 'Eto laboratorija zděs.´ [It´s a laboratory here] I don't speak Russian again, yeah, I've erased that. So we said it was a laboratory. So they placed the two soldiers they came with in front of the door. Except that the radio exchange still had wiring further on, pekin it had, and it was behind the flights, so we could walk on it so that we were not controlled."

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    There were five of us operating engineers sitting there

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    "There were several of these operating engineers. I was in charge of radios, another colleague was in charge of low frequency (LF) equipment and LF operations. These were the classic long-distance phone lines and international ones. Another colleague waas in charge of the high frequency traffic - so there were high numbers of circuits being carried on those cables. Another was in charge of the coaxial cable, which I've mentioned here before, and another was in charge of the long-distance network, because long-distance cables carried telex messages. So there were five of us in the operations department, and each one of us had a certain section, but everything went over those long-distance cables, and the different kinds of traffic that I have just listed went over one cable."

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    I was in charge of transmission routes from domestic and international events

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    "As an operations engineer, I was responsible for the entire network of connections from the radio to the transmitters. At the same time, I was in charge of all the reporter connections from sporting events, both here in the country, the World Cup, and the transmission routes from various international events. When the Olympics were in Japan, for example, Emperor Hirohito was giving a speech, he was on the screen, but the sound was not coming through, which was a problem of remote connection by chance, because all the interruptions were investigated by the Interior Ministry. The management of the long-distance cables was under the supervision of the Fifth Department of the Interior, so they investigated it first as sabotage, and then it turned out to be a technical malfunction in Japan. So I was in charge of networks like that."

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I was doing what I enjoyed, and politics was out of my mind

Jiří Lávička, 2024
Jiří Lávička, 2024
photo: Post Bellum
photo: Post Bellum
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Jiří Lávička was born on 16 March 1940 in Prague. In 1948 he partcipated in the XIth All-Sokol Meeting. After completing his primary education he entered the technical vocational school of communications in Brno, where he became a frequency mechanic. Shortly afterwards he started working in a radio exchange in Prague. There he became familiar with the operation of the radio network. For the next five years he studied electrical engineering at night at the secondary technical school in Panská Street and then graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. He worked at the Prague Long Distance Cable Administration (SDK), where he worked as an operations engineer and was responsible for the network of connections from the radio to the transmitters. Because of his employment, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). During the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, he was involved in ensuring the operation of radio broadcasting via cable distribution. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia during the normalisation period, he left the party in 1992. In 2023 he was living in Prague.

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