Petr Placák

“What I hated most about the Communist regime were the lies and the pretence; you feel things like that very intensely when you’re a child. At primary school we turned everything upside down: when a Communist taught there were nine planets, we adhered to a pre-Copernican solar system, we claimed there were seven planets and the Earth was the centre, not the Sun. But it wasn’t just for fun - you could work out a lot of things like that.”

“[Q: What kind of people worked for State Security?] According me, about eighty per cent of them were typical lumpenproletarians [from a term coined by Karl Marx, meaning ‘miscreants’, low life - trans.] blokes who didn’t know about anything - their school reports would be filled with threes and fours [equivalent to C, D grades - trans.], with ones [As] always only in physical education. State Security offered them easy money, similarly to the SA in the 1930s. And seeing that they were often primitive characters, it must have felt good to them that they had power over others and that they constituted the regime’s elite, feared by all.”

“What was the investigation of that case like?” “I have to say that I felt relieved when the criminal police eventually handed me over to the StB, because I finally knew how I was standing. Originally, the criminal police was playing such a mean game with me… at first, they were pretending that they were investigating something, or they believed so. Then the State Secret Police stepped in, they kept doing as if they were running the investigation, and I was not experienced in that, I really did not know whether they really were investigating something or not, if there really was something behind it or not… There was a claim that somebody had raided a petrol station, and that a gun similar to the one I had was used in the assault. And I still did not know whether this was true or not. I made stupid mistakes, like willingly giving them some texts, so that they could verify that the suspicion was not true. Had I known what was going on, I obviously wouldn’t have given them anything. When this pretence was over and they handed me over to the StB, I felt greatly relieved. Now it was clear what was going on.”

“And as for the importance of the demonstrations?” “I believe they were of great importance because what mattered was not just the overthrowing of the regime itself, but the manner in which it was done, the fact that the regime was not reformed by some State Police members and the like, but that the revolution of 17th November was accomplished by people who were openly protesting against the regime and who had nothing in common with it. And at first there were thousands of people involved in these demonstrations, then tens of thousands, and then it became a matter of the whole nation. If the demonstrations had not been there before, then there would have been no 17th November, nor would the general strikes have taken place the way they did, I think.”

“The activity of the State Police actually relied on two things: prevention and repression. It combined both of these. The prevention consisted of incessant bullying, intimidation, of an effort to deter people from activities which the regime did not like – publishing books, samizdat… If this did not help, repression followed, and it is very hard to tell the exact intentions of the StB officials in individual cases, often it was done just at the whim of some StB boss, or upon an order from the highest authorities; then it concerned mostly people like Václav Havel, and those who were known all over the world. In these cases, some prosecution then followed. It also depended a lot on where the person lived, whether in the countryside, or in Prague. In the countryside it was much worse for these people, because there were few of them there, and the StB agents tried to do their work properly and they were bothering them all day long, from the morning till the evening. While here in Prague there were hundreds of us, so it wasn’t that bad. Anyway, it all relied on maintaining this atmosphere of being constantly threatened. Anytime, they could storm into the flat you lived in, and so you could never feel safe anywhere, unless you were somewhere in the middle of a forest, or on some trip about which you had not told anyone. To a certain extent it was such a psychological war, which sometimes overgrew into acts of repression.”

“They were the best blokes. One would think that as pensioners that would at least have some self-restraint or dignity of the old age, they were between forty-five and sixty-five, some of them still remembered the communist takeover of power. And the hatred and malice was really emanating from these people, I think I have never seen anything like that anywhere else. These old proletarians and their way of speaking. I remember one young mother with two children who was there, and one old People’s Militia member was threatening her: ´You cow, go home with those bastards, or I smash that face of yours…´ That’s the way they spoke. Really, this was the staunchest sort of the proletariat, and you could see it on their faces, their faces were just unbelievable. The State Police members, they were just young brags, they were nothing compared to these guys.”

“What we wanted: above all to live as we liked, to do our own stuff, to have our own world, independent of the regime. And naturally, when the regime was bothering us, we were then doing the same. It was mutual. But I absolutely did not think that the regime could collapse, I only realized that when I learnt that they have permitted the student demonstration in November 1989. Before that, I was simply thinking that the bastards would hold the power as long as they could.”

“You have founded the Czech Children association. Could you explain when it was founded, what it was, and what was your aim?” “The Czech Children initiative came into being in spring 1988. The founding manifesto included a proclamation calling for a restoration of the Czech kingdom. I wanted to come up with something, which would sound as the most alien, most distant, most ungraspable thing to the communists. And the idea of Czech kingdom suited this well. It carried the notion of something traditional, and it was the communists who were exotic here, who made an intrusion here after that Bolshevik revolution. The other point was that we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the older generation of dissidents. We did understand their ideological point of departure, but they were not that close to us in that.”