Ladislav Snopko

“The abolition of the leading role of the party. I remember that in Prague there were some speculations that it would come sometime in March 1990 after the negotiations with Adamec and his government and the like. We sat on the Public against Violence and my friends called me from the High Tatras, Gabo Ondrovič was a mayor there for two terms, and they asked us if we were crazy because the Mountain Rescue Service was prepared to trounce the communists. They said they would go on foot to Bratislava and though only ten would set out, a million would come to Bratislava to throw everything out. So we called to Prague and told them that Slovakia was prepared to annul the leading role of the party. Then, we announced our intention to annul the leading position of the party at the meeting. Vlado Ondruš, I think Ľubo Feldek, and Peter Kresánek went to Prague for negotiations, and you know, at that time I was at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts with Fedor Gál and when we were leaving it at about five in the morning, I unthinkingly grabbed Pravda and Smena newspapers. We went to Milan Kňažko’s home, where we were preparing the evening meeting and we were seeing them out as they were about to leave for Prague, when I suddenly noticed Jano Budaj reading newspapers. He said, ‘Guys, they have accepted it.’ The headlines of both newspapers informed that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia didn’t object to deletion of the leading role of the party. So they went to Prague with information that this problem had already been solved in Slovakia. I say, in this case the dynamism was much greater in Slovakia. When Václav Havel was in Bratislava at the National Theatre for the first time, then the Federal Assembly announced after their session that they decided to abolish the leading role of the party. It was a consequence of the pressure from the Public against Violence movement, the pressure which went from below. I think that the first period of the revolutionary enthusiasm in Slovakia ended on December 10, 1989. It was the stage of a real revolution and then, the stage of building structures came.”

“The fall of the communist regime. You know, I am still thinking about one thing when I evaluate the events of November 1989, I mean the Velvet Revolution. I still speculate whether the November events were the culmination of the previous period or the beginning of the new one. As the culmination of totalitarianism, it was a demonstration of a peaceful energy of wise, cultured people used against totalitarianism. It displayed the good as good and evil as evil and everybody understood it. From this perspective I think that November was paradoxically the culmination, the happy ending of that era, of that fairytale on normalisation. November was organised by people whose youth was in 1960s. Either we in Bratislava, the whole Coordination Centre of the Public against Violence, or Václav Havel and Pithart and all those who were responsible for November in the Czech Republic, all of them were people who more or less belong to the generation of the 1960s. I mean to the generation of people who believed in certain ideals, who only needed to change ideology into ideals. The revolution lasted and it probably definitely ended with elections in 1992 when the normal, everyday, pragmatic life began just like in other democratic countries where the populists became known as contemplative and quiet people and despite the fact that the situation sometimes seemed a bit charged, it always was a progress which we had in our hands, because after all also Mečiar’s hands were ours, weren’t they?”

“I think we still consider culture to be a sort of luxury, not to be a part of what us, Homo sapiens, sets apart from the animal species because there is no other difference between us. We have the same hunger, we breathe in the same way, we have to drink equally, we love or rather reproduce on the same principles, and the only thing differentiating us is the culture. However, we can’t understand it, but the Czechs, Polish, and Hungarians can. In these countries attending theatrical performances, concerts, exhibitions, and reading books belong to proprieties. It hasn’t been common in our country yet, and until it won’t be spontaneous, we won’t be equal. Actually, we can do ‘compulsory exercises’, we can even have the biggest production of cars in the world or jet aircrafts or some rockets, but since we won’t have the mentioned, we won’t be happy, nationally happy. It is a waste of words when some nationalists talk about our peculiarity and the like, it really is. We are not and I consider it to be one of the things, which haven’t been solved yet. I firmly believe that the Slovak population will reach this point; I believe that people will start to trust in themselves, in their own culture and their history because it hasn’t happened yet.”

“De facto, we formulated the program of the Public against Violence on the basis of the principles of the democratic society. We wrote twelve main points there, out of which almost all have already been accomplished, except for the separation of the Church and the state. And those media appearances, either in the SNP square or in the Studio Dialogue, inspired the whole Slovakia. Of course, we used to travel around Slovakia, for example we went by train to Košice and the like. The identity of Slovakia took the form of the Public against Violence and we expected, I had to admit, that we were a bit naive, that the society, which had already been sick of that policy, would transform and start working in accord with the civil order. Therefore, we didn’t intend to change the small Public against Violence movements, which were being established not only in other cities, but also in factories, into some political cells. Therefore, we were not interested to take high political positions, as I have already said, only two members of the Coordination Committee of the Public against Violence had a seat in the Slovak government led by Milan Čič because we understood that the system had to be administered by somebody who knew how to do it, so we just controlled it and paradoxically we lead the least important ministries. Ondruš was the Deputy Prime Minister for the Environment and I was the Minister of Culture.”

“I think we have to acknowledge the director of the Slovak Television Hlinický who understood that the change, which suddenly came, was a crucial change and opened the television for the Public against Violence. It was a sort of methodical centre, the Studio Dialogue and live broadcasts from the meetings held in the SNP Square were certain methodical centres, where the citizens of Slovakia could sit and see the way of thinking of the Public against Violence and their way of solving problems in the SNP Square. Then people did the same in the squares of their cities, therefore everything went so quickly and properly.”

“I remember one unbelievable event when a man came to me and said that he was going to buy some furniture with his wife but they lost twelve thousand crowns, so he asked me what to do. Milan and Jano passed the hat and they managed to collect about one hundred and eighty thousand crowns, which were usually delivered to us in plastic bags. Finally, we had a plastic bag full of money and we didn’t know what to do with it, so we called the post office and asked them to send a sack to us so as to put the money there. They did it, we put the money in and the sack travelled around, people passed it around until it got to the post. A week later, we were sitting in the Public against Violence, handling other issues, when a clerk from the post office phoned us, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me what we should do with that sack with one hundred and eighty thousand crowns? Obviously, you have forgotten about it.’ And we replied, ‘Oh, we really have done so.’ So we decided to buy an ambulance or something. You know, it took such a hectic ad hoc form. I remember the general strike, which we proclaimed. We informed the citizens of Slovakia about the oncoming general strike and we also sent this message to the government and to the party. It took place, although we didn’t suspect people would come to the square because we didn’t call the meeting. Then, they phoned us that there were fifty thousand people in the square and we had to do something. So I went there along with Fedor Gál. Moreover, I ‘requisitioned’ a butcher knife. You know, butchers, who wore the typical checked clothes, sat there in a big Avia car. I said, ‘Come on, let’s go to the square!’ So we went to the square, we walked pass the former Soviet Book, at present it is the Trinity, when I suddenly realized that I needed to do something, that people were expecting something. I jumped on the deck of that butchers’ car, grabbed the Czechoslovak flag from somebody’s hands and started to wave it. I went down and as I was still waving it, I brushed against something. I looked up and I saw the trolley wires. And there were two types of flags back then. One had a wooden handle and another had an aluminium handle. I was fortunate that coincidentally I had a flag with wooden handle, because if I had had an aluminium one, I would have been the only victim of the Velvet Revolution.”

“The idea was that after freeing the customs, Bratislava citizens would walk to the other side of Danube, opposite to Devín Castle, to the Hainburg side of the river, and they would greet the Hainburg’s mayor. The second group of Bratislava citizens would be at Devín Castle. There would be a boat sailing on Danube, where the loudspeaker system would be installed, loud enough to be heard on both sides of the river. On the boat there would be Karel Kryl playing to both Slovakia as well as Austria. This idea seemed to me the best way how to appeal to both riversides as Kryl worked in emigration in Free Europe, whereas he still stayed in Czechoslovakia and Slovakia present in his songs. Both groups on the riversides and people at Devín Castle would have microphones connected by transmitters with the loudspeaker system on the boat, where would be Kryl, and everything they would say would be heard on both sides. It would be such a first bridge of understanding. Even though the realization wasn’t easy, enthusiasm of people was immense. At first, when it was announced, there was a great shock in official spheres. However, as soon as it spread out among Bratislava citizens, everyone awaited December 10, 1989. More times Martin Bútora and I went to negotiate to the Border Guard’s Headquarters, which was on the way to Devín next to a quarry. We could feel how they gradually receded at the headquarters and then we only solved the operating issues. So the main problem of carrying out the event or not was solved from our side. Of course, we, the inexperienced enthusiastic revolutionaries, didn’t realize the fact that we interfered in competences of our Border Guard, but at the same time we also were about to open borders into foreign state which was during the past 40 years considered to be a war enemy. Without visa and elementary diplomatic actions. The period in which we lived was so amazingly, even though hectically, but positively oriented, that after dealing with our Austrian partners, including the mayor of Hainburg, they agreed on everything. Otherwise there were risks of problems not only from our Border Guard, but also from the side of Austrian customs guard.”

“In some way citizens of Bohemia and Slovakia remained absolutely defenceless towards the impacts, which we set off in the favour of revolution, but later, in the meantime they were being used by someone who wanted to divide Czechoslovakia, and of course, by commercials and marketing. And today I think the marketing is so far and so immensely dominant in the minds of people, that it’s necessary to do something with it. It’s sad to see massive influencing of people who want to have better life even though they are just fine now. Slovaks are well, comparing to others; even comparing to Slovaks before the year 1989 they are much better nowadays. From the spiritual point of view, that massaging towards values only of material character makes from people vulnerable puppets. They are unsure, unstable, thinking that the sense of life is in possessing something; that is the present classical reasoning. As a director of Cultural Facilities in Petržalka (Bratislava), since 1996 until 2006, I used to organize so-called anti-drug forums, which were public forums of discussion about addictions. However, it was not only about material addictions as alcohol, drugs, pills, but also about non material addictions as was gambling, sex, violence, healthy lifestyle, etc. Here I realized that an addict makes much greater effort to gain the object of his addiction than a man who is hungry and wants to eat. So when we watch how the commercials work today, they are programming people to be addicted to desires for new cars, e.g.; when you watch TV series, they are composed in a way that when one episode ends, you want to immediately see another one. Once I walked in Poprad by Kaufland. Opposite to me walked a man who pushed a cart full of stuff and suddenly he recognized me and began to tell me off about how we ended up, that life was much better during the socialism. I was shocked and of course, people started to gather around. I looked at him and asked: ‘Excuse me, but did you have such a full shopping cart? Back then you even didn’t know things like that existed. And look how many people are here today, tens and hundreds, having their carts as full as you.’ Well, he was quite decent, he turned red and apologized. But you know the problem is we talk about poverty, but it is not true poverty, it’s envy. I envy my neighbour has a Mercedes and I have only old Škoda. The thing is that the inward values are completely corrupted. It is connected with education, which doesn’t provide the basic value systems in certain hierarchy. There is a great film in the cinemas now All My Children (Všetky moje deti) about a priest Marián Kuffa. This is where I see the hope, in such men and women it dwells.”

“On that chilly day, December 10, 1989, this event occurred. People were walking through the customs, customs officers then just waved their hands. It was no more contact with needed stamps, visa or so. Then we stood on an improvised tribune on the Danube riverside with microphones; there were Milan Kňažko, Ján Budaj, Martin Bútora and I, and over a little boat we appealed to our people who were at Devín Castle. There were about ten thousand people at Devín Castle, Peter Dvorský sang there. And in the morning a Slovak mountain climber, the first Czechoslovak who was on Mount Everest, Zolo Demjan, hoisted a very long Czechoslovak flag, which his wife made during the night. That strip of Czechoslovak tricolour shined from the castle. Within the preparations an artist Daniel Brunovský made a huge heart from the rest of Iron Curtain’s wire. Then it was standing on the riverside where we carried out this project. Even before Austria and West Germany signed the contract with Czechoslovakia about breaking the Iron Curtain, we de facto broke it in this great way. Brunovský’s heart was later washed away by a massive flood, but he made its replica that is now placed on our riverside of Danube, under Devín Castle. Austrian customs officers tried to count that number of people crossing the border back and forth on December 10, and they said that by the number of hundred thousand they gave it up. They simply knew there were more than hundred thousand people. It was amazing how these people walked to Austria and returned back. The magic of Gentle November was so powerful that nothing what could violate good relations, which we longed for, happened.”

Snopko Ladislav

"Well, if I come back to that VPN, then the VPN, as the leadership of this already political movement, only had two members of its leadership in the government of national understanding, that is, Ondruš and me. And that is interesting, because today we all know that when political leaders succeed, they become the leaders of the country. Either by presidents or prime ministers or by politicians working in these positions. This is something I always think about, that maybe we shouldn't have gone so far with the non-political politics, because by doing so we also helped to create the duplicity of Slovak public political life that still works today. On one side there are those who go and get wet, on the other side there are those who comment on them but are clean. I think that even those commentators should occasionally immerse themselves in the complex environment called political life. Because that environment is really very complex, often dirty or dirty because quality people don't go there, but only those who go there for utilitarian reasons. But even so, the division into good and bad that works today, because nowadays politician is not a positive word. Although people who talk about dirty politicians are actually condemning the profession that takes care of them and this reasoning is perverse. But that happened partly thanks to the fact that the elites wanted to remain elites, so they didn't go into politics. Rather, they went to the positions of MPs, advisers to politicians, etc., but to that politics where you go to the market with your skin in the role of minister, speaker of parliament, prime minister, where you have to be able to make compromises and you have to be able to estimate to what extent that compromise serves what I'm about and to what extent it sinks what I'm about. And these are very difficult tasks. And by the fact that more and more simple people enter the political world, they cannot distinguish these differences and then it all goes to waste."

"Well, in this spirit, but not as a strategic decision, we simply don't need to take that time, our gray zone, as if it was our strategic conscious decision, that we will not dissent, that we will try to do it in some way so that for us, the state power, especially its totalitarian component called ŠtB, did not follow up on it so much, and at the same time it was a certain space of freedom and free breathing. That's not how we planned it. We are simply spontaneous, but we were also quite young, looking for spaces that the company made possible. If you imagine a fish in water, when the water is low, it always moves through the shallows towards the deeper water, so it eventually gets into it. We similarly spontaneously looked for possibilities where we could get away with that Bolshevik, where we could do something that would have the stamp of freedom, free-spiritedness and a certain free, unencumbered expression. So in 1980...and it was done on the basis of personal contacts, that is, not official, but personal contacts."

"As I said, there was no dissent in Slovakia. There was indeed a secret church in Slovakia, but the secret church was introverted. It worked in large quantitative numbers, but their quality was introverted. That is, they did not go to other concurrent structures of the society at that time. That's why, for example, Velvet Revolution in personnel form, or what personnel form the original VPN coordination committee had, there is no one from the secret church. There are completely different areas that we will talk about, of course. But probably only in the second part. All of these were communication possibilities that arose spontaneously. In the Czech Republic, by publishing samizdates, not one but many, by having meetings at different levels, feedback also arose and they were already creating something that was institutionalized. We managed to create this dimension only in the environment of environmentalists. But this is also a gray area, because the Slovak Association of Environmental Defenders (SZOPK, author's note) was a legal official platform, only its ZO 6 (basic organization) and the section for the protection of folk architecture, mainly thanks to Maňo (Mikuláš) Huba, also got this free dimension. In a similar way, although not institutionalized, the unofficial scene of Slovak contemporary art was functioning."

"I know that the meetings with him... because Dominik Tatarka was a person who talked. His thinking progressed in speech, the contacts he made and everything else happened in speech. Of all the meetings we had together, I will mention one very interesting and bizarre one, but one that accurately describes that time and atmosphere. It was in the second half of the 70s, I don't know if it was 77 or 78. Dominik always had a certain problem with the fact that when he met someone, the state security immediately took them in for questioning. He didn't have that problem with us, because we had already beaten our first interrogations, as they say, and secondly, he had a real reason to come to us, because one of us was his daughter's husband. But despite that, we always implemented those meetings in a way that could have as few witnesses as possible. And so we decided that the best place for meetings and a good debate would be the saunas at Bernolák, in the university dormitory. Back then there were saunas by the pool as a new invention. So about seven of us from Gorazd with Dominik went to the sauna, where bodybuilders and those who took the sauna exactly in the spirit of the health and physical significance it had. We got there, we put on the sheets they gave us, it looked dignified like togas. We came with a basket, in the basket were roast chickens, bottles of red wine. We sat down, Dominik talked, we listened, ate, drank. Those bodybuilders didn't even know what it is, if we are Martians, or why, and who lives there like that. It had an immense advantage because it could not be overheard, everyone there was naked, including us. Nobody knew in advance that we would come there. So it was kind of a magic discourse or a sauna salon or whatever I would call it. And Dominik kept talking and taught us that the primary interpersonal communication is in the conversation. And it is best when the conversation happens directly. Whenever we found ourselves in any situation, we always dedicated it to communication, conversation and not to any practical orders or just dry scientific factual musings. This is the contribution of one of the most important personalities of Slovak history to our rising generation, and I am very sorry that this contribution has not yet been taken up in the right way."

"As you know Košice, they don't have a main square, they have such a big street that they call Hlavná uliča, it used to be the so-called Lenin Square. Well, university students live in Košice mainly on Terasa - they are doctors and natural scientists, and then in the direction of "Maratonca", where there were more technical sciences. And we, as students, went to celebrate the victory, one huge stream from the Terrace, the other from the other part. We met at the Peace Marathon square and there was already a large cordon of policemen, maybe 350 to 400 of them with watering trucks, etc. And with such a wall green uniformed bodies with batons blocked the entrance to the city center. Every time we started to press them, they beat us and pushed us out. This went on for quite a while amid tumultuous shouting, until a married couple walked from the cinema behind the policemen. It was early evening. That husband was wearing a suit or jacket and a dederon shirt. Dederon shirt was worn then, plastic snow white. For unknown reasons, the policemen beat the gentleman who was leaving the cinema with his wife so that he was lying on the ground and his white shirt was covered in blood, so it was clearly and dramatically reflected. And then I experienced what is called a crowd. We, the people, the students, who expressed our opinion and wanted to show with our collective power that our opinion also has a place in the world, suddenly turned into a literal beast, which can be called an enraged crowd. We ran at the policemen, there were about a thousand of us, so in terms of human bodies we were overwhelmingly above the policemen. They suddenly realized at the last moment that it was bad, they pulled out their revolvers, but before they tried to do anything, we ran over them, kicked them, smashed their cars, smashed the windows, it was literally a massacre. They ran away, it was a mess. Then we walked around the big square until three to four in the morning, shouted anti-communist slogans, and paid tribute to Milan Rastislav Štefánik. Since it was a spontaneous riot, we got tired and went to our dorm rooms, and that's how it ended. For a long, long time after that, many of us were studying for exams, one had a police cap, the other a police jacket, just traces of that crazy attack. It is interesting, but it would have to be historically verified that we have heard that the state leadership severely punished the police chief and all responsible officials for taking such harsh measures against us and for provoking our even harsher reaction. It was something incredible, it still gives me chills when I remember how we ran like crazy with our bare hands. We swept away those policemen, they had batons and water cannons for nothing."

“Today many people reproach us for the revolution was not aggressive, but gentle. I don’t feel guilty at all, because what has been happening in the society now, 25 years after our Gentle Revolution, is not caused by its good or bad presentation. Reasons for this are our bad traits, bad traits of naughty people. We weren’t brought up to functioning in democracy. Maybe our only mistake was that we thought, as Martin Bútora used to say, that it was enough just to uncurse people from the communist evil and this way they’d become good, as people are good by their nature. But it’s not like that. Weak people don’t have a chance to be good, very easily they get to ways of effortless solutions and temptations. The only mistake we have truly made was that we didn’t realize that solving of the back then situation dwelt only in education. We neglected attitude towards schooling, education, and towards the whole learning system of upcoming generations. We left it to the market mechanism, which is normally able to provide successful consume functioning of the society, but absolutely fails to ensure intellectual society’s functioning. When I turn back to November 1989, to all what happened in Bratislava since November 16, 1989 up to the first free elections, that was the only initial situation, to which we may return as to a credible one. It would be enough just to go back to that point and follow up with the humanity, decency and tolerance.”