Miroslav Šolar

* 1943

  • "I was on vacation at the time. I was on my way home, probably from Bulgaria or somewhere. I was coming home, I was on public transport when Ondra had already been found, and they were doing a reconstruction with him in the square. I was on a bus, the square was full of people. I saw someone with a white tape on their arm, the cops with him. But I still didn't know, I wasn't in the picture. I asked someone I knew on the bus what was going on. He said, 'You'll stop laughing. It's yours Stavinoha.' In the morning I came to the shaft and the guys from the group already knew it. Within ten days, that's what Ondra told me afterwards, when he came back from prison, he was in the interrogation room about three times before they finally sentenced him. They came to get him at the shaft in the night. They went down, guarded him even while he was bathing. To keep him from trying to escape, supposedly. So I only found out about Ondra Stavinoha's act after I returned from vacation, when they were doing the reconstruction with him in the square in Příbram."

  • "I was on the morning shift at that time, on 21 August [1968]. We arrived at the shaft, but there was talk of not working. There was a slogan - you probably read it somewhere: 'Not even a gram of uranium to the Russians!' But then, while we were gathered there, in that shaft management building, it was decided that, since we didn't know how long we wouldn't work, it was necessary to go down and secure the individual workings against cave-ins. That was done the next day. We only had one day to do it. Then we didn't work for ten days. At that time, Shaft 19, where we later worked for years, was not yet in operation. We did surface workshops. We were working around the mixer, for instance. We then got paid the average salary we had."

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    Praha, 10.08.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 53:16
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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We considered it a schoolboy prank. They viewed it as terrorism

Miroslav Šolar in 2021
Miroslav Šolar in 2021
photo: Post Bellum filming

Miroslav Šolar was born on 7 September 1943 in Pilsen, to a family of fireman František Šolar. During his childhood and adolescence, he was mainly interested in sports, played competitive football and hockey, and trained at the first national Spartakiade in 1955. He trained as an electromechanic at the former Škoda Factories, at that time renamed the V. I. Lenin Factories. He graduated from the industrial school while working there. In 1963, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), convinced that he would be able to influence his surroundings for the better. During his military service in Tachov, he met his wife, and they had a daughter together. After the war, he therefore sought employment with an apartment. He found it in the uranium mines in Příbram, where he started working first as an electrician and later as a miner in the shaft. At the beginning of the 1970s, he became a foreman. Ondřej Stavinoha, who blew up a statue of Klement Gottwald in Příbram in 1978 to protest against the tenth anniversary of the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops, was also a member of his mining group. Miroslav Šolar did not approve of this act, but in court, he offered that the work collective would vouch for Ondřej Stavinoha. When his former subordinate served his sentence, he allowed him to return to work at the mines. Miroslav Šolar returned to his profession as an electrician after 1989 and retired in 1993. In 2013, he resigned from the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) because he no longer considered his membership meaningful.