Jaroslav Spurný

"I would probably use the word 'party'. It was an unbelievable party, more or less without alcohol, because there wasn't much drinking - we were having beer only later in the evening. It was such an explosion of joy, anticipation, curiosity, cluelessness, everything all together. Something that made me feel so good. Things you didn't know before suddenly came up. And at the same time, there was this Independent Press Centre coming into being, which I felt to be terribly essential. Because then it started to get organised, and taxi drivers and students started to walk in. Out of nowhere a taxi driver called Pepa Zajíček appeared, he was an incredibly energetic person. This man - the taxi driver - when he saw what we were doing, saw our enthusiasm and saw our abilities, which he was able to evaluate emotionally, he started going round the printers and started forcing what we were doing on the printers – he persuaded them to print it. So he managed to raise our print run within a week. We already had a little bit of access to printers in the beginning - from maybe ten thousand to a hundred thousand copies within a week. To a hundred and twenty thousand copies that were given away for free. We gave it to the students and to the taxi drivers who delivered it all over Czechoslovakia. It was taken to the trains, the trains always took it somewhere. I know that people read it, we got - and that was also my job - hundreds of letters."

"On the 19th I probably... either I got a call, I don't know how I found out - I found out about Martin Šmíd's death. Which, as it turned out later, was not true. What we did: we agreed with the children - we didn't want to risk it anymore - that they would stay at home, and my wife and I went to Wenceslas Square first thing in the morning. There were relatively many people there, but it was not a demonstration. The people were walking on the sidewalks around Wenceslas Square - quietly, nobody was shouting anything. And only from the loudspeakers was there a regular announcement - I don't know, every fifteen or twenty minutes - that the information about Martin Šmid's death was false, that nothing had happened on Národní třída, that everything was fine. But at the same time I knew - it was obvious - that all those people who were on Wenceslas Square were convinced that the regime had overstepped. And there was an atmosphere - there were normal people there - and I realized that the system was over. That those people who were quietly walking around there, that they were actually a kind of message, that they were a sign. To me, they were a sign that it was ending. To this day, actually, the memory of that morning somehow moves me. The atmosphere was incredibly strong."

"Of course, the 1980s, the end of the 1980s or the second half of the 1980s, was to some extent a clash of generations in the dissent. There were people - people of '68 or the founders of Charter 77, people who are now, if they are alive, in their eighties. But then there was the younger generation that grew up more from the underground. But they were mostly people five or ten years younger than me, and they were rebelling a little bit - at least in Prague - but actually elsewhere as well - rebelling against this kind of moderate dissident, slightly left-wing, slightly '68-flavoured protest. And they had their own protest, which was much more strident. Which no longer accepted any intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism. Which somehow hadn't experienced the freedom of the sixties that was actually created somehow from above - instead they wanted to create that freedom from below. Those people did it themselves."

"It was actually quite common. It wasn't my personal idea, not my invention. I'm not going to say it was done on daily basis, but I knew people who had done it to avoid the military service before me and afterwards. I was also the initiator of about five or ten people who avoided the service by either demonstrating suicide or trying to play out some mental aberration or something. I actually did cut my veins, and the magical thing was that I bled relatively a lot, but at the same time I knew that I couldn't die of it. It was just a cut, I knew I wouldn't bleed out. It was not that deep. I knew the bleeding would stop eventually. So I made a bit of a mess in a public place, in a public toilet – but I kept the door closed. Then, when I saw that it looked pretty crazy and that someone would call the ambulance, I opened the door. And it wasn't until about the fifth person who found me - or the fourth person who found me – who eventually called the ambulance, so it took some time."

"Could you please describe the interrogations?" - "It wasn't, it wasn't anything, it wasn't anything terrible. Before they put me in detention, they were asking me all sorts of questions about who I knew, and they were showing me pictures of people from the underground and people from dissent and kept asking me whether I knew them and so on. But the policemen didn't quite understand one basic thing - how the people who were outside the regime, how they actually got to know each other. How was it possible. Because I travelled relatively a lot around the Czech Republic. And they didn't understand at all how I could just come from Brno to Olomouc and find the right people there who had the same mind-set as me. They couldn't understand what kind of sign we used. And it was actually simple, every city had people who were trying to do something. And because there weren't many places to meet, they would meet in pubs. It was always one or two pubs where these meetings were tolerated, and you could find that pub very quickly even in a big city, like Prague. Or you'd heard about it and so on. So that was actually their big interest, they wanted to know who I knew and how we passed on the information."

"The detention itself was amazing in its own way. Because when you're arrested, and you're in that prison, which was a room no bigger than this, with four other people... Four people in a space of two and a half by four and a half metres. And there's a toilet in that room, I should point out, and the toilet was not separated in any way from the rest of the room, so it was very rough at first. But at the same time, it took about a week or so before I started to realize that it was rough, but that I had gotten to a place that couldn't break me. And paradoxically, in the six months that I was in detention, I came to the conclusion that my inner freedom was not breakable, not by the communist regime, not by the prison, not by the stupid Secret police who interrogated me, not by those who accused me of things. Well, and that was amazing. So the stay in detention was actually to some extent a joy."

"I left school... saying that the school was violating basic human rights. I admit I didn't know much about human rights back then, but I left this note there. Which apparently the headmaster sent to the right places, the Secret police (StB), I suppose. Well, about ten months later, I was arrested. But I was arrested more than once in those ten months, because I had already started to move around, let's say, in a society... where it was clear that it wasn't exactly a society that was building communism. It was people who were protesting, it was people who were reading books. It was quite incredible that, for example, the police confiscated books from me that I had borrowed from the library. Sometimes there were books left in libraries that didn't really belong there, that were banned but the librarians forgot to put them out. And I, when I borrowed them and then I was detained by the police, they confiscated the books. It was just kind of weird. And it kind of logically led to the later arrest. Just one day, I and my friend, who is long dead, were checked by the police at the station in Přerov. Somehow we didn't seem right to them so they took us to the police station and then they found out that we were actually, as they rightly put it, 'material fit for jail'. And then they were just looking for a reason to lock us up. And I spent six months in jail."

„ We were usually issued with the membranes, we´d go somewhere to get them, but I don’t remember where anymore. Ivan Lamper would pay us for the paper we bought. I knew all stationeries in Prague. Actually those membranes were on sale to. We´d get the texts here or they gave them over in pubs. I don’t remember the details, just all the piles of papers in our flat. Here in the house a communist lived, who was pretty tough, who confessed in 1990s that he knew about the fact we printed stuff at home. I was suspicious to see that there is all the blinking in out flat night and day. Yet he never reported us and the secret police never came. I brought the copy machine back to the Revolver office in 1989.“

„We discussed our attitudes towards the regime right at the beginning and now I cannot tell you, whether he was close to me immediately or not. In the first moments he surely seemed radial to me. I was telling myself: Why go that far. Yet the years 1974 to 1977 were very significant to me, so much happened then. My own attitude to regime changed from the first wondering and claiming there is no need to take such extreme approaches, to almost total sharing. I understood that the attitude of Miroslav Tichý is completely fine. Of course no one lives perfectly. From my perspective today he was cheating as his parents were getting his disability pension and somehow they took care of him. He was not left in the street. He´d probably die soon like that. Having that home he didn’t go further than to a junk heap, where he found everything he needed to live – things for his camera and clothes. And he had nothing in common with the regime.“

„In that year my hair already grew longer and when the director saw me, he thought he´d get mad. I got somehow jolly and I said I was leaving the school. He replied that he´s glad but I have to write it all down, otherwise he could not kick me out. Those were the regulations then, if he threw me out, they´d have a problem not being able to manage me as a student. And so I wrote down my reasons for leaving due to breaching basic human rights. The letter then was a key to my fate later.“