Martin Štainer

“I knew people who had problems because of their cultural activities, but that’s one thing. I also saw there was a heap of other people who got in trouble for their civic opinions. And of course, it was an obvious thing that people sat in prison for their political views. I saw Chartists, and the problems they had. Or the problems of people who spoke out about 1968, and of their children, my classmates, who were barred from studying, for instance. They were excellent students at secondary school, but the regime decided that these people can’t have a university education. Those were all issues that I was well aware of, that bothered me a lot. That was one thing. The second was that I was studying at the Faculty of Education, and at the time I couldn’t imagine not becoming a teacher, but at the time I kept getting signals that perhaps I wouldn’t complete the school, simply because I wasn’t worthy of a degree in education, or that because I wore long hair, I didn’t behave like a proper student of the Faculty of Education, a future teacher. But it got worse. Towards the end... I’d say that the fear was subdued by the anger, the degree to which the authorities were arogant. And that you kept coming up against human stupidity and you suddenly came to know more and more people who had Party functions but were terrible teachers, and they were important, and I don’t know who they brown-nosed and so on. And there were more and more of them, so that when you looked around, you couldn’t see any real personality among all these functionaties. I was disillusioned. I didn’t like the idea that I was to just come to terms with the fact. Because that would have probably meant that the friends who’d been blocked up after sixty-eight, I would have pretty much joined their ranks, regardless of whether I wanted to achieve something, whether I was dull or not, what I could or couldn’t do. Simply, that a person is predestined to being a manual labourer in some chemical plant or something just because he has an opinion.”

“One thing that did work out was that I have an excellent opportunity to live in a different regime than the one I had to before, one which I was worried my children would have to live in - in conditions ruled by such stupidity. On the other hand, the longer it is from the revolution, the more I feel that the stupidity is coming back to power. I think that the main thing is that few people, decent people especially, are willing to enter the public scene and do something for the community. The way the democratic elections are done, the political plurality, those are things that simply ruins intelligent, honest, and capable people. You have to go through several moments of voting - will it be you, or the other guy? And now, it often doesn’t matter if you’re intelligent, capable, educated, experienced, hard-working, honest, but the question is who has more friends in the vote. When you secure yourself the people and give them small quid pro quos, then the day comes when they will vote for you. Yes, that is a pseudodemocratic method, but it allows those who have the audacity, the impudence - cheats, manipulators - to gradually get above those who are decent and don’t have such mean tactics.”

“One time I wrote the minister of education an angry letter. It was in the period of Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika, so I wrote the minister a letter in which I criticised the state of Socialist university education etc. She did send a terse reply, but they took the matter up with the rector of the university, who sent it on to the faculty. Sometime in summer 1989 I was invited to the head of the department; when I arrived, I found the Party chairman of the faculty there as well. They started reasoning with me, what had I done, that I couldn’t behave like that to the comrade minister, that I was an embarrassment to the whole university, etc. I was such a dolt I just couldn’t understand that something bad had happened. I had expressed my opinion; I thought I had the right to do so. It might sound very naive, but I didn’t really consider that it might cause trouble. I wasn’t a bad student, I fulfilled my duties, and although I wore long hair and had problems because of it, I always reckoned they couldn’t do much to me because they didn’t have anything to stand an argument on. But I was wrong, of course. Because I often spoke out openly, and I enjoyed attending the union [Socialist Youth Union - trans.] meetings at the faculty. I spoilt the atmosphere for them. But on the other hand I increased their attendance rate, because whenever there was a union meeting, my thirty-odd classmates knew it was worth finding the time to go there.”