“I'll tell you something; not many people know about it. The fat cats had diplomatic stores in Prague. And they were in various townhouses in the centre of Prague, or even in Smíchov or Karlín. There was no sign anywhere. And they–the communists–went there to buy things that were not available anywhere else. So this existed. We knew about it, do you know why? Because I worked as a storekeeper at the receipt of goods and the drivers who brought us groceries . . . In the Kotva department store, there is still a large grocery store in the basement. During the communist era, it was essentially the most luxurious store in the republic. That was first-class; the Bolshevists were bragging about it. So Kotva, and then there was the department store Máj. And these stores were relatively well stocked because it was the pride of communism. So we did have these short-supply products. The suppliers who brought us the goods used to trade with us. For example, one car would bring meat - it was a fridge with meat. Or there were greengrocers. There were beer suppliers as well. We simply received fifty to eighty cars a day. From dawn to dusk. The supply there was very dense. And a driver who, for example, was transporting vegetables needed to get meat because many things were scarce, and we actually had almost everything there in Kotva. So we used to exchange it. For example, he gave us something, and we gave him or sold him something in return. So we used to trade like that. And he brought us, for example– Imagine the official bakeries, for example. Bread. The communists had their bakery outside Prague, in Mochov I think. And there they baked excellent bread, nice and round like in the old days, delicious and fragrant bread. And that baker used to deliver it to those diplomatic stores and to those communist stores that were secret - people didn't know about them at all. But he always had some extra bread and he used to give it to us in exchange for a crate of Pilsen beer, for example. Pilsner beer, which was also in short supply. It cost four crowns sixty, a bottle, I remember. That was a lot of money back then because normal beer cost one crown sixty, and Pilsen cost–I think–three sixty or four sixty. But it was not available on the market. So we were able to play around with the goods like that because we had them. So the communists always had everything they could wish for. But the common people had to have acquaintances or settle with little. Or stand in the line.”
“Of course, they herded us into those wagons, but before they herded us there, we had to– Under the station, how there are the lower platforms, the underpasses you go through before you go to the platform, it led through that underpass, about thirty steps, and then it was about twenty or twenty-five meters long. We had to run through that. The stetsecs [State Security officers, trans.] stood on the right and left with service dogs - all the barking, it was terrible. Rattle. It resounds well on the platform. The dogs barked and chased us. They only let us in one at a time so that they could relish it. We couldn’t run through it in groups of ten or something like that. They held us upstairs and then said: ‘Go on.’ They pushed you, you had to run down the stairs, and then you had to run through, and they were hitting you with clubs, left and right. So some people got beaten up badly. I only got hit about three times, I dodged, I ran pretty fast, and I was short and skinny, so I ran past them. Some tall boys got hit in the neck, head, and legs. It was pretty rough.”
“Imagine that we woke up – we lived in Spořilov – and in the morning, before noon, it was one plane after another. The Ankas were humming, we called it Anka. And they were landing in Ruzyně with the provisions, it was one plane after another. Then the tanks arrived during the morning. We have already started with the boys– But we didn't know yet– It wasn't until the morning that we turned on the radio and mom said: ‘They're already here. It's over.’ That was a shock. That was tough. I was just a young boy back then . . . We were scared. We could hear shooting from the city centre. Then we found out that the houses below the radio station were burning. Opposite the radio station, it flared up. There were demonstrations there. After all, we know it from those television and video recordings, from various films and photographs. Of course, I went to Prague the next day. So we saw the Russians, those tanks, those cars. Prague was full of the army, it was simply hell. And Spořilov was actually almost on the outskirts of Prague, behind the estate– Today it is already built up, there is Chodov, and it is connected all the way to Jižní Město. But back then, it [Spořilov] was the end of Prague and behind it were only fields. They settled in there and had camps and tents. They were in there for half a year, the Russians, the army. So it was tough, the state of war.”
Pavel Alexander Taťoun was born on 6 September 1954 in Lomnice near Rýmařov. His father, Ivan Taťoun, worked as a deputy secretary at the Central Council of Trade Unions in Prague, so the family soon moved to the capital city. From early childhood, the witness was strongly influenced by his older brother Petr Taťoun. He led him to alternative culture and later to the early underground movement, which the regime prosecuted and persecuted during normalization. Since his father left the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) at his request after the Warsaw Pact troops invaded in 1968, Pavel was not allowed to study at his dream art school of Václav Hollar. He trained as a low-voltage current operator. During his teenage years, he devoted himself to his life’s passion – painting. He rented a studio in Smíchov, where he created intensively and at the same time, he started becoming a part of the Prague underground circles. He discovered the iconic music groups of the time – The Plastic People Of The Universe and Dg 307. After a brutal attack on the planned concert of these two bands in 1974 in Rudolfov near České Budějovice, Pavel came under the radar of State Security (StB). Four years later, the situation in Prague was so unbearable that he decided to move to Moravia, his wife Jarmila’s birth town. During the following years, he became a link between the Moravian and Prague dissents. He distributed samizdat literature and smuggled large amounts of paper, on which this literature was transcribed to Prague. In 1982, he sent his painting “Composition of Love” to an exhibition in London. When he was subsequently talked about on the Voice of America, he became the focus of State Security’s interest again. His last exhibition was held two years later in Loštice cultural house, where the painting “The Fall of Babylon the Great” was confiscated. He was not allowed to exhibit anywhere until the Velvet Revolution. His brother and Charter 77 signatory Petr Taťoun was one of Václav Havel’s close friends and later colleagues. In 1992, Pavel Alexander Taťoun worked as a driver for Olga Havlová’s business trip to Italy. During the 1990s, he started exhibiting again and making a living from painting. Later, he taught painting to convicts in Mírov prison.
