Robert Valík

* 1957

  • "So after all, it was the mid-seventies, it wasn't the sixties anymore, the cops used to do raids or catch guys with longer hair, catch them on the street and take them to the barber and stuff like that, but back then it was important to have long hair on your ID. If a person wanted to wear it normally, otherwise, when they did checks on the streets of course, if they saw long hair on guys, they would often perust them just so that they could harass them, and if someone didn't have long hair on their ID and in fact did, they would pay a fine, usually thirty crowns. But then with the conscription it was that whoever didn't have it, immediately had to, there was perhaps a barber, I can't remember exactly, but immediately had to get a haircut, whoever didn't have long hair in the ID card, and I solved it by deliberately losing my ID card and going to get a new one, already with the long hair. Of course, the policemen there, the communist ones, were looking at me in disgust because I had long hair and I was going to get my ID card: 'How can you imagine going to the office like that?I still had my jeans torn off, because they were expensive, so you couldn't afford new ones all the time, they were falling apart, so it was a terrible humiliation for them when someone like that came there.'"

  • "I studied for two years at the building industry school, but I was not very good at it and then it was depressing, it was the hardest school in Zlín out of the secondary schools. For example, at the mechanical engineering school nobody was bothered by long hair or jeans, and at the chemical school, there was also a leather industrial school, which was artistically oriented towards the design of shoes and so on, so there was freedom, you could wear long hair, jeans, nobody minded, but at the construction school it was like this, we used to sit in a class and now the headmaster and the deputy headmaster came in and interrupted the class and said: 'Boys, stand up! Face backwards.'So we turned around and now they were just going, 'You, you, you, you, get a haircut! The next day you come in with your hair cut, your hair must not go over your ears and back of your collar.'"

  • "It was the third grade, the teacher started telling us about the liberation by the American army, how the evil Americans didn't go from Pilsen to help Prague, that it was their shit, and at the same time she claimed it was a hundred: 'That's some fifty kilometers, they didn't come, they could have helped.' And because I knew from home that it was an agreement they couldn’t break, I came home completely devastated, telling how we were being lied to at school. That was third grade, I was eight or nine years old, something like that. And how unhappy I was about it even then."

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    Zlín, 24.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:11:17
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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Comrades turned their hatred to Máničky (young people with long hair) against each other

Robert Valik in 1976
Robert Valik in 1976
photo: archive of a witness

Robert Valík was born on 17 October 1957 in Gottwaldov. His grandfather was a Hussite priest and anti-Nazi resistance fighter Ferdinand Valík. Robert grew up in a family that made no secret of its negative attitude towards the communist regime. At the age of thirteen he fell in love with Western music, the desire for freedom, jeans and long hair. Already in high school, he had problems because of his appearance and he also struggled with the fact that the construction industry, which he entered in Gottwaldov in 1973, was then notorious for its harsh attitude towards “glitch youth”. Therefore, he left his studies at the age of seventeen and started working. Two years later he had to join the military service, but due to health problems with blood pressure he got out after only half a year, and a few years after that he was officially discharged from the army. During the 1980s, Robert Valík began to produce and distribute samizdat in cooperation with other Gottwald dissidents. In 1986 he signed Charter 77 and a few years later he was one of the founding members of the Gottwald faction of the Society of Friends of the USA.