REPCO

 “We are the generation that can compare”

Josef Cepek, frontier guard and policeman, born 1936.
Quoted in Miroslav Vaněk and Pavel Mücke, Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society

 

Us and freedom

We knew freedom after the Velvet Revolution when we could finally…Say what was on our minds…Speak at last our thoughts and hearts…Watch Václav Havel, our new democratically elected president, address the US Congress, saying we Czechs and Slovaks also have something to give, “Our freedom, independence and our newborn democracy have been purchased at great cost and we shall not surrender them”…We reminded the heirs of those who wrote and backed the US constitution with their lives of the meanings of freedom—

Our new freedoms were…To listen to the news in Czech with a straight face…To pray (although we are mostly atheists) to God without being ridiculed in class, called in front of our boss or jailed…To open a copy of Playboy appalled but able to read it…To stop the secret police from blackmailing us, telling our spouses of our affairs unless we spied for them…To not duck our heads and be anxious, conscious at all times of what we thought, said or did, were accused of or subjected to even when doing nothing until our Velvet Revolution—

Many people, one person’s growth

I was just a kid when the revolution happened—we say in Czech the word převratný for an epoch-making time…My small town developed with me as I grew up, the business towers rose in the centre together with my height as a child…I was only 12 and lucky because we had good university professors who had been forced to teach at primary school, they were still decent and when the revolution started they took students to Wenceslas Square, where the people protested for liberty…I grew up outside Prague and as a teen graduating middle school two-three months after the revolution, I recall our post-war history changed: we had always been told only the Russians freed us, now, they said it was the Americans too, suddenly, the Americans were back in our history…

…In my high school we went on strike following the general one of November 20^th and in my anti-communist family we were ecstatic, as my grandma hunting mushrooms exclaimed, “I’m reaping ‘shrooms like the devil is mowing down the commies!”…At the time I was 22 and it was like a key suddenly turning, things unlocked and we were let out and it was great but people did not know what to do or how to react…For a few years I was not yet 30 it was the Wild West, the police sat back on their heels and would not stop anyone from doing anything, looking the other way as criminals ran free…

…I almost did not notice the Revolution at first, as a young mother the first of my two sons was already born and as we started our farm kept our boys with my parents, built our business on my maternity leave, I hadn’t planned for either a family or farm but with the revolution suddenly had both…Earlier I had told my wife I did not want to bring up children under this regime, not believing it could change, then after the revolution I was responsible for more than just myself, our parents and also our town…I was already retired and suddenly no one wanted a cigarette thrown on the ground, weeds growing everywhere, to be embarrassed by our public toilets but we couldn’t shake all our habits…My grandfather never thought he would live to see it and died a few years later but told us, “Everything was dark and grey at night when the shops closed and everything sunk into sleep, now let’s see if you can make it different”...I was on his knee but alive and free believed that my village, my town, city and country could turn bright like the rest of the world—

Getting out and coming back

The world was suddenly open to us; in the past we had little use for passports…I remember to go abroad we needed our identity cards and permission from both the police and security forces, travel was only for the elites but now we could go…When I first set foot in Vienna, it was like seeing a fantastical beast previously unimaginable…I got out and worked in a pub in Elgin, Scotland…I became a nanny in Oxford to the manager of Radiohead and had never even heard of this famous band…I was nearly arrested trying to photograph an exotic ATM machine…I got a work-study visa to Snowdonia National Park in Wales and met my husband there, raising three children among Celts, people I never imagined growing up in Jižní Město, our socialist housing estate—

I started importing cheeses from the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and France…I voyaged like a European immigrant at the start of the 20th century to the United States and saw no flaws at first, it was so big and rich...I still dream about my first time abroad and cannot imagine my youth, my life, without them although so long ago and growing harder to remember—

The problems of new freedom

It was not what I imagined after the revolution; officially the communists were gone but still held on to everything…Even Havel was soon disappointed he said democracy in the full sense of the word is a horizon always distant and only 20 per cent of the country understood him in the Prague cafés, not the ordinary folks…Look how they are voting now even in the US-we used to repeat the slogan of the revolution “freedom is participation in power,” but who participates now? We used to ask how people use freedom, how do they use it now?

Freedom now for many is just to make do for themselves; to cheat, lie and steal like before in new ways…From the start people accused others of being informers and during the lustrace (lustration) after the revolution were presumed guilty, who knew the difference between crooked and just like one political party from another now…The ones who want power always find a way…Before we tuned into jammed foreign radio stations; now no one listens…We could cross the borders but still needed papers, we weren’t in the EU, not in Schengen…Even now they still see us and frankly we can act like second class Europeans, liberty seems too much for us…Freedom is a drug that let us down—

The first taste of new things after the revolution was intoxicating, but my grandfather who had seen everything, war, invasion, occupation, knew by Christmas 1989, he said wait, it would not go well…No one could imagine the economic problems, insecurity of work and everything else, the breakup of Czechoslovakia after we had been together so long, the separation without a referendum…What did we get? Fresh lies and smears of the press…Fierce competition dividing the rich and connected from the newly disenfranchised... It seems best to turn back to our cottages like after 1968 and the crushed Prague Spring, the past was better or at least easier…Who remembers why we even wanted freedom and do we, anymore?

In one moment

We are more inclined when we try and remember, recall seeing neighbouring countries, our fellow Visegrad states, retreating and losing what they fought for within living memory…Try not to forget what we were forced to endure before the Velvet Revolution, what we were compelled to do against our wills…To learn Russian, I still cannot speak the language of this false “brother” and unwanted master…To march in parades chanting slogans we did not believe in…To stay after work for compulsory courses on Marxism-Leninism where we slept and some held open their newspapers for the teacher to see…All we had to say, sign, join, eat, wear and witness…How scarce were goods and how rare clear consciences…How blocked everything was, inaccessible…How we saw pictures of the Vatican knowing we’d never see Rome, love rock music never see the Rolling Stones...How we weren’t allowed into the forests at night around a fire, at the frontier ten kilometres from the border manned by soldiers with guns…Try not to forget this now when I think or speak freely…When I leap on planes to unknown lands…Remember everything we could not do, that was not permitted in our socialist paradise—

 

Would I go back? “Whoever lives in fear is not a free human being”: another saying of our Velvet Revolution…Our revolution with only one night of bloodshed due to the goodness of people when no longer angry or petrified…Remember and revive the possibilities of freedom: …To continue what we were in our First Republic…To live again where we are, in the heart of Europe…To stake opportunities to do things new...To take chances to develop, experience and grow…To meet with frustrations, then to face and overcome obstacles…To try other ways of life…And notwithstanding our unofficial national creed of “it will get worse,” – to believe that things can be better for the young and young at heart…From one moment in the Velvet Revolution, 35 and speeding on years ago, when freedom was a rush, a wave, a sensation, an atmosphere that you could breathe in the streets and try on like new shoes, to think we could make this happen…To feel suddenly capable…To know and keep the memory of that fleeting, unrepeatable joy. 

Gabriel M. Paletz first came to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia just after the Velvet Revolution in 1990. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Southern California, he returned to Prague to teach screenwriting to students from five continents at the Prague Film School.