Jiří Blažíček

* 1942

  • "Both my father and mother were in the Communist Party. My father believed in it, he believed in it a lot... He had no idea what it was like in the Soviet Union. The first time he got abroad was through Tesla and physical education, he was in Italy on some sort of trip [in 1966 or so]. And he didn't believe that people in the West lived normally. I was a little worried about him, he was still convinced that everything was fine... that Russia was good and that we were doing well here."

  • "And what was Russia like at that time [in the 1970s], what was life like there...?" - "For me it was horrible. One thing is what they wanted to show you - a big house, Lomonosov University... and there were several of those houses. But we took a taxi, it cost a few crowns in those days, and we drove ourselves. And when possible, on that day, after the official tour program. Nobody was watching where we were going, we were a tour. So, we saw the liquor vending machines, it was unbelievable, gypsies who had American cars with trailers, this was near Yerevan - we're driving and suddenly we see a camp full of Russian gypsies with cool cars and they were telling us: 'Come!' So we went, they invited us for shashlik. They took it out on the road and cooked it... So, we experienced things like that."

  • "Because I used to show it to kids in the Sokol gym when I was still going to the gym with my dad. So, I thought if the boys brought us a developed film, we could project it on the wall and use the camera to capture and broadcast it. That was my idea. They brought in a projector, and I painted posters that said: WE ARE CONNECTING. Everything was projected on the wall and the TV broadcast it. They brought films, and they showed what was going on in the streets, what people filmed where... They used to go to Jindřišská Street to develop the films. It was projected on the wall and through a normal camera it was broadcasted."

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 07.03.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:41:48
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Everything was done to get the information out to the people

Jiří Blažíček in 2022
Jiří Blažíček in 2022
photo: Post Bellum, 7. 3. 2022

Jiří Blažíček was born on 2 October 1942 in Prague. In 1951-1958 he lived with his family in the newly built Solidarita housing estate in Strašnice. He trained as a frequency mechanic at the Tesla Strašnice factory. In 1960-1962, at the time of the Berlin and Cuban crises, he was in the compulsory military service in Kbely, Prague. In the 1960s, he started working as a camera technician in television transmission cars. He witnessed the events in the centre of Prague in August 1968, helping to keep the television broadcasts running in the days shortly after the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops. In the 1970s he worked as an electrician for the German and Austrian circus Rebernigg and Sarrasani. From 1973 to 1989 he worked as a repairman of music machines. At the time of the recording in 2022, he lived in Hřensko.