Pavel Bratinka

* 1946

  • “After all, the Act on Illegality of the Communist Regime clearly states why the regime was contemptible, in just a four points. You wouldn't hear it so often, and I just love to talk about it with foreigners, who would roll their eyes, because they still think the worst thing was that there was no democracy. No way! You can have a country that is not democratic, but it can still provide a good standard of living. A country, where you're not in danger of having your career ruined just because you don't bow down to them. And that's exactly what happened here! You had to witness all the crimes, not just be silent – you had to bow to the power, actively, you had to attend all those May Day parades or join the Communist Party – so you could live a normal life. So that your children could study. The party forced people to bow down to its lies and its crimes, knowing it was all just lies and crimes all the way, and to celebrate it. That's basically a moment when your soul dies. That's the most terrible thing there is.”

  • "The Nazis claimed that people were unequal. And Communism, like I said, claimed that we were all equal, that our common value was zero! Officially, the Communists claimed that the man was nothing but a living matter, although complicated. Sorry, but that's the way it is... Then of course Stalin, when he treated people as if they were just a cinder, he behaved like a true Marxist-Leninist. As for them, a human being has no value. Envy and hatred, on the other hand, are given enormous value. This void, the fact that the man has no value, but this hatred and envy are of enormous value... You can feel clearly how much of a nonsense it is, with all those inherent contradictions.”

  • “The library’s charm resided in the fact that you could read lots of dailies and weeklies there with just a one-day delay. The first three years, until sixty-eight, the American embassy’s car even brought magazines and newspapers directly to my house every week. And so I had so many issues of International Herald Tribune, Life, Newsweek, Time... that I could take a pitchfork to them.”

  • “The Dutch intelligence was terribly naïve. I remember speaking with a forty-something-old physicist in the canteen of the nuclear institute in September 1968. I asked him: ‘How far do you think Soviet tanks are from this canteen?’ He retorted that he had never asked himself the question. So I told him: ‘About 400 kilometres. That is a matter of two days for the Soviets.’ ‘Really?’ he gasped. Then I asked him how many people Stalin killed, and he said: ‘A thousand.’ And that man had a university degree! So you can paint yourself the picture, the Dutch had no idea what they were up against. The students protested against NATO, against the war in Vietnam... I was horrified to think I should live in such a country.”

  • “[Q: I remember you really enjoyed reading Tolkien’s Hobbit with my dad, Tomáš Halík, and Zdeněk Neubauer. What took your interest?] Tolkien’s beautiful saga described the fight against evil, which is waged by various powers and in which every fighting creature must give its all. The experiences expressed in Tolkien’s books resonated with the life that we were living in Socialist Czechoslovakia. The models of thought and action that Tolkien expressed, we actually came up against, including the chapter that the film makers left out: after the heroes defeat the evil and return home, the evil had regrown - a caricature of its former self, but dangerous all the same. We experienced the same after 1989.”

  • “The hollowness of the communist ideology was evident in cases when someone came to the classroom during a civics class and began telling them how it was all derived from the ownership of production means – these notions like justice and beauty. It was such nonsense that even a ten-year-old boy would be able to tell if he looked around and saw his classmates, who were just ten years old but they were bragging and striving to look good in front of the girls, boasting who had better marbles and who was physically stronger. And suddenly some loony comes in and starts explaining them that all is derived from production means. I considered it totally stupid, and what was horrible about communism was that we had to listen to these perversities, to this intellectual vomit, and we even had to take exams for it and keep our mouths shut.”

  • “I returned to the battle, and I absolutely didn’t feel like an oppressed wretch – who would be put into a cage, beating with his chest against the wall and longing to be free as a bird. Not at all, I knew that this was out of question and that it was necessary to be here and help to put this regime down; from this point of view my life was thus easy. Firstly, I’m a believer, and this helps. Secondly, I had this rational conviction that it would come to an end and I would live to see it. And I was here willingly, which meant that had I not lived to see it, I would have never regretted it. In this respect it was thus very easy for me. People who didn’t have this support had to suffer through it and they spent years in prisons… In this respect I was still doing very well.”

  • “When Brezhnev died in 1982, I already lived as a somebody who is waiting for a bus, or waiting at a railway station for a train to come. I already lived in absolute certainty that I would live to see the fall of this regime, and still be relatively young; before that it was only wishful thinking. Vašek Benda was always telling the story how he was waiting in a queue for meat or potatoes in 1968, and people were saying how absurd it was, that it couldn’t last, and he told them: ´No way, this will last some twenty years or so.´ And the people nearly lynched him for pessimism and subversive talking. But he was absolutely right and in 1989 he just laughed about it.”

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    Praha, 29.03.2011

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    ZŠ náměstí Svobody, Praha 6, 13.11.2013

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    Praha, 17.08.2015

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    Praha, 03.03.2020

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    Praha, 01.06.2020

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    Praha, 29.06.2020

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    Praha, 04.08.2020

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The most horrible thing was that you had to bow down before the beast

Pavel Bratinka (November 1974)
Pavel Bratinka (November 1974)

Pavel Bratinka was born on March 14, 1946 in Bratislava and grew up with his mother in Prague. He graduated from the Faculty of Nuclear and Technical Physics of the Czech Technical University in Prague, where an independent spirit reigned in the 1960s. He learned English and regularly visited the US Embassy library. He became a Catholic. In July 1968, he went to Holland to complete his thesis and in late November 1969, he decided to return to the occupied Czechoslovakia. He associated with dissidents, and although he did not sign the Charter 77 manifesto right in the beginning, he worked for it from the very start. He delivered money to the families of dissidents who were in jail, was able to secure replacement for confiscated typewriters, and distributed texts created by Charta. In 1981, he took over the Edice Expedice, a samizdat publisher, and devoted the following two years of his life to it. However, the name had to be changed to Edice Svíce due to conspiratorial reasons. He was twice fired from his job for political reasons; from 1981 until the Velvet Revolution he worked as a cleaner and a boiler operator. The State Security’s kept monitoring him and registered him as an ‘enemy person’. In the 1980s, despite being a boiler operator, he lived a life on an active intellectual: he attended various unofficial lectures held in private flats, Bible studies seminars held by the Kroupa family’s and the so-called underground university in Prague, visited mainly by the French and British scholars. He was a member of the Kampademie – “a renewed Platonic Academy” based in Kampa, Prague. He signed the Charter 77 manifesto in 1988, when he also became a member of the Movement for Civil Freedom (HOS). During the November Revolution he worked for the Civic Forum. One month after the crackdown on the National Avenue, on 17 December 1989, he co-founded the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA) and became its chairman. After the first free elections, he was a member of the Federal Assembly, and from 1992, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. In 1996 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic and became a minister without portfolio in the government of Václav Klaus. In 1998, he resigned from the ODA and, together with Libor Kudláček, he founded the consulting firm Euroffice Praha - Brusel a.s. He lives in Bubenč, Prague.