I changed my name because of my communist father
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Aleš Richter, born Křehulka, was born on 4 July 1947 in Svitavy, but grew up in Brno with his younger sister. His father was a clerk at the national committee, and in 1948 he became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. His mother came from a family of Viennese Czechs who settled in Svitavy after the World War I. After finishing primary school, Aleš Richter graduated from secondary school, and in 1965 he studied psychology at university. In the 1960s he experienced the relaxation of conditions at universities. The occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 found him on a holiday trip to Bulgaria, from where he had a complicated return home, thanks to which he got to know the opinions of the inhabitants of several socialist states on the invasion of the Czechoslovakia. Upon his return, he took part in the autumn student strikes in Brno, and in March 1969, he happened to witness the spontaneous celebration of the victory of the Czechoslovak hockey team over the USSR team on Wenceslas Square. At the beginning of normalisation, thanks to his acquaintance with the Šabata family, he and his future wife Zuzana Richterová got involved in organizing and spreading various petitions. In the autumn of 1971, they helped to distribute leaflets calling on the citizens of Brno to boycott the elections to the representative bodies. He was released from custody before Christmas and at the same time was expelled from his studies. Due to disagreements with his communist-minded father, he fell out with his parents and adopted the surname Richter. The trial of those accused of the “leaflet action” did not take place until the end of July 1972 in Brno. Aleš Richter and his wife were sentenced to twenty months with five years’ probation. In the autumn of the same year Richter started his military service, after returning to civilian life he manufactured plastic floors at Ingstav. When he and his wife signed Charter 77 in 1977, he was fired from his job and became a water meter reader. In the early 1980s, he and his wife decided to officially move to Austria. This was not only because of persecution by State Security, but also because of the emigration of friends who were Charter signatories. They settled in Vienna, where Richter took an evening course in programming and worked as a data processing operator and programmer for over twenty years. Later he graduated in psychology. After the fall of communism, he received an award as a participant in the anti-communist resistance.
