Charter 77

By nature, not, I was not serving in diplomacy but, uh, somebody with university education.

So, uh, Havel some cycle reached a conclusion that, uh, it makes a sense to work, uh, with me, not just because of samizdat, and it led me, uh, to cooperate closely with Charter 77, and in late '80s, I became, uh, uh, the youngest speaker of the Charter 77.

And was also lucky in a sense that when, when I met my future wife, so she was living, um, one minute, uh, or two minutes walking distance from the house where Havel has been, uh, uh, resident.

So, uh, we had been close e- even physically, you know, not just mentally.

So he was a...

I was a bridge to the younger people, and Xřížan was a bridge to, uh, this outside of dissident circles.

And, you know, the idea was to expand, uh, extend our influence, to invite the people to the streets, to not just, you know, to be the handful of 1,000 something, uh, members of the Charter 77 or signatures of some Charter 77.

So I think it established this kind of a trio which, uh, played quite important role November, December, uh, '89.

He belonged to a younger generation of dissidents.

In the 1980s, he helped publish underground legendary samizdat magazine, Revolver Revy, or Revolver Review, signed Charta 77, and in 1989, became its youngest spokesman.

So he was there when Civic Forum, the broad movement that brought down communist rule, was founded during the Velvet Revolution.

When Václav Havel became president at the very end of 1989, Alexandr Vondra became his first foreign policy advisor.

That was the only possibility.

So you were just kind of dimly aware of Vaclav Havel, I suppose, but you must have been aware of Charter 77 because you refused to sign the papers kind of condemning the Charter 77.

So when did you first meet Václav Havel personally?

Only late 1988, because I was working for Charter 77, but under the surface, as we called it, you know, smuggling things over the border to Poland or trying to jam broadcasting of Czechoslovak television with...

Harta messages which didn't work out or messaging to Poland before imposition of martial law in early 80s but by 19 and I was working as a as a fixer for always one of the three spokesperson of Charter 77 for several years But in 1988, it became clear that the secret police is sniffing around to close.

And the safest way how to withstand that was to become a public personality.

So I was sent as a representative of Charter 77 to Moscow for the first independent human rights seminar.

And I succeeded because I was preparing it only on my own.

If, however, If, however, this confrontation is seen against the backdrop of what we know about power in the post-totalitarian system, it appears in a fundamentally different light.

For the time being, it is impossible to say with any precision what impact the appearance of Charter 77, its existence, and its work has had in the hidden sphere, and how the Charter's attempt to rekindle civic self-awareness and confidence is regarded there.

Whether, when, and how this investment will eventually produce dividends in the form of specific political changes is even less possible to predict.

But that, of course, is all part of living within the truth.

very least, unusual in modern political history, a phenomenon that might well have, as I shall soon attempt to show, far-reaching consequences.

Undeniably, the most important

political event in Czechoslovakia after the advent of the Husk leadership in 1968 was the appearance of Charter 77.

The spiritual and intellectual climate surrounding its appearance, however, was not the product of any immediate political event.

Who did you speak to? How did you identify people who are willing to tell you why they were speaking out and standing up and why they thought so many others were not?

Well, you had the Charter 77 dissident movement, which was a grouping of political dissidents.

The dissidents knew each other for quite a while, already from – Starting in 19, before in the 60s, and then you had the Prague Spring around 68, and then the Soviet Warsaw Pact invasion to put that out.

And then the period of normalization in the 70s that drove everybody underground.

So in 1975, when the Helsinki Act was signed and you had the decalogue and inside there, they had each of the states made commitments to human rights, rule of law, many of our fundamental freedoms, and they made commitments to uphold these.

And so the dissidents – and again, they didn't call themselves dissidents.

They were just normal people, a lot of intellectuals, playwrights, artists, professors who – wanted to live their lives normally and you never actually want to be a dissident you just want it you don't call yourself that it's what the authorities call you right you're just living your life as as you want and you are being confronted with an oppressive regime that is not letting you do that and then that is where the dissident kind of label comes up because you're dissenting And this is what they did, is that they created this document, Charter 77, which was an offer to help the communist state to fulfill their international obligations.

And they said, we have full faith that you are sincere in signing this international document, and we are here to help you do that.

Does not this vision of post-democratic structures in some way remind one of the dissident groups or some of the independent citizens' initiatives as we have already known them from our own surroundings? Do not these small communities bound together by thousands of shared tribulations give rise to some of those special humanly special humanly meaningful physical political relationships and ties that we have been talking about are not these communities and they are communities more than organizations motivated mainly by a common belief in the profound significance of what they are doing since they have no chance of direct external success joined together by precisely the kind of atmosphere in which to formalize and ritualize ties common in the official structures are supplanted by a living sense of solidarity and fraternity Do not these post-democratic relationships of immediate personal trust in the informal rights of individuals based on them come out of the background of all those commonly shared difficulties? Do not these groups emerge, live, and disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hallowed traditions? Is not their attempt to create an articulate form of living within the truth, and to renew the feeling of higher responsibility in an apathetic society, really a sign of some kind of rudimentary moral reconstitution? In other words, are not these informed, non-bureaucratic, dynamic, and open communities that comprise the parallel polis, a kind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model of those more meaningful post-democratic political structures that might become the foundation of a better society.

I know from thousands of personal experiences how the mere circumstance of having signed Charter 77 has immediately created a deeper and more open relationship and evokes sudden and powerful feelings of genuine community among people who were all but strangers before.

This kind of thing happens only rarely, if not at all, even among people who have worked together for long periods in some apathetic official structure.

It is as though the mere awareness and acceptance of a common task and a shared experience were enough to transform people and the climate of their lives as though it gave their public work a more human dimension than is seldom found elsewhere.