Martin Fafejta

* 1968

  • "I rather [remember] fragments. Either we're just distributing some leaflets in pubs somewhere, discussing with these people, we're in Bohumín at a night poster hanging and the cops are chasing us, we're going to some village - I don't know, what village it was, somewhere in Haná - and there nobody wanted to talk to us, nobody was interested, until the parish priest goes to a pub with us and starts discussing it with us and it's obvious that a few people are willing to listen to us. And some things like that. Yeah, that means... I remember that in Olomouc, for example, the reception was sort of overwhelmingly positive. Like going around with, for example, Přetlak, which was the magazine that we were producing at that time, going around the pubs in Olomouc with it... We were very welcome everywhere. I know that it was quite a problem to explain to those people that they really shouldn't buy us shots because we were making a revolution and we couldn't be drunk."

  • ,,But then I came home, and as I say, there again in the whole apartment - Free Europe, so then I listened to it all that weekend actually, I listened to it live. At that time it was thought that the student Martin Šmíd had been murdered, which turned out to be fake news. But at that moment something in me really broke down and I said to myself that I was going to Olomouc and nobody would force me to collaborate with the regime in any way. I just... I heard on the radio 'theatre strike, student strike', I said, 'I'm going to Olomouc, I'm going on strike, and if it doesn't work out, I'll emigrate. But nobody will make me live under that communist regime for one more minute!'"

  • "I remember the announcement on the school radio, we had chemistry and this sad music and this and that and the first thing that came to my mind was that the janitor had died. And the janitor didn't die, Brezhnev died. And then we actually, all of us, even the kids from the elementary school, had to go to the Pardubice theater to sign condolence cards. That was my first act against the regime, when I noticed that I was next to the toilets when I was about to sign in the queue. So I just went to the toilet, and when I came back from the toilet, it was already being signed. So I didn't sign the condolence card in that way, which was actually kind of a spur of the moment idea, it wasn't anything planned. And I'm pretty sure that the teacher, or the comrade teacher at that time, saw it very well and didn't intervene in any way."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Olomouc, 27.09.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 01:11:14
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The regime collapsed on live TV, we all saw it

Martin Fafejta during filming, 2018
Martin Fafejta during filming, 2018
zdroj: Post Bellum

Martin Fafejta was born on 27 December 1968, roughly four months after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. Although he did not pay much attention to the regime he lived under as a child, as he grew up he became increasingly aware of his dislike for the state political system and communism. His first rebellion against it came in his childhood, when he refused to sign the condolence papers for the death of Leonid Brezhnev and preferred to go into hiding. Politics was not much discussed at home, and he got his first information about Charter 77 from his friends. In his adolescence, when he was almost clearly aware of the pitfalls of living under a socialist regime, his aversion to it gradually transformed into a strong dislike. This resulted in his involvement in the 1989 revolution and active participation in student strikes at Palacký University in Olomouc. After the revolution, he studied sociology and began working as a university teacher in his field. In 2013, out of a recession, he tried to run for president. In 2024, he was still an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at Palacký University in Olomouc.