Jiří Fiedor

“So then we decided – I don’t remember if it might have been the start of 1989, we actually started publishing in samizdat, a monthly, it was called the North Moravian Passivity. It was a joint project of the people who gathered at the Šavrdas for those political discussions. Those were people from Bohumín, Ostrava, Opava, Krnov, Karviná, Český Těšín, Havířov, it started snowballing like that. So we reckoned we actually wanted to do something of our own, to comment on political affairs in our own way. So in early 1989 we started making that North Moravian Passivity. I don’t know if we had twelve, fourteen issues, something like that. We made it in pretty big print runs. At first it was copied out on to carbon paper, one or two issues were printed out at Jirka Hanus’s flat, in a block of flats in Ostrava-Dubina. But then we printed it in this one garden cottage of his wife’s parents. He always borrowed the hut for the weekend, and five or six of us came there at most. We made it there in print runs of, I don’t know, but it was in the hundreds for sure. Because everyone had a load of addresses that he sent it out to. So we divided it up and it went out into practically the whole country.”

“The first year was with no troubles at all. That happened to be a year when lots of the long-haired ones finished up. Only a few of remained there and suddenly they started making demands and threats, that we have to cut our hair and that if we don’t, they’ll expel us, and so on. So they actually expelled me from the boarding house first because I refused to have my hair cut, because they got a new manager there who had managed a police boarding house before. So he was used to seeing everyone with short hair. Then the pressure upped at school too, where the deputy headmistress told me that I wasn’t to attend her lessons until I cut my hair short. So I didn’t attend her lessons, because I didn’t cut my hair. It ended up with my parents coming and trying to persuade me, together with the headmaster, to have my hair cut and stay at the school. I was obstinate and refused to have my hair cut, and back then I discovered the recordings of the Plastic People and the third festival of the second culture and the theoretical texts of Ivan Jirous, and I was already influenced by the Czech underground a bit. So I actually, how did Loony [Ivan Jirous - trans.] say it – ‘stick your education up your arse’, so with this motto on mind I quit the school. The way it happened was they said that if I leave of my own accord they wouldn’t expel me and I won’t have further trouble. So my mum, I wasn’t of age yet, so my mum signed it for me that I had decided to leave.”