Vladimír Gut

* 1956

  • "I think that everyone carries that evil inside them somehow. If the regime encourages you to do it and you're close to it, then it comes out and the evil wins and does this... that's what I've come to in my life. That we all have a little bit of that evil in us, but we have to do everything we can to be respectful to each other and somehow know how to treat each other. But the communist regime, just like the fascist regime, the Germans were driven crazy by Hitler, just like Stalin and Gottwald drove people crazy here, they won the election. Although, God knows what it was like. In forty-eight there were certainly no free elections. In forty-six it was still free, yet they won. But I also give Benes a share of the blame, because he was a supporter of Russia, too, and that had an effect on the people. And, unfortunately, even the smart people... It wasn't the case with us, because my grandfather had that experience with Russia, a negative one. There is no respect for people, for life... we see that today in the war in Ukraine. No respect for life at all. It's just food for the cannons, the people for them, and they don't care about anything."

  • "My wife, in '89, on that seventeenth of November, was on a trip to Germany to buy clothes because we were expecting a son, a baby. So she was buying diapers, because people used to go, you don't remember, but there was nothing here. So she was in East Germany shopping for things for the baby. And I was in the evening, I was in charge of the two older children, and at nine o'clock I was listening to the Voice of America, and there was nothing on the news, just that there was something, that the anti-state elements... by then I was thinking, 'Holy shit, it's already stirring.' I was expecting it any day then, because I didn't believe it could survive. Because Gorbachev gave us a great deal of hope... The Germans, when they left the Trabants here, we were expecting that. I was already pumped up, I thought it was bound to break out any day now. And it did, I believed it. We were scared, of course we were scared. We were afraid... the militias were around Prague and the army. And they were just vetted communists, the militia, they were all hardened communists. But I think communism was so rotten from the inside that it was falling apart on its own. And then when we had the Civic Forum at Jednota shop... there was no problem of firing somebody, but there was a problem of who was going to do it for them..."

  • "In the year sixty-eight, when they gave it back to us, they were angry because nobody was working in the cooperative, so they set aside the twelve hectares. We didn't have any equipment, so my father left it fallow for a year, he said, they're going to shut me down, so he started looking for some machinery and equipment. Back then, under the communists, you couldn't buy anything normally, because a private person couldn't buy it. Nevertheless, he found something, we started farming, we all enjoyed it very much, we were very good at it. The prices then were unbelievably high compared to today, today wheat is worth four or five thousand, whereas then it was worth three thousand. And a tractor cost forty thousand and today it costs four million. So it was an incredibly big difference, milk was made, meat was made, everything was made. There were a lot of us, there were a lot of children, we knew how to use pitchforks and boots and shovel manure from a very young age, and we just had a lot of fun, I mean, I did. And then in 1976, when they saw that we were doing well again and that we were having the best time we ever had, they took it away from us again. But by then, we young people had gone to school and by then we were able to take care of ourselves and we were able to handle that family, that life. And then the revolution came in '89 and that was wonderful. Unfortunately, my father didn't live to see it and we were the only ones here with my brother who went to Wenceslas Square every day when there were demonstrations and we didn't miss a day and here in the village people were afraid and I think they are still afraid to this day."

  • "The terror in that village was enormous, the merging of people into agricultural cooperatives was preceded by terror, which had a big impact here in our village, because here in the year 50 there was a mock trial on the square in Vlašim against a group of people, I would say such clever ones. Because here from us they condemned the headmaster of the school from Radošovice, the other was the headmaster of the school in Bílkovice and my uncle was a shopkeeper, he had a general store here in Radošovice and they condemned them all to sixteen to twenty years. And then they were released, the two of them after ten years and my uncle after twelve years. The end of their stay in the camp was spent at Bytíz here near Příbram, cutting uranium for Russia. They were the Matouškovi brothers and Alois Kukla. Miloslav Matoušek and there was Sláva. They lived here when they came back from the prison, I would say, such broken people. The terror took an incredible toll on them. They weren't allowed to do their teaching profession, nothing. They lived out their lives as guards or janitors or whatever."

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    Radošovice, 20.11.2023

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In the 1960s, the wounds of the wrongs of the 1950s were not yet healed

Vladimir Gut
Vladimir Gut
zdroj: archive of a witness

Vladimír Gut was born on 18th October 1956 in Vlašim, he grew up in the nearby village of Radošovice, in a family that had its own farm until 1957. After the communist takeover, the Guts‘ house and the hospitality business it was part of were nationalized in 1957, along with all the fields. In Radošovice, a joint agricultural cooperative was established in 1951, following the example of the Soviet Union, and most of the Radošovice farmers joined it then. Vladimir Gut‘s parents refused to join. The following year, most of the members left the cooperative again, and Radošovice entered a forced phase of collectivisation, of which two families of the biggest farmers in the village became victims. Both families had their property confiscated, their fields expropriated and were evicted outside the district. Vladimir Gut‘s family was also threatened with eviction, but it did not happen only thanks to the „leniency“ of the judge, who did not allow a pregnant mother with three small children to be evicted. The Guts lived under constant pressure, and in 1950, in one of the politically motivated trials, Vladimír Gut‘s uncle Alois Kukla was sentenced to twenty years. In 1968, his family‘s property was returned to him. They started farming successfully again, but in 1976 their fields were expropriated again. Vladimir trained as a chef-waiter, but was not allowed to study at the agricultural school because of his cadre profile. He returned to farming after the fall of communism in 1990 and has been farming ever since. He is a pioneer of regenerative farming, farming in harmony with nature. In 1989, together with his brother, he founded the Civic Forum in Radošovice and became the first post-Cold War mayor of Radošovice, and remained so in the following election periods. He lives in Radošovice (year 2023), is married and raised two children with his wife.