The Czech Supreme Court on Wednesday quashed 38-year-old sentences on four leaders of the underground movement against the communist regime.
The court abolished convictions for disturbing the peace handed down on poet and Czech underground leader Ivan Martin Jirous , nicknamed “Magor,” which translates as blockhead, and fellow literary rebels Eugen Brikcius, Jaroslav Kořán and Jiří Daníček.
The four men were sentenced in 1973 to prison terms between eight months and a year. Their crime was singing songs against Russians and Communists in a Prague pub and abusing a major in the secret police (StB) who was keeping an eye on them and tried to stop their action. He later called the police to intervene.
A ‘normalization’ verdict
Court chairman František Hrabec said that courts gave verdicts at the time clearly influenced by the “normalization” of the time following the Soviet-led crushing of the Prague Spring of 1968. Afterward, the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) was purged and a strict line following Moscow’s rigid ideological orthodoxy was adopted.
Hrabec said it was enough that the four showed their anger at the Russian nation and Warsaw Pact invasion and that the court did not look any deeper into the incident, which took place shortly before the fifth anniversary of the invasion of August 1968. Today, their rowdy pub behavior would at most deserve a conditional sentence, he added.
Jirous is a well-known Czech poet and artistic director of the popular underground rock band the Plastic People of the Universe, which became a symbol of resistance to the regime in the mid-1970s and 1980s. “I always acted as though I were free, regardless of the risks that would bring. We had definite enemies,” he said previously about the verdict. None of the four attended the reading of the verdict in Brno, South Moravia.
The group’s appeal against the verdict was aided by current Justice Minister Jiří Pospíšil (Civic Democrats, ODS), who told the court that the convictions broke the existing law at the time because their actions did not merit being regarded as a serious disturbance and threat to the public.
Uniting dissidents
Instead of suppressing what it regarded as a dangerous counterculture, the action of the communist regime encouraged links to be created with the small dissident movement headed by playwright Václav Havel. Those links were firmly soldered when members of the Plastic People of the Universe, including Jirous, were put on trail in 1976.
A year later, the demand for the Czechoslovak regime to respect basic human rights it had pledged internationally to uphold, Charter 77, was drafted and the clear division between the regime and its opponents was drawn.
Havel led the Velvet Revolution that helped topple the communist regime at the end of 1989. Kořán also entered politics, becoming the mayor of Prague for a short spell in February 1990. He later went on to become the editor of the Czech version of the US glossy magazine Playboy, a true sign that times had changed.
