Pavel DUDR (1949)

Portrét

I wanted to at least shame the Communists a bit

Pavel Dudr was born on 2 December 1949 in Gottwaldov (today’s Zlín). His mother was a nurse while his father was a vocational school teacher. The Communists threw his father out of the school in around 1958 for his allegiance to the Catholic Church and attending services. He then worked in a cement plant. His father’s loss of his profession and the jailing of his uncle Frantisek Havlik, who got a 20-year term for subversion in the 1950s, naturally led Pavel to distrust the regime from a young age. 

“Even though I couldn’t yet understand anything, it happened to me several times in school that I unwittingly asked about something that was taboo. And I never got an answer. So I never even asked my aunt from Olešná in Vysočina, where we went on our holidays, why uncle wasn’t at home. Once she herself told me he’d done nothing wrong but was in jail because he had let a person in distress sleep over and fed him and let him shave.”

Pavel attended vocational school. Because he graduated before the start of normalisation, when the temporary thaw during the 1968 Prague Spring came to an end, he was accepted at the Brno University of Technology despite his class profile. After graduating he found work as a designer at the Precision Engineering Plant in Zlín. He was introduced to samizdat distribution by a vocational school classmate Bohumil Obdržálek, who signed Charter 77 and later emigrated to Austria.

Pavel Dudr printed on a primitive cyclostyle copier, typically receiving sheets of glazed paper already containing text. He would make up to 300 copies. “Finding paper was a major problem. Buying a large amount in one shop was suspicious. So it was bought in small amounts at various places. Taking paper from an office was risky, as that could constitute the theft of property in socialist ownership.” Somebody else looked after the distribution of the copied materials and a cell system was observed. Pavel Dudr only worked directly with the dissidents Stanislav Devátý, Jaromír Němec and Augustin Navrátil and did not know the names of other collaborators. 

He was careful as samizdat production could carry sentences of several years. He didn’t even give copies to acquaintances very much. “I wasn’t as thorough as, for instance, Standa Devátý, who they never found anything on. I printed materials in the living room at home and when it was finished I brought the lot to the cellar of a friend who it had been arranged with. He always had it tidy at home and the StB never found anything, even when they ferreted about in his absence,” says Pavel Dudr.

Until 1985 he believed the State Security (StB) were unaware of him. “It was evidently during a pilgrimage to Velehrad in July 1985 that they probably noticed me in a group of dissidents.” A clampdown on the production and circulation of subversive materials in Zlín and environs took place that November. The StB also arrested Jaromíra Němec and Augustin Navrátil on the same day. Pavel Dudr was married with three small children. “It was evening and the kids were already asleep. When I opened the door one StB man stuck his foot in it and announced they were doing a search.”

An advantage of the one-floor apartment building where the family then lived was that it had large cellar spaces. Pavel Dudr had three cellars and used one as a covert printers. “Luckily the StB only glanced into the children’s room. They looked the living room over in a cursory manner but then said: ‘Now let’s go to the cellar.’” He first led them to a room where conserves were stored. They told him to show them the second cellar. It mainly housed bikes. They also knew about the third cellar, where they found all they needed to launch criminal proceedings. “As I found out later, they’d been there when I was out and knew exactly what I had where.”

Before the StB hauled him off to a remand prison in Brno he handed his wife the report on the home search when they weren’t looking. When Stanislav Devátý learned of his arrest he and his brother visited Pavel’s wife and she gave them the report. Soon afterward the whole thing was read out on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. “It was something else. That worked on them. I sensed that the StB men, the investigators and the screws had respect towards us. My fellow prisoners were surprised that after lunch I dared to lie down on a plank bed and nothing happened to me. They didn’t even touch me at interrogations. I understood then that I was very lucky that, thanks to friends, our arrests were known about. Otherwise they would’ve treated us far worse.”

After almost six months in custody a court released him and Jaromir Nemec. The prosecutor had charged them with incitement against the socialist establishment and they awaited their trial at liberty. Pavel Dudr had a boss at work who treated him well. “I was able to just go back. The boss said: ‘He hasn’t been convicted yet, what’s the problem?’ And, surprise, it worked.” Their file was passed from court to court throughout Moravia. One issue was whether it was a case of incitement or sedition. It went on for nearly four years. “The machine got stuck.” In 1989, shortly before the Velvet Revolution, the Supreme Court decided that the law had been breached to the defendants’ detriment and accepted a conditional sentence.                                                                                                              

“The end of the Communist era was in the air and judges and I guess prosecutors didn’t want to dirty their hands on a case being monitored by the West,” he says. Though Czechoslovakia couldn’t have been expected to remain the only Communist country in the former Soviet Block the fall of the regime still surprised him. “The regime had seemed bulletproof to me because it controlled everything. It mainly decomposed from within. It was a huge surprise to me that nobody defended their ideology. Only fanatics such as Milouš Jakeš and Miroslav Štěpán.”