Petr MILLER (1941)

Portrét

Workers’ role in the Velvet Revolution is forgotten today

Within just six days of 17 November 1989, when Communist police attacked a peaceful student march on Národní St., the situation in Prague had changed so much that the comrades didn’t even find support among those on whom they had hitherto relied. The regime lost perspective even for the proletariat. The person who gave direction to the spontaneous protest, and soon became one of the faces of the Velvet Revolution, was a 38-year-old sporty looking steelworks leader named Petr Miller.

He was born into the family of a well-off architect in Prague on 27 July 1941. One might expect that he had an easy childhood, but a series of family tragedy spelt otherwise. He never knew his mother, who died in 1942. His busy father placed the little boy in the care of a nurse, Jiřina Kubešová. To prevent her having to do forced labour in Germany during the Protectorate, he married her. After some time they had another son. However, in 1948 Petr’s father died of gas poisoning. So he lost his second parent and had to come to terms with the knowledge that the person bringing him up was not his real mother. After some time Jiřina Kubešová married again. Petr and his stepfather didn’t see eye to eye. He felt unwanted. He didn’t pay much attention at school and his passion was ice hockey. After elementary school he became an apprentice smith, moved into a hostel and practically lost contact with his family.

Petr Miller soon became independent and while doing his apprenticeship began working at a brewery in Holešovice. He sought better paid work but under the recruitment system at that time only had the option of either mining or steel work. He entered the Nosek mine in Tuchlovice in the Kladno area, signing up for three years. But he wasn’t to stay long. Three months after he joined the worst mining disaster in the history of Kladno mining occurred on 23 September 1960. Dozens of miners suffered smoke inhalation during a fire, with 20 dying. That day the miners had complained of trouble breathing, but the bosses failed to grasp the situation – output came first. During the shift some began losing consciousness. Before Petr Miller, 19, could reach protective gear he too fainted.  His life may have been saved by the fact that when he fell his head was by a water pool, where the concentration of carbon monoxide was lower. He came to in hospital. “I started cursing. The people standing around me urged me to swear even more, because shouting changed the air in my lungs.”

He did not return to the mine for health reasons, while his promising hockey career was also over. After military service he got married and joined the ČKD industrial colossus in Prague’s Vysočany as a smith. He made decent money at the plant and enjoyed travelling. However, he had a sense he needed to supplement his education. When he graduated with distinction from evening classes for workers it was 1968 and enthusiasm for promised changes ruled the land. Petr enrolled in correspondence study in foreign trade at the University of Economics. But then came the August 1968 invasion. Petr became a face of non-violent resistance from the ČKD workers. 

“Later came a period of reckoning and it became clear that all those who had stood up against the invasion had been misguided,” he says, ironically. He was pressured within the union organisation to publicly recant his declarations of August 1968 on the works tannoy. Petr Miller refused, and soon felt it. At the university he got a choice: either be thrown out or quit. A year later he attempted to enroll to study again, this time in law but did not receive a recommendation from the plant’s Communist Party organisation. “Comrade, we have ruled that you may not study on workers’ money as you’re an enemy of the people,” he was told as normalisation set in. 

For the next 20 years he gave up on public events, focusing on work and hobbies. Reports of the quelling of a demonstration on 17 November initially met with a predictable response from ČKD workers, along the lines of “the students made a mess so they got a smack”. However subsequent statements by Communist politicians in the media and rumours about the brutality of the police treatment of young people also led to protests at ČKD. Petr Miller, by then a gaffer at the works forge, summoned his colleagues and a plan was hatched to march to the city centre, where demonstrations had been taking place on Wenceslas Square all week. On Wednesday 22 November he visited the coordinating centre of the nascent Civic Forum at the U Řečických gallery. “None of us knew any dissidents. We didn’t know where to find Václav Havel or even what he looked like.” He was lucky that he ran into Pavel Pecháček, an exiled journalist freshly arrived from Munich and a friend since Miller’s childhood. The workers’ representative was invited to the next morning’s coordination meeting. 

It was there he first spoke to Václav Havel, telling him thousands from ČKD would arrive at Wenceslas Square in the afternoon. Havel was sceptical: “What’s this nonsense? We send delegations of students to ČKD and you throw them out of the factory…” To which Petr Miller replied: “Mr. Havel, have you ever heard of kids telling their dads what to do?  I certainly haven’t.” The first march of ČKD workers to central Prague on Thursday 23 November was a damp squib. Miller says that the Civic Forum didn’t uphold their side of the deal. “Mr. Havel, this isn’t what we agreed on,” he said, angrily. The playwright responded: “So do it again tomorrow.” There were concerns the workers wouldn’t be persuaded and, as it was Friday, would instead head for their cottages. But the exact opposite occurred. The second march on 24 November was even bigger, joined by workers from other factories. 

The group of informal leaders of the Velvet Revolution, initially comprising various representatives of the dissent, accepted into their ranks a workers leader and people began speaking of the “Czech Lech Walesa”. Petr Miller later represented Civic Forum in key negotiations with Communist PM Adamec and other representatives of the waning regime.

One December evening, when for once he was home, Miller’s phone rang and he picked up the receiver. Zdeněk Jičinský was on the line: “We’re setting up a government. We’ve put you forward as a minister. You’ve got two hours to decide if you’ll take it.” Petr thought somebody was playing a trick on him. But 10 minutes later the phone rang again: “I forgot to say, it’s the ministry of labour and social affairs.” He tried to find out quickly what the ministry actually did. “I said to myself, I’m able to calculate wages. As one of the gang I calculated wages for colleagues at the forge.” But he had to check in the phone book to see where the ministry was located in Prague. When he arrived later at Civic Forum HQ he saw a large sheet with the names of proposed ministers. His was among them. “It was necessary to face it head on or run away. And I’m not the type to run away.”

On 10 December 1989 Petr Miller was appointed minister of labour and social affairs in the federal government of PM Marián Čalfa. He remained in the post until the first free elections in June 1990, when he led Civic Forum to victory in the “difficult” North Bohemia region. When Civic Forum fragmented soon afterward Petr Miller joined the Civic Movement, mainly comprised of Civic Forum founders. However, in the following elections the party did poorly and he quit politics. “You wake in the morning and you don’t have to get up for something, there’s no car with a chauffeur waiting for you, no secretary offering you coffee. At first you feel huge relief – finally you can focus on your own stuff. But nobody who’s reached such a position can tell me they don’t miss it. It’s an enormous drug.”

In 2021 Petr Miller celebrated his 80th birthday in good condition. He most enjoys spending free time at his houseboat. Looking back at the hectic end of 1989, he remains convinced of the key role that workers played in the Velvet Revolution. “It wasn’t students, it wasn’t the Prognostics Institute, it wasn’t the artists. Yes, all of them played a part. But it was the workers who decided. I think that’s forgotten today.”