Czech Books “We were criminally naïve”: a former Czech PM looks back to the Velvet Revolution
Since the fall of communism, Petr Pithart has been a central Czech political figure. As one of the first people to sign the human rights manifesto, Charter 77, he spent the last years of the communist regime as a political dissident. But as the regime collapsed in November 1989, he shot to prominence – firstly in Civic Forum, which brought together those fighting for an end to one-party rule, and then as the first post-communist prime minister of the Czech part of the Czechoslovak federation. Later he went on to be chairman of the Czech Senate and today he serves as the Senate’s deputy chairman. Senator Pithart has just published a book with the simple title “1989”, in which he reflects on the events and the legacy of the time. Surprisingly the book is one of the first studies to be written by a prominent actor in the Velvet Revolution. The book is striking for the openness with which it discusses the mistakes that were made, mistakes that in Pithart’s view, hastened the split of Czechoslovakia and sowed the seeds for many of the political problems in the Czech Republic today. When I went to see Senator Pithart, he began by telling me that he was drawn into the fray of politics more or less by chance.
Wenceslas Square in Prague in 1989
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