In postwar Czechoslovakia surveillance was widespread. There were cameras everywhere, and anybody could potentially be an informer. From early on, one learned not to trust anyone. Living in a system like that changes you forever, as Richard Ernest (1938) knows. Ernest was a journalist who moved to Holland to work here as a foreign correspondent. He lives with his wife in Amsterdam. 

Communist Czechoslovakia

After the Second World War, Czechoslovakia was the only country in the Soviet sphere of influence where a majority had voted the communists into power. It soon became a police state, with penal camps and prisons where inmates were tortured. A period of freedom began in 1967, when Alexander Dubček was the party leader. The Prague Spring came to an abrupt end when 450 000 Warsaw Pact-troops in tanks invaded the country to ‘restore order’. It led to a period of total apathy among the people. In the 1980s a group of dissidents close to the poet and playwright Václav Havel started gaining influence. In 1989 the Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets en masse. During the Velvet Revolution, they demanded an end to the dictatorship by symbolically jangling their keys. Václav Havel and his artist friends were installed in office and organised the first free elections.