Petr Pithart (*1941)

  • politician, political scientist, educator, translator, lawyer and publicist

CV

Petr Pithart was born on 2 January 1941 in Kladno into the family of Vilém Pithart, a lawyer and communist. He was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to Belgrade in 1954 and was ambassador to Paris from 1966 to 1970. There, in August 1968, he protested to President de Gaulle against the occupation of the Czechoslovakia and was persecuted in Czechoslovakia after 1970. Petr Pithart had to stay in Czechoslovakia. He lived in the Foreign Ministry dormitory. After graduating from high school, he entered the Faculty of Law at Charles University. Even then he was interested in history and political events. From 1959 to 1968 he was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. From 1962 to 1971 he worked as an assistant professor at the Department of General Theory of State and Law at the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague. From 1966 he worked part-time as editor of Literarni noviny. In the same year he became secretary of Mlynář's interdisciplinary team of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences for the development of democracy and the political system of our society.

At the beginning of August 1968 he travelled to Israel with his wife and journalists to support the restoration of diplomatic relations, and in the autumn he took part in the occupation strike with his students. In 1969 he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford and moved with his family to the UK, but before the closure of the Czechoslovak border in the autumn of 1969 he obeyed the call of the Communist government and returned. Petr Pithart disagreed with the course of action taken by Dubček and his comrades in their negotiations with Moscow, which displeased the ruling Communist Party. Consequently, his employment was terminated and he was expelled from the Faculty of Law by agreement. For the next few months he was unemployed and only eventually was given the opportunity to work at the Water Resources company. From 1973 to 1977 he was employed as a company lawyer in Prague. During this time he joined the exile through Jan Kavan. He began contributing his writings to the quarterly political and cultural magazine Svědectví. As he himself mentions, he published many more articles in it than in other periodicals. The editor-in-chief of this key exile periodical was Pavel Tigrid. Pithart also helped to distribute the magazine in Prague and arranged cooperation with those who smuggled it into Czechoslovakia. He was also acquainted with other personalities contributing to the quarterly and selected articles from them to send to Tigrid. At this time he signed his texts under pseudonyms. The one most often used was "J. Sládeček". Later (after the signing of Charter 77) he signed his own name. After Pithart, Jiřina Šiklová took over the organisation of the smuggling of samizdat and exile literature. Pithart worked as a night watchman, packaging clerk and librarian during the period of normalisation.

Petr Pithart is one of the prominent personalities associated not only with Charter 77 and the Civic Forum. He was one of the most prominent faces of November 1989 and from December 1989 to February 1990 he was the leading figure of the Civic Forum Coordination Centre. Between January and June 1990, he served as a co-opted member of the House of Peoples of the Federal Assembly and as a member of the Presidium of the Federal Assembly for the Civic Forum political movement. In January 1990, he was appointed Chairman of the Government of the Czech Republic within the Federation and remained so until 1992. After the failure in the 1992 elections, he returned to journalistic and teaching activities. From 1996 to 2012 he was a senator, president and later vice-president of the Senate. In 1998 he joined the KDU-ČSL. He holds the academic titles of Assoc. He is still passively involved in politics today and is the author of numerous political science and historical studies and essays, such as the book The Sixty-Eight.

Work

Petr Pithart is the author of a number of political and historical studies and essays. Some of them have been published under his own name, others under a pseudonym. These include: The Sixty-Eight, Defence of Politics, Attempt for the Fatherland. Smaller texts from the years 1977 to 1989 were published in the collection Dějiny a politika (History and Politics), and reflections from 1992 to 1996 were published in the collection After the Eighty-Ninth: Who Are We? He is also the co-author of Czechs in the History of the New Era and A Reader of Displaced History.

Awards

He has received numerous awards for his work, such as the Order of the White Double Cross, 2nd Class (2018), the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion (2023), the František Kriegel Award "For Civic Bravery" from the Charter 77 Foundation (1991), the TGM Medal of Honour (1997) and the Czech-German Understanding Art Award (2010).

Remembrance of the distribution of the exile magazine Svědectví

These contacts began with the first meeting in Mala Strana in the arcade of the cinema U Hradeb 68. A newspaper, an agreed password, that's how we met. We shook hands, and there we had a sixteen-folded piece of paper taped with duct tape. The system was gradually improved. Later, the Testimony was carried in the car, hidden in a cavity in the door. Later, it came in caravans. At first, I managed to bring and distribute everything myself. I decided that I would rather go four times at eleven o'clock at night with four bags, but that I would not involve anyone. Firstly, because I didn't want to put anyone in danger, and secondly because I thought, you make a mistake, you can only be angry with yourself. At that time we lived in Mala Strana near the Mostecká Tower. That night I kept looking at the bed and I knew I wouldn't sleep, that the Testimony had to go. And so I remembered Josef Mundil, whom I had met when we were doing pumping experiments at the Water Resources Company.

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