It’s twenty years since a group of anti-communist dissidents took the brave decision to revive the newspaper Lidovy Noviny, once the spiritual home of the Czech nation’s most eminent journalists and essayists.
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Czech opposition head's ex-wife says she paid tax from gift ... a wider audience. For two years, from January 1988 until December 1989, they distributed a monthly “samizdat” version of Lidove Noviny, until the paper was revived as a regular daily in January 1990. An archive of those samizdat editions has now been put online.
“Newspaper as school” is the title of the front-page editorial in the first samizdat edition of Lidove Noviny, dated January 1988. The author is one Vaclav Havel, and in it he expresses the hope that the samizdat Lidove Noviny can serve as a true mirror of the times, drawing on the newspaper’s prestigious reputation.
Lidove Noviny was first published in 1893, and its early contributors included the Capeks and Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. It quickly became known for its journalistic excellence, but fell victim to the periodic twists and turns of Czechoslovakia’s dark century. In 1952 it was shut down by the communists.
The idea of reviving Lidove Noviny belonged to former reform communist turned dissident Jiri Ruml, who was also the samizdat monthly’s first editor-in-chief. After a few false starts in 1987, from January 1988 onwards the editorial team succeeded in publishing – illegally - a monthly digest of uncensored news and comment with a print run of some 350 copies. This, in true samizdat fashion, was photocopied by loyal readers until each edition reached a circulation of some 10,000. Historian Jiri Pernes spoke about the significance of the samizdat newspaper to Czech Television:
“The opposition movement against communism in Czechoslovakia had become elevated to a higher plane, and there was a need to create their own platform for written information which would bring these people together on a different level than the previous verbal or social interaction.”
Each month Jiri Ruml tucked a copy under his arm and went off to the communist authorities in a vain attempt to have the publication registered. Each time he was turned away. The samizdat monthly continued right up until January 1990, when the first edition of the newly restored daily Lidove Noviny hit the newsstands.
All twenty-two samizdat editions – there was no Lidove Noviny in August 1988 or July 1989 – have now been put online on Lidove Noviny’s website. They make fascinating reading. February 1988’s issue features the headline “Rockets Rockets Rockets” and is a rundown of the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals. So not that much has changed – today’s Lidove Noviny features the latest news on American plans to deploy parts of it missile defence shield in Central Europe, something bitterly opposed by her old Cold War enemy Russia.
http://www.lidovky.cz/historie-obrazem.asp
(radio-Prague)
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