[We are reprinting below a firsthand account by Czechoslovak dissident Petr Uhl of his interrogation at the hands of the state security police.
[Uhl, a signer of Charter 77, was sentenced in 1969 to four years in prison for "having organized a Trotskyist group."
[We have taken the text from the December 12, 1977, issue of the French Trotskyist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
In the early hours of September 27, I was led before the state security investigator, Lieutenant Colonel Pavlovsky, at national security headquarters on Bartolomejska Street.
I was released around 11:00 a.m. on September 28.
I spent the evening and the night in a preventive-detention cell. No charges were brought against me; I was not under arrest. Between 11:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., my home was searched on prior orders from the attorney general, on the basis of a commission of inquiry into "acts of subversion against the republic." In the past month, several signers of Charter 77, including myself, have been interrogated in connection with this investigation, which was opened on January 6, 1977.
The search, which took place in my wife's presence, was led by Lieutenant Colonel Gindrich Kristof, and carried out by Lieutenant Colonel Oldrich Noga, Major Josef Lejnar, Major Karel Jansky, and other state security officers, six persons in all. During the raid and illegal search of my wife-for which there was no warrant from the attorney general-several kilograms of printed or handwritten papers were seized, as well as two typewriters.
Among publications in Czech from abroad, they chose to remove the following: one copy of Svedectvi, No. 3; one copy of Informany Materialny No.14 and one copy of No. 24-25; one copy of The Cowards by Skvorecky; The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky; Vol. 14 of Lenin's Collected Works; and the proceedings of the Fourteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.
Also confiscated were several dozen books and newspapers in German, French, Polish, and Russian-one of each-among which I ought to mention "Eurocommunism" and the State, by Santiago Carrillo, and Isaac Deutscher's books on Stalin and Trotsky.
Also confiscated were several dozen samizdat articles, petitions, newsletters having to do with the human-rights movement in Czechoslovakia, and the samizdat editions of the 1976-77 Chronicle and the History of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. These were taken along with less important things, like a mail bag or the French edition of the Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung, which were hanging in the bathroom.
They also seized fifty typewritten copies of the September 21, 1977, Charter 77 press release, several copies of the covering letter by Jiri Hajek, and the attached biographies. They also took several handwritten lists of names on six pages that included maybe fifty signers of the Charter, and around thirty addresses were seized.
I am going to warn those signers, who may run into problems because of my carelessness, and who already have in some cases. Other addresses were not taken. All these things, except for one list that was under a cushion, were found in a dresser, in a book collection, on the floor—in other words, in places that were accessible.
The state security officers' behavior toward me was proper, on the whole. This was not entirely the case during the search. The law was broken, but only at certain times, such as the lack of a warrant from the attorney general to search my wife, the fact that I was held all night by virtue of Law 40, paragraph 23, concerning state security, and a few other details. During my stay at Bartolomejska Street and Konviktska Street, I was given food and a fair degree of comfort.
The interrogation itself, by virtue of section 19 of the state security law, took place in two parts. On September 27, I was questioned about the formation of independent unions; a document on the consumption of goods that had been drawn up; a march in defense of Jiri Lederer on October 19; the founding of a Trotskyist communist party; receiving and distributing foreign publications in Czech; founding an underground university; an alleged letter from me to the sections of the Fourth International. All of these things jumbled together have special relevance to whatever campaigns state security may set in motion against me in the future, whether legally or not.
On September 28, I was briefly interrogated about a sheet of paper that was found in my bag. I answered all the questions in a uniform manner, saying that I refused to answer and that I had nothing to explain.
Aside from the formal interrogation, I spent three whole hours talking with Lieutenant Colonel Pavlovsky, and part of the time with other state security officers. This basically amounted to a monologue on their part, which I commented on with a few observations or short statements that did not take up basic issues such as the struggle for human rights, or the signers of Charter 77 or other people.
During the discussion, the state security officers mentioned the names of living persons, sometimes more than once. I can repeat them from memory, but I cannot say in what order they were mentioned: Jiri Hajek, Marta Kubisova, Milan Hübl, Rudolf Slansky, Hodic, Ivan Djémal, Jan Frolik, Jaroslav Sabata, Anna Sabatova, Lastuvka, Machanek, Baruch, Frantisek Kriegel, Jiri Lederer, Kavan, Pelikan, Lis, Dubcek, Rattinger and one other lawyer whose name I have forgotten, Hosek, and Bartosek.
They tried to convince me that I am isolated within the Charter 77 movement, and in particular, that the former party members, Hajek, Hübl, and Slansky, do not agree with me; that they are much more constructive; that they write documents that are much more substantial than my document on consumer goods—for example, on ecology or nuclear energy; that they are opposed to my radicalism, and so on.
It is probably unnecessary for me to point out that I have not been swayed in the least by these assertions, and that I consider a real range of opinion to be an important precondition for the development of democratic methods of work inside the Charter 77 movement as well as in other areas, that I place a different value on this range of opinion than does state security, and that my assessment of the differences cannot in any case affect my solidarity toward each and every fighter for human rights, whatever their conceptions or opinions may be.
I was also warned about the fact that my activities are beginning to exceed the limits of the law and the limits that state security was prepared to tolerate. One of the officers even expressed the view that my present activity was more serious than that for which I was imprisoned for four years in the early 1970s.
Lieutenant Colonel Pavlovsky informed me that he was putting me under strict surveillance. What this means in practice is that on the way to work and when I leave the house, I am followed by a vehicle containing state security officers. Two uniformed state security officers are seated on the stairway in front of my apartment twenty-four hours a day, whether I am there or not. They check visitors' identity cards and illegally search their hand baggage.
When all this is taken into account, it becomes clear that my activity in defense of implementing the law and human rights cannot be as great as it was before. I realize that many friends will be afraid to visit me, just as I will not visit anyone but those who expressly ask me to. Still and all, I would hope that the restrictions on my activities will not have a negative effect on the initiatives undertaken by other defenders of human rights.