 Can anyone hear me? This is our first pilot for education day for our London branch, and I could not resist to talk to the Communies, and the very first topic emerged out of a number of topics and I think oppressive governance all around the world was something that we've got to We've got to really looking out for and we've got to recognise it. So if I may, in the next half an hour I'd like to share my beliefs, opinions and just a actual reality what we were going through as family and friends and obviously the people of Eastern Europe. I've written some notes. I've written kind of a timeline of the communes and how we all started. We need to understand how the communes had started, where they came from, then what it evolved into and then how it ended. Ac mae'r tîm yn ddybyn – ble mae gynifer gan hyn arrhyw gweld am yr hyn, oherwydd mae'r llaw o'u bod yn ddod i dwydoedd yn ddelban. Mae'n ddaredd yn ddod i ddechrau – ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddelban. Mae'n ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod, ond rhai bod weithio'r rheswm ychydig, i ddod i'r gwagdraeth no lle, i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod i ddod. Rhaid i'n gweithio. Mae'r cyfrwyng iawn o 16,000 gymnoedd yn ymwneud i'r stadion ystradd ym Mhraith, yn ymwneud i'r cyfrwyng iawn o'r ffordd yma yn y Maes Game Cold Spataquiada. Y rhaid yma yw'r cyfrwyng iawn, yn ymwneud i'r ffaith yw'r cyfrwyng iawn, yn ymddangos, yn ymdegwyd, yn ymdegwyd ac yn ymdegwyd. Here, in the heart of Europe, Czechoslovaks are part of an experiment to change the world. The states saw a new kind of society, a new type of human being. They saw to erase the past and reprogram the nation memory. The vice-bread demands to reform society however brutally crushed by Warsaw Pact allies. Czechoslovakia became a kingdom of forgetting. Yet, there is a persistent rebellion amongst artists, intellectuals who do not submit to this type of society. Thanks to a footage locked away in the National Archives and from revisiting my childhood memories, I shall take you on a quick journey of the people's life during these extraordinary times. 8th of May 1945, unconditional surrender of Axis power. The allies accept to Germany's surrender. About a week later, Adolf Hitler had committed suicide. Three E Day, victory in Europe celebrates the end of the Second World War. Central and Western Europe are ravaged by a ruinous war beyond recognition. The nation states are declared beyond repair and a self-determination of any kind of future society. What is yet to be cast upon Central and Eastern Europe is even more evil, even more ruinous than fascism. It is a Stalinism communist regime. Dressed up, the communism of a human face, in simple terms, this is their lost world for the next 40 years to follow. My two late grandads fought in the war. Both came back home, one without his leg, the other one mentally scarred by the horrors of the war. But they both did come back alive. By May 1948, the Iron Curtains falls onto the Czechoslovakian state in the heart of ancient Europe continent for the next 41 years. Czechoslovakian Communist Party gatherings in Pragym Bratislava rally the masses, reaching a staggering 2.5 million party members in the streets. This is the most significant party majority outside the Soviet Union. However, the Communists do not command a majority in a parliament. The Communist Party, however, gains the power and a spectacular political coup beat no more an illusion. Democracy is submerged and the Communists emerged. Overnight, the nation wakes up in the horror of what is being done to them. A rich hand begins between the state and the citizen. The fair's entree on a Communist menu is to nationalise all the private sector property. A good Communist is also an excellent socialist and ensures and cares for all a class struggle before the state begins. By the year 1950, on your five years since the ruin of the Second World War, a young state of Czechoslovakia is in the grip of Stalinism terror. So-called sham-shell trials take place. Any kind of political opposition or dissent to regime are punished by the most brutal public displays of them all. Sham-shell trials with a death penalty stage in the end. Political prisoners are plenty. Sadly, the country of ancestors becomes an epicenter for these atrocities. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a project fear of leaving the EU with no deal. This is a different type of project fear. Your shot or hanged death, if you show to be complicit, a quarter of a million people are convicted and hundreds executed for their political crimes. The evidence is fabricated, the government supplies the witnesses and it is made absolutely sure that this appalling stage show trials are your TV program or radio debate during the day for those of you lucky ones that own a TV set. Very dark times set in. Innocent people are executed for freedom, conspiracy theories with the West and espionage with the US. Everybody becomes a target. Society becomes very afraid. The politics of fear are installed. The bold shield, the east from the west, is almost complete. Yet, some brave souls who plead guilty of these and committed grotesque crimes still hold their head high in the eyes of regime to never, never surrender while awaiting the gunshot in the head. Hitler leaves Waffa Starlin with that trade night moustache now with a slightly kinky twist. New work concentration camps are built deep in Siberia. The prisons overfilled with anti-sublishment political prisoners. The truth and reality are entirely concealed. The state controls everything, the way people vote, bring up their children and most importantly what they're allowed to see. The year 1965, the glory of agricultural collectives. Socialism is being brutally and often literally enforced in a countryside. People have lost their incentives to work, land and cattle. Poverty, hunger, misery are all too familiar joys of post-war austerity times. The state sees its almost old land, property and strips the ordinary folk of everything she or he has. New agricultural collectives are the answer. They are supposed to bring social haven for the comrades working in pretending fraternity and collective team efforts but what does ordinary folk supposed to do when she or he doesn't obey with the orders of the state? They are quietly evaporated by it. South familiar? Maybe in George Orwell's. 1984, no, which have brought along with me. Please, I feel free to have a look. With the out with the authors vivid and untamed fantasy but do not be fooled, this is an actual reality. Socialism claims yet more lies. It is bringing even more misery onto the ordinary folk's life. Pretended abundance and record harvest and tractor's production are made before the big plans are even announced. The reality has no longer significance and it no longer matters that there had been dry some month on record with the crops taking the bloke. Subjectivity is the new norm. Law seems the subject of politics and one's membership to the Communist Party is a golden ticket. To the Communist paradise. Socialists are always the winners. My land grandmother, stripped of her, Joyce was enslaved entirely by the agricultural collectives. She had no idea that they were free time to be had. Her day started early at 6am and ended at 11pm out in the fields of agricultural collectives. But she was lucky. She left and enjoyed labor in the fields. The Communist attitudes replaced violent attitudes. The problem was that the Communist took the land off. Therefore people lost the land for the land. The communism was, as it turned out, built on a lie. Hypocrisy has reached another level. When people said one thing at home and another in the public, my parents did find the cracks in the system to escape the trouble. Barack Spring, 1968. The Communist in desperate attempt to fill the cracks elected a new leader, Alexander Dukcek, who was supposed to bring a new form of communism. Socialism is a human fate form of a liberal politics to hold back the pressure from the public. The censorship was temporarily abolished. Few people could travel a beacon of light. Europe had a short-breath period of time to change, to be different. Czechoslovakia wants to go alone, to be independent from the USSR structures. It sounds like Brexit, doesn't it? New communism reforms were extremely popular. Nation has woken up to a full blossom in Barack Spring. Life couldn't be better. Freedom smelled like a cherry blossom. 9th of August, 1968. Defending Socialism against Upture performs. Heavy military machinery tanks woke people up. In the middle of the hot salmonite, frightened nations saw the horror. Allies of Warsaw's Communist Party invaded every single village, town, city in Czechoslovakia. The entire country was strangled in the hold of of Soviet Army Operation Danube had begun. Tanks, soldiers with Kalashnikovs, rifles were roaming the streets. My late grandmother grabbed her two daughters. One of them was my mother. And they all hid in underneath bunker they had in the house. The makeshift bunker was not used in the Second World War. My late granddad was brave enough to come out of the house without the man to see what was being done to them. All they could see were Soviet tanks, armed soldiers and martial order in the streets of quickly taking charge. But these troops were not Americans. The West was supposed to be an enemy, as good communists always told us. How very mistaken they were, in fact, Soviet military armed forces of Warsaw packed allies. The nation was at Disney's in a state of shock. There were, of course, multiple casualties. A peaceful invasion, it was not. The year 1967, normalisation. The communists had failed to reform the system spectacularly. The process to reverse reform and the reformers was called normalisation. The reinforcement of Iron Curtain had followed. The dimes of Social Depression had followed, as intended in the communist utopia. Hardline communists censored all footage, movie or any traces of unflattering rhetoric or negativity expressed towards the regime. Speaking out, got a heist form of punishment or exile for these kind of state political crimes. The era of forgetting was installed by the regime erasing any traces of negativity against the Soviet regime. State confirmatory replaced belief and reality. There was not reality anymore. My dad was a moderate communist. He was a member of the communist party. As a social worker within the education sector, he simply had to obey the state. He could not attend my little sister's church christening. No photos could be taken either. And this was a severe price for him to pay to his newly born, darling daughter. I could see his watery eyes filled with tears on that Sunday morning when we all went to church for the big moment. The communists were atheists and did not support or believe in religion. Not my father could have attended otherwise. First of May 1976, amid the communist regime, my dear mother gave her birth to a healthy baby boy. I was born. She did not make it into the hospital so I was born at home. It was a labour day, the celebration of communism by all workers and socialists who had to march in every single town and village for the day May parade. It was punishable not to. The baby bursts or urgent medical care seemed not to be the priorities. I guess I picked up the wrong day with the communists. My first breath in the new world was a proper communist one. However, as a child, I never liked marching miles for hours giving fake acknowledgements or approvals of gratitude to communist elite. This really felt like a double speed, a virtual reality, a science fiction movie in a slow motion. As a child, I could see people who were exposing the gaps between the socialists, the referees and the truth. Many joked about system with a pinch of salt as these precious moments were carefully captured by a film, photography and media. Black market, agriculture collectives and communist aparychics were the main themes to laugh about with the communist authorities. Something finally had to give in. 1st of January 1977, Childhood 77 is published. Art and music were the only space where people's feelings could sleep. Somehow, miraculously, magically, people understand the coded language of disapproval, rebellion and just the pure disagreement of the regime. I have experienced this incredible human intuition from one like-minded individual to the next without a word being spoken. I know how you feel. Bartalof Havel, famous Czech artist and intellectual, fell the same and there to act. He's organised the petition of signatures to fight for human rights, descending movement. Something incredible has just happened. Sadly, Bartalof, the brave soul of them all, paid an utter price. He was a son and non-stop 24-7 police events by the state and later thrown in the jail. The police were patrolling with their docks in every single move. Can you even imagine what life must be like? George always, Institute of Hate, would come here for us to truly understand the restriction of freedom and his free movement, yet the snowball gathered pace. 26 April 1986, number four nuclear reactor in a Chernobyl nuclear power plant near the city of Pripyat in the north of Ukraine a USSR exploded. They didn't tell us, the communists. Thirsty days fall over the silence. I remember, later my mother was telling me, do not pick any strawberries in the garden and you must wash your hands twice when you come from outside. But why do I have to do this, all these things, mother? Why? She was right. And we were indeed in the path of the radioactive ash cloud. I'm here today, though, in standing cancer-free so far. Thank you, God. Russia kept silent about this human error disaster on a global scale. Finally, month later, Yeovin tablets had arrived to protect our thyroid glands. As a child, I could see a misery, cynicism and decline for the pheasants. Yet the communists had dug gold and star, the highest communist civic award for lifetime work achievement and install to a citizen who had just been exposed to a potential radioactivity. Ladies and gentlemen, you need to understand that this is not a science fiction movie. This was indeed the communism. Utopia from beginning to an end and the end is near. November 17th to December 29th, 1989, the Velvet Revolution, the voice of forgotten people. I remember asking my dad, why are you not going to work today? And he said, son, we are going to be free. I need to head downtown for a few days. And yes, we were becoming free. The Velvet Revolution was a non-violent position of power in what was then Czechoslovakia by a peaceful demonstration in response to a collapse of the Berlin Wall. The popular demonstration against the one-party system and government of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, including students and older dissidents. The first was the end of 41 years of one party rule in Czechoslovakia and a subsequent dismantling of the command economy and conversion to a parliamentary democracy. At last, we were becoming to see the light in the end of the tunnel. November 17th, 1989, International Students Day, riot police suppressed a student demonstration in Prague. It was the 50th anniversary of a violent suppressed protest against the Nazi storming of Prague University in 1939, where 1,200 students were arrested and nine killed. The 1989 event even sparked a series of demonstrations from November 17th to late December, a turning into an anti-communist demonstration. On November 20th, the number of protests assembled in Prague grew from 200,000 to previous day took an estimated half of a million. The entire top leadership of the Communist Party including General Secretary resigned on November 24th. On November 27th, a two-hour general strike involving all citizens in Czechoslovakia was held, which was the start of many weeks of protests to follow. In response to the collapse of the other wars of power governments and the increasing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28th that it would relinquish power and end the one-party state. Two days later, the Federal Parliament formally deleted the section of the Constitution given the Communist Party a monopoly of power. Barbed wire and other obstructions were removed from the border with the West Germany and Austria in early December. On December 28th, 1989, whilst the habe became the President of Czechoslovakia, the communism did really end. Ladies and gentlemen, these were extraordinary times that lived under Eastern Europe. On my recent visit to Slovakia, I have asked my parents and got parents what do they remember from the communist times. I could hear some kind of nostalgia, some kind of bitter memories. It will take a couple of generations to wash away the footprints of that evil regime entirely. The moral devastation of the socialist social class had been done. I am filled with dread that some of our modern-day British politicians flirt with words such as comrades, socialists and even community methods. I can hear and see the evil again. Not more, not ever again. The past is the history and the future is a mystery. The President is a gift, so make sure you make the most of it. Thank you very much for listening to me.