Mgr. Ivan Mynář

* 1950

  • “I remember that November was happening on two tracks parallelly. First, there were the demonstrations on the city square, led by Mirek Urban and other people who gathered at the square for two or three days in a row. These gatherings were not very well attended. Just a couple of people. Then someone had an idea, it was probably Ivan Junášek, that we should interconnect. Mirek Urban and others came to my basement – where else than that – and that’s where the people from the streets met the intellectuals. And these people then formed the coordination center.”

  • “We established a coordination center and had to arrange many things. That the State Security files wouldn’t get shredded for example. Mirek Urban was in charge of that. At the beginning, I was in charge of education and was supposed to persuade teachers not be afraid anymore. And we needed to replace many people. There were round table talks with the communist representative of the local national committee and other offices. And what I remember as the most cardinal problem, apart from me being away from home for days, was that we didn’t have enough people. Those affiliated with the regime had to leave. But who was there to replace them? To get a decent, honest person with the relevant expertise was a really big problem that we constantly had to deal with.”

  • “One of the main problems that we were addressing was whether to dissolve the Communist Party. The opinions on this matter differed. To tell the truth, I wasn’t up for it either. We naively believed that communists would simply die out. They didn’t die out. Another argument was that the extremists would just gather in other parties and that other parties would arise. Truth is that only a few emerged. Only the Communist Party remained intact. Besides, I clearly felt that there was no public demand for this move. People didn’t want it back then. There was one million party members here at that point. But there are moments when I say to myself that we should have banned it, that I made a mistake.”

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    v Ostravě, 20.08.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:49:51
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I discovered that people didn’t care that much about freedom in November 1989 as they did about doing better

Ivan Mynář / 1989
Ivan Mynář / 1989
zdroj: Archiv Pavla Bártka

Ivan Mynář was born July 1, 1950 in Valašské Meziříčí. He spent a big part of his childhood in Zdounky near Kroměříž. After graduating from the Gymnasium in Vizovice he studied Czech language and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Brno. He taught at the Gymnasium in Nový Jičín between the years 1974 and 1990. He presented exhibitions and concerts of artists from the alternative scene in the local ‘J-klub’ youth center. He was one of the founding members of the Civic Forum in Nový Jičín and an active participant of the town’s political revolution. He was an MP of the Federal Assembly for the Civic Forum between 1990 and 1992, later for the Civic Movement. After his mandate had finished, he returned to the Gymnasium in Nový Jičín. He moved to a partially secluded house in Valašská Bytřice and started teaching at a Gymnasium in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.