Daisy Sindelar: Jan Urban, welcome to Weight of the World. You’re a person who’s played a very important role in Czechoslovak democratic history and the subsequent Czech political conversation, let’s say, if not politics itself. So you’ve had a very interesting life. You grew up in communist-era Czechoslovakia and your father was a member of the Communist Party and a diplomat and he worked as an ambassador in Finland. And this is something that afforded you something that perhaps not everyone had access to, which was travel and time to study abroad. I’m curious how the world looked to you as a young person. What was important to you? 

Jan Urban: [Laughs] I was a perfect commie kid. I loved the easiness of the world as it was pictured to us as kids in communist schools. You know, black and white. I couldn't grow up fast enough to fight against imperialism, to save the poor workers in the West who were exploited by imperialists. And both of my parents were communists. My father spent six years in the anti-Nazi resistance, a communist one. So he came out from [World War II] at 24, with nearly completely white hair. He never talked about it. And since I remember him as a kid, in my earliest childhood memories, he was screaming at night, of horror. 

So they were true believers. And as a war hero, my father made a stellar career. He was a much higher-placed communist before he [was demoted and] became ambassador to Finland. But you're absolutely right. The entire family was able to travel to this semi-western Finnish existence. And it was an eye-opening experience that changed me forever. Remember, that was in the ‘60s. So I was in my teens. Girls began to be of interest. And I quickly realized that having longer hair and playing guitar made my prospects better. You know, we were confronted with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez music, and the Beatles. And after that, no propaganda could win us over anymore. 

One more interesting thing in my teenage years was that my parents, though still devoted communists, sent me to Great Britain when I was 16. I was 16 and I landed at Heathrow Airport, and for the first time in my life, I saw imperialists in reality. And they had both hands, two hands, two legs. They talked with strange accents, but they seemed to be absolutely normal people.

What were you expecting?

Come on, I grew up on class struggle. And though I changed and I knew of the troubles of my parents [and the fact that] my father lost his position in the Communist Party because he was protesting, because he was asking for change earlier than anybody else. But this was with my own eyes.

I could talk to people. I could see real life all over Britain. And it was an eye-opening experience. I even met by accident with Paul McCartney.

Wait, wait, wait. You can't just gloss over that detail. Tell us a little bit about meeting Paul McCartney.

Friends took me to a concert in Liverpool of The Scaffold, which was a local band with a very famous poet who was, I think, a nephew of Paul McCartney. (Editor’s note: Scaffold member Peter Michael McCartney, known professionally as Mike McGear, was Paul McCartney’s younger brother.) And during the break we just went to a corridor, and there was Paul McCartney talking with his nephew – cousin, sorry, cousin. Yeah, and so it was fun.

I bet! 

[Laughs] And you know, for someone from a commie country to go through adventures like this was kind of mind-boggling.

Yeah, it's mind-boggling to even think about. So in 1968, you're in England, and then you go home for a visit. 

I went to Prague on August the 20th, 1968, with the last British-European Airways flight to Prague in the evening. And I woke up and there were Soviet tanks in front of our house.

And this was the Soviet invasion following a blossoming period of pro-democracy experimentation and reform by the communist regime [known as the Prague Spring]. And this was quickly crushed by Soviet tanks and soldiers. And you were there, having just arrived from England.

The thing was, I was 17 and I was alone, my family being in Finland. And I was lucky because all of a sudden I had to make decisions in critical situations. You know, when you see tanks shooting from heavy machine guns 15 meters from you – it’s not only something that you remember, but it’s something that makes you think. And so I spent 10 days here before I was able to take a train to Vienna and fly to Helsinki to meet the family again. And on that train, I believe the lady conductor and myself were the only two people who wished to come back. Everybody else was talking about the United States, Australia, Europe – emigration. I believe it was a hardening experience, because everybody knew that all hope was lost.

So you had been to Helsinki. You had been to London. And you described that process of realizing that the imperialist enemy that you had grown up fearing or feeling sorry for was really something different. What was the reverse experience like? When did you begin to become aware of the fact that there were limitations on your perception of freedom at home? 

Already in primary school. I was a tall guy, quite unpopular because I was tearing all the fights apart. Then a classmate of mine, whose father came from the Czechoslovak army legion from the east, from the Soviet Union, told the class during a break that it was the Americans, and not the Soviet army, who liberated western Bohemia, the western part of Czechoslovakia. 

In World War II. 

At the end of World War II. But that was contrary to what we were taught. So we had an argument and, you know, I was twice as big as he was. And so I got him down to the ground.

I had to report to my father because of a class reprimand for fighting. And he – you know, a great communist – looked at me and said, ‘But he was right.’ 

Wow.

So you know, this [was an] example of the first big lie the world tells you. Because [until then] we had absolute trust with our teachers. That was the beginning of doubts, and I started to have conversations with my father. [Laughs]

Let's stay with your father for a minute. After the Soviet invasion, there was a period where people basically had to make up their minds. Members of the Communist Party, were they going to toe the line, observe the communist regime and all of its restrictions, or were they still going to press for democratic reforms? And your father fell into the latter category. 

You know, it was very simple. Everybody understood the rules. Because there was a long-standing tradition within the Communist Party: either you are with us or against us. No middle ground. And they came to him with a very fair offer. ‘Support us, be with us, and very probably as early as next year you'll be a deputy foreign minister. If you go against us, you will never find a job.’

And he told them to go to hell because he was this old kind of idealist. And true to their word, he never found a proper job. He worked in a forest, he worked as a hotel bellboy, a night watchman, a postal clerk. And he died at 66. 

A lot of people faced a similar fate. A lot of people lost their professions, their vocations, their ability to earn money, to have a respectable career, because of that same choice that your father made. This literally affected hundreds of thousands of people. But I want to know how it felt for you watching him make that decision and face the consequences that he did. What was it like at a personal level?

We didn't know the consequences, really, because it was not only his job. A few months later, my mother lost her job. My younger sister never made it to the university, despite being the brightest in the family. I barely made it [into university] to study history and philosophy.

And you see two brilliant people… OK, losing social status is fine, but the atmosphere has changed. All of a sudden, people that you knew in the street, for instance, stopped seeing you. We disappeared. Soon we didn't have any money. My father collapsed. He had joked, you know, ‘I know I will die from a heart attack, I just don't know which one it will be.’ It was the fifth one. So he was portioning his life among heart attacks. 

Do you think your father ever regretted his decision?

No way. [It was not even a matter of] pride. He was [just] an honest man.

So in a way, he made you an inadvertent dissident. But then you became a dissident in earnest.

Family tradition, third generation, right.

Right. So I wanted to ask you about that too and about Charter 77, which was kind of a citizens’ initiative to which you were a signatory. And this was a movement that was aimed at putting pressure on the communist regime to uphold the human rights [obligations] that were built into the Czechoslovak Constitution and in international law. But that had similarly grave consequences for you, just as your father's decision had had for him.

I had to move after finishing university. I was lucky to see the end of it. We had to move from Prague because both of my parents had been expelled from the party. So it was a kind of big black mark on my CV. I couldn't get any kind of intellectual job.

So we went to a small city in the south, and I got a job as a high school teacher. And it was fun until January ‘77, when Charter 77 came into existence and all state employees, including teachers, were quote unquote ‘asked’ to sign a petition against antisocialist forces and those who poisoned the wells and spread the plague. And there was a really nasty Stalinist language-style article in the Communist Party daily, with names [of alleged anticommunists].

And we were ambushed by the director of the high school. He had us seated and said, ‘Comrades, I have this document for you to sign against Charter 77.’ And I was the third around the table. And I said, ‘I'm sorry, I can't sign it, because this article is totally false. It names people that I know from childhood, people who survived concentration camps or were in the resistance.’ Some of them I called aunt and uncle, which is, in Czech, kind of the way you call your nearest family friends. And I would never accept that these people are enemies.

Two others joined me. The rest just, you know, looked down and signed it. And this director turned totally pale and took the paper and ran away.

What’s the difference between the person who signs and the person who doesn't sign?

Humiliation. You inflict humiliation upon yourself because we all knew it was rubbish. It was a total lie.

[After that,] I had my final farewell meeting with a student theater that we had put together. And one of the students came with a message from her mother. ‘You should go to a horse stable, a racetrack 17 kilometers from that town, and ask for Mr. XYZ, and you'll have a job.’ And that was my start with horses. It was the first time in my life that I saw a horse from up close. There were young horses and there was a stable for racehorses – a very small one, 12 horses. And after three days, a jockey fell from a horse and broke his leg bone. So the trainer came to me and said, ‘Are you afraid [to ride]?’ You know, you ask a 26-year-old kind of naive macho [guy] – the answer can’t be ‘Yes, I’m afraid.’ So, you know, on my third day, I was sitting on a horse and after a few days, I was riding steeplechase horses in training for two years. The best years of my life.

You were a person at that time who had had exposure to the West. You had spent time in London. To what degree was the West or the United States important to you in setting an example of what a democratic society could be – or, even more intimately, in terms of providing support for people like yourself inside Czechoslovakia? Was it part of your thinking, or not at all?

Oh, definitely. It wasn’t that we knew very much, but it was a dream. You know, during this [political] thawing in the late ‘60s, Kennedy's book, ‘Profiles in Courage,’ or what was the name in English, was translated into Czech. And all of a sudden you realized somebody in the system was standing up against the majority and winning, at least morally. Intoxicating! 

It all changed after the Helsinki Conference in 1975 and the policy of human rights defense. It was a lifesaving endeavor for us because we ceased to be the property of the regime. Any signatory government could ask for specific information on the specific case of an individual, even, based on the Helsinki Accords. And it became one of the most efficient policies [in dealing with] totalitarian regimes. You know, in my real dissident years, during my [police] interrogations, sometimes the guy on the other side of the table would lose his temper and bang the table and say, ‘If you just didn't have your Americans and all this shit about Helsinki human rights.’ And I would giggle and say, ‘Well we do, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

There were also growing contacts [with the U.S.] because, you know, there was the New School for Social Research in New York that was originated by Jewish exiles from Nazism in the late ‘30s. And there as a strong tradition in that university to support dissidents. So all of a sudden, we started to get visitors [to Czechoslovakia] – contacts, careers, brave people who would come at great risk in many instances. And near the end, we got visits by university presidents and journalists, even some politicians. And we really believed that this was the world we wanted to join. And it lasted and ended with November ‘89.

Well, let’s go to November ‘89. You were a leading member of the Civic Forum, which was driving the protests that became known as the Velvet Revolution and led to the communist regime stepping down, Václav Havel becoming president, and the first free elections in 43 years. Revolutions tend to be lodged in historical memory as kind of a spontaneous event, a once-in-a-lifetime flash. And I want to know if it was like that for you, or if it was the long-awaited result of a lot of hard work.

[Laughs] First, none of us expected ever to see the end of communist regime. Whoever said something different later on is a liar. The regime had succeeded in making us ‘unthink,’ stop dreaming. Later on, I went around, to 40 of my former dissident colleagues asking everybody whether they remember any meeting or discussion about the future. Nobody did. That is how unprepared we were. So I'm not calling it a revolution, because revolutions tend to destroy something old and construct something new, and that's not what we did.

Okay, we won. It was clear. But we didn't have the slightest idea what to do. And it all became improvisation and it all concentrated only on Václav Havel and his nearest circle and that was the end for me. So around December 10th [1989], I said ‘I’m out.’ But because I was younger, sufficiently stupid, and feeling some responsibility, I agreed to continue until elections [in June 1990]. But I deliberately refused to sign an employment contract.

I want to ask about Donald Trump. I'm really interested in your view of his second term. As you've watched the past few months of his presidency, what has really been most striking for you?

[Laughs] I watched him already in his first term and I saw Ivanka's secret police file. There's so much information on Donald. 

Just to be clear, we're talking about Ivana Trump, correct? His wife and not his daughter. 

Correct. From what I've seen, I'm convinced that Ivanka Trump inherited her father's collaboration with secret police, officially or unofficially. And what I've seen from the late ‘70s and ‘80s on Donald Trump in the communist secret police archive was funny.

Funny in what way?

They took him for a simple guy, easily influenceable. For me, the study of Donald Trump was fun. He was so predictable, so uneducated, so pompous, manipulatable. And I just couldn't believe that, you know, the political scene in the United States could swallow a clown like that.

Meaning it's enough that you won 51 percent and you’re king of the universe. You stop discussing [policy] with anybody – specifically with that remaining 49 percent – and you start to act like a totalitarian leader. And that's not the dream I had about America.

I would never believe that the political scene in the United States could capitulate in front of one man. It reminds me so much of what we've been through under communism. And you can see the gestures, you can see how simplified the speech becomes with these people [like Trump], how dependent they are on yes-sayers. And how the yes-sayers, when you compare Trump’s first and second terms, are of lower and lower and lower quality.

We in Central Europe, to put it mildly, are slightly nervous about Russia and its wars. And watching Donald Trump and his staff dismantling the CIA, the FBI, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe… We just don't believe what we are looking at. From our perspective, it's high treason. You dismantle the security apparatus. You dismantle counter-intelligence. You dismantle expertise. Exactly at the point when it's the most needed. And we just don't understand. And because we are hysterical people, we’re afraid.

You've been a dissident. You've been, let's say, a political strategist. You've been a journalist, including a war correspondent in the Balkans and in Iraq. But you've also been a teacher, both at the start of your career and now. You teach a university course at the Prague branch of New York University about modern-day dissent. How do you teach students about dissent and what it means to fight for democracy?

We talk. You know, there are no limits in our conversation. I always say, you know, what is said here stays here. I'm not reporting on anybody's opinions. I just want you to be totally open, just as I am. I will provoke you. I will try to confuse you. 

The course itself is a combination of psychology, history, storytelling. Just today we had a great conversation with students, a debate, and I told them that the amount of information that people in the time of the Industrial Revolution received through their entire lives is the amount that we [now consume] in a week. Does it make us more moral? Does it make us wiser? And they start thinking. Understanding that from time to time, one may go against the majority, by accident or because of moral reason. Understanding that majorities are not always right. In reality, majorities are in most cases wrong. And it's dissenters who are asking the right question. I mean, you know, all major religions are based on the story of a dissident.

I want to ask you a sort of a thought-experiment question. So let's say we go into a lab and our task is to create the perfect citizen for public engagement. So it's still 2025. You still have the internet, you still have social media, but other than that, you have a blank slate. And so what does this person need? What does a person need in order to become the perfect, responsible citizen?

Learn to listen. When you want to change something, when you want to help people, you first have to hear their stories, their grievances, their crying. I've learned the hard way that the worst thing a good-wisher can do is to parachute him or herself into some rotten place and tell everybody, you know, that ‘from now on love and peace will emerge. You just have to follow the principles,’ or whatever. No. You have to start in misery, you have to become the lowest of the low, to understand people's passivity, people's distrust, and find the ways and tricks for how to motivate them to take a more active approach.

Jan, a final question. What advice would you give to the American people and to anyone concerned about the attack on liberal democracy at this moment?

Never stay silent. Never surrender. Be open. And pay the price. The second you buy into the picture of inevitable conflict, us versus them, you’re in trouble. Asking questions is always more effective than screaming ‘Injustice!’

You know, in my career, I had to deal with secret police provocateurs, interrogators, war criminals. When you go into extreme situations like this, you see the end line of humanity. But it is still humanity. You have to understand you cannot change people like this. But you can change the environment. You can help change the environment [in a way] that at the end makes even individuals such as these either step down or change, lose their killing instinct, and so on. But it has nothing to do with education. It has nothing to do with political opinion. It’s humanity. And we cannot pretend we are all angels. And to understand the heavenly qualities, you sometimes have to talk to devils.

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You can listen to this conversation by following Weight of the World on Spotify and Apple. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.