„Podkopávej ze všech sil dnešní režim!“ Ilegální tiskoviny odbojové skupiny Za pravdu (1949)
Undermine today’s regime as much as you can_Illegal publications of the Za pravdu resistance group (1949)

Summary/Abstract: This critical edition of documents includes all the existing illegal publications of the Za pravdu (“For Truth”) anti- Communist group which was active in 1949 in Prague, České Budějovice and Vodňany. The documents are accompanied by the introductory historical essay which devotes attention to the lives of their authors. The two mimeographed issues of the Za pravdu magazine and several leaflets, saved in the investigation files of the State Police, contain not only political commentaries and emotional proclamations for resistance against the post-February regime, but also rather ironic movie and literary reviews. The tone of all the articles, however, was the same – the authors sought to expose the totalitarian regime, mocked the primitive Red propaganda and international failures of the Soviet Union and sarcastically commented upon speeches given by Communist leaders. In connection with the distribution of these prints, the State Police arrested an increasing number of people, most of whom were subsequently sentenced to many years’ imprisonment. In the first trial, the State Court in Prague sentenced the writer Karel Pecka, Czechoslovak People’s Party leader Antonín Řežáb, movie director František Sádek and actor and screenwriter Vladimír Valenta. Their arrest, according to the archive documents, was helped by the State Police collaborator Miloslav Cettl whose role in the case as a whole has not yet been sufficiently clarified. The printed materials of the Prague group also continued to be spread by friends of Karel Pecka – members of the Scout Group in České Budějovice, led by František Zahrádka, a young radio mechanic who cooperated with the former flight mechanic Silvestr Müller. In the summer of 1949 the group established cooperation with the American military intelligence service in Bavaria where they illegally guided refugees over the border. In September 1949 the group from České Budějovice was arrested by the military intelligence service and subsequently sentenced in a separate trial by the State Court in Prague. Silvestr Müller was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in an accident in a uranium mining camp in 1954, and most of the other nineteen people were sentenced to many years in prison. Although some of them were conditionally released before the end of the term, none of them was successfully rehabilitated before the end of the Communist regime.

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