Richard Fidler
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Richard Fidler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And on top of that, it had the best beer in the world.
So what more do you want, Mark, in a place?
I was there during its glorious Velvet Revolution.
Remember, right at the end of the 1980s, late 1989, there was a wave of democratic revolutions in the former Soviet satellite states, and one by one they went down.
It was Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and eventually Czechoslovakia in November 1989.
And to arrive at Prague in this kind of beautiful, stunningly beautiful, the most beautiful city in the world, I think, to find it in this utterly joyful state...
It was one of those things where the regime ended not with a bang or a whimper, but the sound of a champagne cork popping.
The whole city was like a gigantic party.
The Czechs in the 20th century had this long history of trying to establish themselves as an independent democracy.
After the First World War, they had a great liberal democracy under their president.
They had a free economy, free political system.
They had feminist senators.
This was destroyed by the Nazi invasion.
And they lived under the awful night of Nazism, where Prague's Jewish population, which had been there for a millennium, was almost entirely exterminated.
Coming out of that, there was a brief patch of semi-democracy just after the war.
But in 1948, the Communist Party staged a coup d'etat, which they called a revolution, but it was a coup d'etat, and had been in power for four decades.
Which was everything in the economy is controlled, it's planned, they said that was going to be a virtue.
There's no other political party.
Any form of dissidence was met with, initially by torture, repression, and a bullet in the back of the head or a noose around the neck.
There were awful purges in the country in the late 40s, early 50s, where so many people were hung in Prague's punk ruts prison.
Showing 21–40 of 218 · page 2 of 11
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