Petr Uhl (1941–2021) was one of those public speakers who demand much more from people than the public is capable of giving. Of course he was aware of it, but he didn’t want to compromise. He couldn’t be liked. He wasn’t. But its importance does not diminish with time, on the contrary.
He was born and raised in Prague, where he graduated from the Czech Technical University in 1963 as a mechanical engineer. He did not study either politics or journalism, which soon became his life’s content. He was of the opinion that a person should not accept any existing forms (for example, join existing political parties), but as an individual should create everything new.
He began to live fully in the sixties. Raised a Catholic, he turned atheist. Above all, however, he visited France for the first time in 1965 and began to meet members of the radical non-communist left there.
The way to them was opened for him by Alain Krivine, one of the organizers of the Fourth (so-called Trotskyist) International, which despised the systems of the Eastern Bloc. She demanded the real liberation of the workers, not just the substitution of one exploitation (capitalist) for another (state bureaucratic). Uhl enjoyed himself with the program of the Fourth International during the entire time that he was allowed to go to France and stay there (1965–1969). It transformed his life.
When the so-called revival process broke out in the Communist Party in 1968, he was
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