Democracy Digest: Two Czech Artists Who Defined a Revolution

Chramostova signed the Charter 77 petition demanding the regime respect human rights and was banned from performing in public again.

By contrast, Gott publicly urged his fellow artists to sign the "Anti-Charter" opposing the dissidents and became the "golden voice" of the conformist "Normalisation" period of the 1980s. 

Yet both dissident and collaborator were active in the Velvet Revolution, in which all parts of Czechoslovak society were able to come together in massive demonstrations to demand democracy and freedom, culminating in the election of dissident Vaclav Havel as president. 

Thus a discreet veil was drawn over the fact that there were some 1.5 million party members in the 1980s (10 per cent of the population) as well as 70,000 secret police agents or informers, while the dissidents had been marginal (only 1,900 signed Charter 77 compared with 7,000 who signed the Anti-Charter). 

Instead the country could agree that the Velvet Revolution, the Prague Spring and the interwar First Republic represented its true face and that the 40 years of communist dictatorship were only an interregnum.

"People who cared about democracy and freedom were in a minority. This is now catching up with us," says Jiri Pehe, a former adviser of Havel and now a commentator for the Novinky.cz news site.

After Gott's death was announced, Prime Minister Andrej Babis — a former Communist Party member and secret police informer (though he disputes that he is in the STB files) — immediately called for a state funeral and a national day of mourning. 

This was a typically brilliant populist move by Babis's PR advisers: Gott was a hero to his tabloid-reading older and poorer voters who were formed under communism and often look back on that period...