Lidové noviny, along with the whole Czech press, pays tribute to a “great Czech statesman”, Jiří Dienstbier, who died on 8 January at the age of 73. Dienstbier was “a key figure in the 1989 revolution”, recalls president Václav Klaus. A journalist until the Soviet invasion in 1968, a signer of the Charter 77 human rights manifesto and an active member of the dissident movement in the Soviet bloc, for which he was persecuted by the Communist regime, he later became the first foreign minister of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, remembers Communist era meetings between Czechoslovakian and Polish dissidents in the Krkonoše (Giant Mountains), on the border between the two countries, and this line from Dienstbier: “We had to have the revolution because we were fed up climbing to the summit every time we wanted to meet with Jacek Kuroń and other Polish friends.”
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