Pavel Křivka

Pavel Křivka was born on 12th June 1960 in Pardubice. After high school he left for the German Democratic Republic, where, together with Pavel Škoda and other students from Czechoslovakia he enrolled to study at the University of Agriculture in Halle. After his graduation in 1984 he returned to Czechoslovakia and became a custodian of the collection in the National History Museum in Jičín. He was interested in ecology, which is why he received the post of regional environment officer. The State Security became interested in him because of his correspondence with several young ecologists from West Germany. When the State Security felt that it had enough evidence, they abruptly stopped their surveillance: on 29th April 1985 Křivka was arrested and charged with damaging the interests of the Republic abroad. Křivka had allegedly committed the aforesaid criminal act by criticising the quality of nature conservation in his socialist homeland in the letters he was sending to West Germany. During a house search that followed, in his apartment they found an anti-soviet style parody of the original text to Jakub Jan Ryba’s Christmas carol, that went like this: Hey Gustav, the atmosphere is tense, a telegram from Moscow has arrived saying that Leonid himself is going to rot by the wall. And in the Supreme Soviet, chaos broke out: ‘Who’s going to be installed?’...” Pavel had sung this “Christmas carol” with a Czech student choir at the University of Agriculture in Halle, shortly after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, and was in fact the author of the innovative text. The punishment for such a piece of insubordination according to the Communist judiciary was a three years of custodial sentence.