Lust for Freedom - The First Years after the Velvet Revolution

The photographs of Pavel Hroch and Jáchym Topol’s essay record the wild years following the Velvet Revolution in Prague, an exciting time of celebrating the newfound freedom after the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The emotions of the country’s inhabitants flowed out onto the streets from more personal zones, along with many other previously suppressed subjects – and also the many repeat offenders released by the president’s amnesty. Confusion was mixed with joy and with a desire to do everything that had been previously forbidden, with no order or rules and with no more than abstract and idealized objectives. A counterpart to Hroch’s photographs from post-revolution Prague are his pictures from demonstrations in West Berlin, where left-wing radicals spit on capitalism under the banner of Mao Zedong, and also his pictures from Moscow, where anti-government protesters were calling for a return to the old order. All this was Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s – a place full of euphoria, illusions, and paradoxes.