‘Solidarity of the Shaken People’
Seeking solutions to America’s troubles, I turn to Prague in 1977 — to the text of Charter 77, a human rights manifesto that exposed violent oppression and united dissidents. Intro by Alex Alvarova
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Author’s note: At the end of my Sunday Hot Type column in Byline, I asked where is our counter measure to the NSPM-7 directive, which allows people to be incarcerated for life sentences “based on a fiction” — the antifa boogeyman. Where is our pro-democracy directive in defense of human rights?
I decided to read Charter 77, a foundational human rights manifesto written in Prague and published on January 1, 1977. It criticized Czechoslovakia’s communist totalitarian regime for failing to uphold basic civil liberties promised in signed international human rights treaties — asking they be honored to guarantee human rights for all citizens.
In 1979, the U.S. Office of the Historian wrote: “The Charter 77 movement—approaching the third anniversary of its establishment—has successfully focused attention on the human rights violations in Czechoslovakia and on the repressive policies of the regime. In doing so, it has gained considerable sympathy and support in the West, as well as among other dissidents in Eastern Europe and the USSR.”
Today, in this moment, the U.S. needs a Charter 77 before it slides further into a fascist abyss. I asked disinformation analyst Alex Alvarova to write an introduction for the Bette community. You will find her words below, as well as the full text to Charter 77.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, 29 June 2026
Charter 77 — An Introduction by Alex Alvarova:
Charter 77 was one of the most significant civic initiatives in the former Communist Bloc, functioning as an informal and open community of people striving for the observance of human and civil rights.
The text of this document and civic declaration itself was drafted in late 1976 and dated January 1, 1977. It was officially published in the Western press (Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Times) on January 6, 1977, alongside the first public appearance of the names of the original 242 signatories. The text was smuggled to the West to avoid detection by the secret police.
The immediate catalyst was the arrest and trial of members of the underground rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. This regime crackdown united diverse groups of people in a Czechoslovakia that was otherwise deeply divided in its views.
The Helsinki Accords: The strategy of Charter 77 was ingenious in its legality. In 1975, Communist Czechoslovakia signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Helsinki, committing itself to respecting human rights. By that time, the communists were beginning to realize they would need strong Western currencies for their secret Western bank accounts and at least minimal conditions for trade, as the Russians had driven nearly all the economies of their satellite states to the brink of bankruptcy. Chaos, lack of competence and economic mayhem was the new normal. The state treasuries and mineral resources of the Eastern Bloc looked like a looted store.
Charter 77 deliberately did not define itself as a political opposition or organization (it had no statutes or fixed structures). It merely pointed out that the communist regime was systematically violating its own laws and the international commitments it had voluntarily signed up to. In this way, dissidents highlighted the hypocrisy and non-compliance with the country’s own Constitution and laws for over a decade before the regime finally collapsed.
Due to the lack of a permanent structure, the initiative was always represented externally by three spokespersons who rotated regularly to ensure continuity in the event of arrest. The first three spokespersons were:
Václav Havel (representing independent writers and playwrights, later president of a free Czechoslovakia),
Prof. Jan Patočka (one of the most prominent Czech philosophers, who died in March 1977 following brutal interrogations by the StB secret police),
Jiří Hájek (former Minister of Foreign Affairs during the 1968 Prague Spring).
By 1989, approximately 1,900 people out of a population of 13 million had signed the document. The communist authorities responded to the creation of the Charter with a massive wave of repression and a propaganda campaign called the Anti-Charter, forcing artists and celebrities to sign a moral condemnation of the dissidents.
Persecution: Signatories faced dismissals from their jobs (medical doctors and university professors thus often worked in blue-collar occupations as cleaners, stokers, or window washers), their children were banned from studying, and they were monitored, wiretapped, arrested, and imprisoned. As part of Operation Asanace (Sanitation), the StB sought to force signatories into emigration through physical and psychological pressure.
The Anti-Charter: The official press labeled the Chartists “traitors and sellouts.”
Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS): In April 1978, members of Charter 77 founded VONS. Its task was to monitor and thoroughly document cases of people who were criminally prosecuted or imprisoned for their beliefs or independent activities, and to inform both the domestic and international public about them.
Charter 77 managed to connect previously isolated pockets of domestic resistance, creating what Jan Patočka called the “solidarity of the shaken people”—a community of people who, regardless of their ideological differences (from Catholics to Trotskyists), shared a moral responsibility and refused to live in a lie.
Although during the “normalization” era — a two decades’ long period post-1968 of tremendous oppression, where passive political compliance and acceptance of Soviet dominance were exchanged for consumer gains, as a “substitute for the loss of personal freedom” — Charter 77 remained largely the project of a few brave intellectuals. This was due to the information blockade imposed on the majority of society, its structures and people became the natural foundation of the Civic Forum in November 1989, the umbrella organization of the Velvet Revolution.—Alex Alvarova for Bette Dangerous, 29 June 2026
Charter 77 — full text in English:
Declaration
1 January 1977
In the Czechoslovak Collection of Laws, no. 120 of 13 October 1976, texts were published of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which were signed on behalf of our Republic in 1968, were confirmed at Helsinki in 1975 and came into force in our country on 23 March 1976. From that date our citizens have the right, and our state the duty, to abide by them.
The human rights and freedoms underwritten by these covenants constitute important assets of civilised life for which many progressive movements have striven throughout history and whose codification could greatly contribute to the development of a humane society.
We accordingly welcome the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic's accession to those agreements.
Their publication, however, serves as an urgent reminder of the extent to which basic human rights in our country exist, regrettably, on paper only.
The right to freedom of expression, for example, guaranteed by article 19 of the first-mentioned covenant, is in our case purely illusory. Tens of thousands of our citizens are prevented from working in their own fields for the sole reason that they hold views differing from official ones, and are discriminated against and harassed in all kinds of ways by the authorities and public organisations. Deprived as they are of any means to defend themselves, they become victims of a virtual apartheid.
Hundreds of thousands of other citizens are denied that 'freedom from fear' mentioned in the preamble to the first covenant, being condemned to live in constant danger of unemployment or other penalties if they voice their own opinions.
In violation of article 13 of the second-mentioned covenant, guaranteeing everyone the right to education, countless young people are prevented from studying because of their own views or even their parents'. Innumerable citizens live in fear that their own or their children's right to education may be withdrawn if they should ever speak up in accordance with their convictions. Any exercise of the right to 'seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print' or 'in the form of art', specified in article 19, para. 2 of the first covenant, is punished by extrajudicial or even judicial sanctions, often in the form of criminal charges as in the recent trial of young musicians.
Freedom of public expression is repressed by the centralised control of all the communications media and of publishing and cultural institutions. No philosophical, political or scientific view or artistic expression that departs ever so slightly from the narrow bounds of official ideology or aesthetics is allowed to be published; no open criticism can be made of abnormal social phenomena; no public defence is possible against false and insulting charges made in official propaganda; the legal protection against 'attacks on honour and reputation' clearly guaranteed by article 17 of the first covenant is in practice non-existent; false accusations cannot be rebutted and any attempt to secure compensation or correction through the courts is futile; no open debate is allowed in the domain of thought and art. Many scholars, writers, artists and others are penalised for having legally published or expressed, years ago, opinions which are condemned by those who hold political power today.
Freedom of religious confession, emphatically guaranteed by article 18 of the first covenant, is systematically curtailed by arbitrary official action; by interference with the activity of churchmen, who are constantly threatened by the refusal of the state to permit them the exercise of their functions, or by the withdrawal of such permission; by financial or other measures against those who express their religious faith in word or action; by constraints on religious training and so forth.
One instrument for the curtailment or, in many cases, complete elimination of many civic rights is the system by which all national institutions and organisations are in effect subject to political directives from the apparatus of the ruling party and to decisions made by powerful individuals. The constitution of the Republic, its laws and other legal norms do not regulate the form or content, the issuing or application of such decisions; they are often only given out verbally, unknown to the public at large and beyond its powers to check; their originators are responsible to no one but themselves and their own hierarchy; yet they have a decisive impact on the actions of the lawmaking and executive organs of government, and of justice, of the trade unions, interest groups and all other organisations, of the other political parties, enterprises, factories, institutions, offices, schools, and so on, for whom these instructions have precedence even before the law.
Where organisations or individual citizens, in the interpretation of their rights and duties, come into conflict with such directives, they cannot have recourse to any non-party authority, since none such exists. This constitutes, of course, a serious limitation of the right ensuing from articles 21 and 22 of the first-mentioned covenant, which provides for freedom of association and forbids any restriction on its exercise, from article 25 on the equal right to take part in the conduct of public affairs, and from article 26 stipulating equal protection by the law without discrimination. This state of affairs likewise prevents workers and others from exercising the unrestricted right to establish trade unions and other organisations to protect their economic and social interests, and from freely enjoying the right to strike provided for in para. 1 of article 8 in the second-mentioned covenant.
Further civic rights, including the explicit prohibition of 'arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home or correspondence' (article 17 of the first covenant), are seriously vitiated by the various forms of interference in the private life of citizens exercised by the Ministry of the Interior, for example, by bugging telephones and houses, opening mail, following personal movements, searching homes, setting up networks of neighbourhood informers (often recruited by illicit threats or promises) and in other ways. The ministry frequently interferes in employers' decisions, instigates acts of discrimination by authorities and organisations, brings weight to bear on the organs of Justice and even orchestrates propaganda campaigns in the media. This activity is governed by no law and, being clandestine, affords the citizen no chance to defend himself.
In cases of prosecution on political grounds the investigative and judicial organs violate the rights of those charged and of those defending them, as guaranteed by article 14 of the first covenant and indeed by Czechoslovak law. The prison treatment of those sentenced in such cases is an affront to human dignity and a menace to their health, being aimed at breaking their morale.
Paragraph 2, article 12 of the first covenant, guaranteeing every citizen the right to leave the country, is consistently violated, or under the pretence of 'defence of national security' is subjected to various unjustifiable conditions (para. 3). The granting of entry visas to foreigners is also handled arbitrarily, and many are unable to visit Czechoslovakia merely because of professional or personal contacts with those of our citizens who are subject to discrimination.
Some of our people -- either in private, at their places of work or by the only feasible public channel, the foreign media -- have drawn attention to the systematic violation of human rights and democratic freedoms and demanded amends in specific cases. But their pleas have remained largely ignored or been made grounds for police investigation.
Responsibility for the maintenance of civic rights in our country naturally devolves in the first place on the political and state authorities. Yet, not only on them: everyone bears his share of responsibility for the conditions that prevail and accordingly also for the observance of legally enshrined agreements, binding upon all citizens as well as upon governments. It is this sense of co-responsibility, our belief in the meaning of voluntary citizens' involvement and the general need to give it new and more effective expression that led us to the idea of creating Charter 77, whose inception we today publicly announce.
Charter 77 is a free informal, open community of people of different convictions, different faiths and different professions united by the will to strive, individually and collectively, for the respect of civic and human rights in our own country and throughout the world -- rights accorded to all men by the two mentioned international covenants, by the Final Act of the Helsinki conference and by numerous other international documents opposing war, violence and social or spiritual oppression, and which are comprehensively laid down in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Charter 77 springs from a background of friendship and solidarity among people who share our concern for those ideals that have inspired, and continue to inspire, their lives and their work.
Charter 77 is not an organisation; it has no rules. permanent bodies or formal membership. It embraces everyone who agrees with its ideas, participates in its work, and supports it. It does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity. Like manv similar citizen initiatives in various countries, West and East, it seeks to promote the general public interest. It does not aim, then, to set out its own programmes for political or social reforms or changes, but within its own sphere of activity it wishes to conduct a constructive dialogue with the political and state authorities, particularly by drawing attention to various individual cases where human and civil rights are violated, by preparing documentation and suggesting solutions, by submitting other proposals of a more general character aimed at reinforcing such rights and their guarantees, and by acting as a mediator in various conflict situations which may lead to injustice and so forth.
By its symbolic name Charter 77 denotes that it has come into being at the start of a year proclaimed as the Year of Political Prisoners, a year in which a conference in Belgrade is due to review the implementation of the obligations assumed at Helsinki.
As signatories, we hereby authorise Professor Dr Jan Patocka, Vaclav Havel and Professor Jiri Hajek to act as the spokesmen for the Charter. These spokesmen are endowed with full authority to represent it vis-a-vis state and other bodies. and the public at home and abroad, and their signatures attest the authenticity of documents issued by the Charter. They will have us, and others who join us, as their co-workers, taking part in any needful negotiations, shouldering particular tasks and sharing every responsibility.
We believe that Charter 77 will help to enable all the citizens of Czechoslovakia to work and live as free human beings.
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