The Prague Post Online: Tempo: 'Red Bard' clings to communism

December 5th, 2008

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'Red Bard' clings to communism

Controversial singer denies links to leftist groups despite beliefs

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 28th, 2008 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Epanastatis Prusalis says the communist regime here fell due to ineffective leadership, and that new Lenins and new Stalins will soon come. enlarge

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Prusalis boasts of performing 5,500 concerts the world over. enlarge

The Prusalis File

Name: Epanastatis Prusalis
Age: 60
Birthplace: Gramos mountain range, Greece
Family: Married, with four daughters
Concerts performed: 5,500

Each May Day, a spectral crowd materializes at the Křižík Fountain performance grounds in Prague 7 to resurrect the atmosphere of a bygone era.

Save for a sprinkling of young radicals in red-starred military caps and Che Guevara T-shirts, the annual Communist Party demonstrations emit an ambience seemingly incomprehensible for anyone not of retirement age.

Speaking in the accents of remote rural regions, these lifelong party devotees arrive by the thousands, often clutching canes and crutches as they trudge down the fountain steps. Once secure in the company of their like-minded friends, an undeniable joy illuminates their features. Old comrades pat each other’s backs in a queue for sausages, beer and plum brandy; gray-haired couples sit placidly in the back rows, their eyes fixated on the stage.

When a guitar-wielding Epanastatis Prusalis steps onto the podium, the masses fall silent.

Garbed in a traditional purple robe, the long-haired Greek hypnotizes the audience with melodies that are routinely censured by the radio. His politically charged lyrics panegyrize Fidel Castro, pledge allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, and extol the achievements of the working classes.

“I don’t like Americans,” he bellows into the microphone, collecting applause. “They killed my father.”

Nicknamed the “Red Bard” for his musical ability and staunch communist persuasion, Prusalis — a prominent member of the Communist Party — occupies a controversial niche in the Czech political spectrum.

While ostracized for his unpopular beliefs, he maintains connections with members of the political elite and often hosts high-profile events at his chateau in Poruba, north Moravia.

Investigated by the secret services for his alleged links to dictatorial governments and left-wing extremism, Prusalis has been a local pariah since the fall of communism.

“They have placed me on a side track for the past 18 years,” he says, gesticulating with his spare hand as he delves into a whipped cream–topped sundae.

Despite his evident affinity for the local ice cream parlor, he looks around the cookie-cutter shops in the Tesco shopping center near his suburban hometown with dismay.

“All this is a consequence of the open market,” he says. “Tell me, how many of these shops are Czech-owned? We have yet to see the full effects of capitalism here. [Václav] Havel and his people put Czech society back 50 years.”

Although his faith in the communist system endures nearly two decades after the dissolution of the Eastern bloc, Prusalis says he embraced the Velvet Revolution.

“Communism in itself is genial. It collapsed here because a couple of bastards came to power, which is why I myself welcomed [the 1989 revolution],” he says. “The people have a right to take to the streets when they are dissatisfied.”

Revolutionary roots

Prusalis’ faith in communism sprouts from his tumultuous origins.

In 1946, a civil war erupted in Greece between the royal government and communist guerrillas. While the south of the country had been liberated by the English at the end of World War II, the German and Italian Fascists who occupied the mountainous northern regions were pushed out by Soviet troops. Before departing, both allies molded the locals into paramilitary factions that then fought each other for state control.

Prusalis was born in the Gramos mountain range, the son of a communist partisan who was killed in an air strike.

“Before he died, my father said, ‘I know that I will soon have a son, and I know that he will be a revolutionary,’ ” he says.

In 1948, Prusalis and his mother retreated to Albania along with the defeated communist army. From there, Prusalis was taken in by the Czechoslovak government and transported to regions vacated by the Sudeten Germans and exiled aristocrats.

“For the first time in my life, I tasted bread and butter,” he recalls.

Altogether, around 12,000 Greek refugees were granted asylum by Czechoslovakia after the Greek civil war.

“The Czech people did something unforgettable,” Prusalis says. “They gave us more than they were able to give their own children.”

Foreign travels

After graduating from the Ostrava conservatory in 1972, Prusalis was permitted to travel abroad and perform at concerts in Western Europe, including the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

He also began collaborating with communist intelligence services.

While his superiors never familiarized Prusalis with the objective of his missions, he maintains that his information-gathering activities were of an economic nature.

“We would monitor foreign freight trucks that would come into the republic with worn-out tires. On their way back out, the tires were brand-new,” he says. “They were causing the state million-crown losses.”

When armed conflict erupted in Yugoslavia in 1999, Prusalis went to Belgrade to act as a human bull’s-eye in an effort to prevent NATO forces from bombing the city’s bridges.

“We almost began to pray that the idiot up in that plane wouldn’t push that button,” he recalls.

When U.S. forces began bombing Iraq in 2001, Prusalis headed to Baghdad to dispel the attack.

“The people in Iraq were more divided on the issue. Not all of them wanted peace,” he said. “After the bombing began, there was nothing left for me to do there.”

Days later, he held a concert in North Korea.

“For us, the North Koreans are a people whose extreme modesty is hard to comprehend,” he says of his visit. “Just because they are satisfied by a single bowl of rice does not mean they are not happy. … All that arming is necessary protection against the American airplane carriers just beyond their territorial waters.”

Illicit activity

Squeezed into a small park surrounding a line of working-class housing developments that typify the Ostrava area, the Poruba Chateau is one grade humbler than its aristocratic-owned counterparts. It is nevertheless a mansion: A neo-Baroque balustrade looks over a manicured courtyard; heavy carpets and crystal chandeliers line the spotless parlors. Prusalis insists the chateau is for the people, and he lives in a nearby apartment block.

When he purchased it in 1992 for 96,000 Kč, the 15th-century ruin was on the verge of collapse.

“It was becoming a safety hazard, so the town wanted to get rid of it without having to pay for the demolition,” he says. “Otherwise, I would have been the last person they’d sell it to. … Everyone thought I was a lunatic for trying to fix it up. But they underestimated the labor of hardworking locals. And look at it now.”

During his communist-era travels to countries that were inaccessible for most Czechs, the resourceful Prusalis managed to attain a small fortune.

“The money I used to purchase the chateau was saved up over the years,” he says. “I performed at thousands of concerts, and I obtained other finances from property that had been returned to me in Greece.”

This explanation did not satisfy the financial police. As recently as 2004, up to eight inspectors pored over Prusalis’ records in a fruitless search for evidence of illegal activity.

“They accused me of drug dealing, human trafficking, links to organized crime,” he says. “But my finances had always been clean.”

Prusalis has been on the radar of the local secret services (BIS) since the early 1990s, when he began renting the chateau out for political meetings.

“Prusalis became an object of our attention for the contacts he had abroad. … We had information that delegations from Iraq, Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Belarus were congregating there,” says former BIS officer Vladimír Hučín.

In 1993, Hučín disguised himself as a communist sympathizer and infiltrated one of the meetings.

“We found out that representatives of the ultra-left were mixing with mainstream Social Democrats like [former Prime Minister Miloš] Zeman,” he says.

Given Prusalis’ obdurately anti-Western sentiments, Hučín interpreted these gatherings as potentially harmful to state interests.

“They did everything they could to influence the public and prevent the Czech Republic from joining NATO [in 1999],” he says.

Prusalis admits that former Prague Communist Secretary Miroslav Štěpán, who headed an ultra-left political party during the 1990s, was present at the chateau during Hučín’s undercover mission, but denies any personal ties to the ultra-left.

“The philosophy of the chateau is to make money. Many political parties, including [the Civic Democrats and the Social Democrats] have meetings here. If Lucifer himself approached me, I would rent it out to him,” he says. “It is true that Štěpán was here once in 1993, but when I found out about the character of his meeting, I decided there were certain events I would not allow.”

The allegations linking him to terrorist governments rest solely on his anti-Western persuasion, he adds.

“They accuse me of being a Russian spy. To be honest, I might want to be one, but they wouldn’t take me, because I wouldn’t have the time to give it my full attention.”

Prusalis’ political views may also be behind his three failed attempts to receive a Czech passport.

“I made sure [Prusalis] was prevented from getting [Czech] citizenship,” says Hučín. “I proved he was involved in activities that undermined the state’s stability, that he was an internal security threat.”

Good day, Stalin

Strumming his acoustic guitar in the chateau dining room, the Red Bard plays a song too radical for even the Křižík Fountain audience.

“If I ever met Stalin / I would bow down to the ground / Good day, Josef Vissarionovich / No one will ever destroy your great land.”

While some imprisonments and political persecutions of the communist era are undeniable, Prusalis believes they were a necessary evil.

“Many people today mention the political trials during the 1950s,” he says. “Some of them were unjust — but imagine yourself in the position of someone who just survived World War II. He was trying to rebuild the nation and was faced with a person accused of undermining it. What would you do in his shoes?”

Personal freedoms are a matter of luxury, he adds.

“When you’re a working-class Ostrava resident who makes 8,000 Kč per month, has three children, and has to pay a 6,000 Kč rent, human rights mean absolutely nothing.”

In a 1904 pamphlet criticizing the moderates in his fledgling party, Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin wrote of taking “one step forward, two steps back.”

Somehow Prusalis remains mulishly faithful to communist philosophy.

“In 1986, a political science professor in Moscow told us there will soon come a time when we will have to take steps back,” he says. “Now we have made them, but human development cannot be stopped. Soon there will come new Lenins and new Stalins.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com

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