Dear fellow citizens,
For forty years on this day you have heard the same thing from the lips of my predecessors in various variations: how our country is flourishing, how many more millions of tons of steel we have produced, how happy we are all, how we trust our government, and what wonderful prospects are opening up before us.

I assume that you did not nominate me for this office so that I could lie to you too.

Our country is not flourishing. The great creative and spiritual potential of our people is not being used meaningfully. Entire branches of industry produce things that are of no interest, while we do not get what we need. The state that calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits the workers. Our outdated economy wastes energy, of which we have little. A country that could once have been proud of the education of its people, spends so little on education that it is now in seventy-second place in the world. We have spoiled ourselves the land, rivers and forests that our ancestors left us, and today we have the worst living environment in all of Europe. Adults die earlier here than in most European countries.

Allow me a little personal experience: when I recently flew to Bratislava, I found time during various meetings to look out the window. I saw the Slovnaft complex and right behind it the city of Petržalka. That look was enough for me to understand that for a decade our statesmen and politicians had not looked or did not want to look out of the windows of their planes. No reading of the statistics that I have at my disposal would have allowed me to understand the state we have reached more quickly and easily.

But all this is still not the main thing. The worst thing is that we live in a corrupt moral environment. We have become morally sick because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, not to notice each other, to care only about about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension and for many of us they mean only some kind of psychological peculiarities, or they seem like stray greetings from ancient times, somewhat ridiculous in the era of computers and space rockets. Only a few of us were able to shout out loud that the powerful should not be omnipotent and that special farms that grow ecologically clean and high-quality food for them should send their products to schools, children's boarding schools and hospitals, when our agriculture can no longer offer them to everyone. The current regime - armed with its proud and intolerant ideology - has degraded man to a productive force and nature to a production tool. It has thus attacked their very essence and their mutual relationship. It has turned talented and self-sufficient people, ingeniously managing their country, into cogs in a monstrously large, rattling and smelly machine, about which no one knows does not know what its real meaning is. It can do nothing more than slowly but inexorably wear itself out and all its screws.

When I speak of a corrupt moral atmosphere, I am not only talking about gentlemen who eat ecologically clean vegetables and do not look out of airplane windows. I am talking about all of us. We have all become accustomed to the totalitarian system and have accepted it as an unchangeable fact, and in doing so have actually maintained it. In other words: we are all - although of course each to a different extent - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery, none of us are just its victims, but we are all at the same time its co-creators.

Why I am talking about this: it would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something foreign, bequeathed to us by a distant relative. On the contrary, we must accept this legacy as something that we ourselves have brought upon ourselves. If we accept it in this way, we will understand that it is up to all of us, to do something about it. We cannot blame everything on the previous rulers not only because it would not correspond to the truth, but also because it could weaken the duty that faces each of us today, namely the duty to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government, the best parliament and the best president cannot do much on their own. And it would be deeply wrong to expect general correction only from them. Freedom and democracy mean participation and therefore joint responsibility of everyone.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will immediately cease to seem so terrible to us. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.

We have something to lean on in the correction of general matters. Recent times - and especially the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution - have shown how great a general human, moral and spiritual charge and how great a civic culture have been dormant in our society under the imposed mask of apathy. Whenever someone has categorically claimed to me that we are this or that, I have always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is never good to believe only the face of it that it shows at the moment. I am happy that I was not mistaken. People all over the world are wondering where in those pliant, humiliated, skeptical and seemingly no longer believing in anything citizens of Czechoslovakia suddenly found that amazing strength to shake off the totalitarian system from their loins in a few weeks in a completely decent and peaceful manner. We ourselves are wondering about it. And we ask: where do young people who have never known another system actually draw their desire for truth, their free-thinking, their political imagination, their civic courage and civic deliberation from? How is it that even their parents - that is, precisely the generation that was considered lost - joined them? How is it possible that so many people immediately understood what to do, and none of them needed any advice or instructions to do so?

I think that this hopeful face of our current situation has two main causes: first of all, a person is never just a product of the external world, but is always also capable of relating to something higher, no matter how systematically the external world destroys this ability in him; secondly, it is because the humanistic and democratic traditions, which have so often been talked about in vain, have been dormant somewhere in the unconscious of our nations and national minorities and have been passed down inconspicuously from generation to generation, so that at the right moment each of us can discover them within ourselves and turn them into action.

Of course, we also had to pay for our present-day freedom. Many of our citizens died in prisons in the 1950s, many were executed, thousands of human lives were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of talented people were expelled abroad. Those who saved the honor of our nations during the war were persecuted, those who resisted the totalitarian government, and those who simply managed to be themselves and think freely. No one who paid for our present-day freedom in one way or another should be forgotten. Independent courts should fairly weigh the possible guilt of those responsible so that the full truth about our recent past comes to light.

However, we must not forget that other nations paid even more heavily for their present-day freedom and that they indirectly paid for us as well. The rivers of blood that flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently, in such a shocking way, in Romania, as well as the seas of blood that were shed by the peoples of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten, above all, because every human suffering concerns every human being. But not only that: they must not be forgotten also because these great sacrifices are the tragic background of today's freedom or the gradual liberation of the peoples of the Soviet bloc, and therefore the background of our newly acquired freedom. Without changes in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and the German Democratic Republic, what happened would probably have been difficult for us to happen, and if it had happened, it certainly would not have had such a beautifully peaceful character.

The fact that we had favorable international conditions does not mean, however, that anyone directly helped us in these weeks. After centuries, both of our peoples actually straightened themselves out, without relying on any help from more powerful states or great powers. It seems to me that this is the great moral contribution of this moment: it contains the hope that in the future we will no longer suffer from the complex of those who have to constantly thank someone for something. Now it only depends on us whether this hope will be fulfilled and whether our civic, national and political self-confidence will awaken in a completely new way historically.

Self-confidence is not pride.

Quite the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident in the best sense of the word is able to listen to the voice of others, accept them as equals, forgive its enemies and regret its own mistakes. Let us try to bring self-confidence understood in this way as people into the life of our community and as nations into our behavior on the international stage. Only in this way will we regain respect for ourselves, for each other and for other nations.

Our state should never again be a burden or a poor relative of anyone else. We have to take a lot from others and learn a lot, but after a long time we have to do it again as their equal partners who also have something to offer.

Our first president wrote: Jesus, not Caesar. He was following in the footsteps of Chelčický and Comenius. Today this idea has come to life again in us. I dare say that perhaps we even have the opportunity to spread it further and thus introduce a new element into European and world politics. If we want, our country can permanently radiate love, a desire for understanding, strength of spirit and thought. This radiation can be exactly what we can offer as our unique contribution to world politics.

Masaryk based politics on morality. Let us try to renew this concept of politics in a new way in the new era. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of the desire to contribute to the happiness of the community, and not the need to deceive or rape it. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics need not be only the art of the possible, especially if by that is meant the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret agreements and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it can also be the art of the impossible, namely the art of making ourselves and the world better.

We are a small country, but we were once a spiritual crossroads of Europe. Why can't we become one again? Wouldn't that be another contribution with which we could repay others for the help we will need from them?

The domestic mafia of those who don't look out of their airplane windows and eat specially fattened pigs, although it is still alive and sometimes muddying the waters, is no longer our main enemy. Even less is it any international mafia. Our greatest enemy today is our own bad qualities. Indifference to general affairs, vanity, ambition, selfishness, personal ambition and rivalry. The main struggle awaits us in this field.

We have free elections ahead of us and therefore also the pre-election struggle. Let us not allow this struggle to sully the hitherto clean face of our benign revolution. Let us prevent the sympathy of the world, which we have so quickly won, from being lost just as quickly by getting entangled in the thicket of power struggles. Let us not allow the desire to serve each one himself to flourish again under the noble guise of the desire to serve general affairs. Now it is really no longer a question of which party, club or group wins the elections. Now it is a question of the morally, civically, politically and professionally best of us winning them - regardless of their credentials. The future policy and prestige of our state will depend on the personalities we choose and then elect to our representative bodies.

Dear fellow citizens!

Three days ago, I became, by your will, the President of this Republic, as interpreted by the deputies of the Federal Assembly. You therefore rightly expect me to mention the tasks that I see before me as your President.

The first of these is to use all my powers and influence to ensure that we all go to the polls in free elections soon and with dignity, and that our path to this historical milestone is decent and peaceful.

My second task is to ensure that we approach these elections as two truly independent nations that respect each other's interests, national identity, religious traditions and symbols. As a Czech in the presidential office, who took the oath in the hands of a prominent and close Slovak, I feel, after various bitter experiences that Slovaks have had in the past, a special duty to ensure that all interests of the Slovak nation are respected and that access to any state function, including the highest, is not closed to them in the future.

I consider my third task to be the support of everything that will lead to a better position for children, the elderly, women, the sick, hard workers, members of national minorities and in general all citizens who are worse off than others for whatever reason. No better food or hospitals must be the privilege of the powerful anymore, but must be offered to those who need them most.

As the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, I want to be a guarantee that the defense capability of our state will no longer be an excuse for anyone to thwart courageous peace initiatives, including shortening military service, establishing alternative military service and the overall humanization of military life.

There are many prisoners in our country who have committed serious crimes and are being punished for it, but who, despite the good will of some investigators, judges and, above all, lawyers, have had to go through a corrupt justice system that curtailed their rights, and who have to live in prisons that do not try to awaken the best in every person, but on the contrary, humiliate and destroy people physically and mentally. With this in mind, I have decided to declare a relatively broad amnesty. At the same time, I call on the prisoners to understand that forty years of bad investigations, trials and imprisonment cannot be eliminated overnight, and to understand that all the changes that are being hastily prepared will take some time. They will not help this society or themselves by revolting. I ask the public not to fear released prisoners, not to make their lives miserable, and to help them, in a Christian spirit, upon their return among us to find within themselves what the prisons were unable to find in them: the ability to repent and the desire to live properly.

My honorable task is to strengthen the authority of our country in the world. I would like other countries to respect us for demonstrating understanding, tolerance and love of peace. I would be happy if Pope John Paul II and the Tibetan Dalai Lama visited our country - even for one day - before the elections. I would be happy if our friendly relations with all nations were strengthened. I would be happy if we managed to establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican and Israel before the elections. I also want to contribute to peace with my short visit tomorrow to our two mutually related neighbors, namely the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. I will not forget our other neighbors - fraternal Poland and the ever closer Hungary and Austria.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will talk less but work more. A president who will not only look out of the windows of his plane, but who - and most importantly - will be constantly present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may be asking what kind of republic I dream of. I will answer you: an independent, free, democratic republic, an economically prosperous republic that is also socially just, in short, a human republic that serves man and therefore has the hope that man will serve it. A republic of all-round educated people, because without them none of our problems can be solved. Human, economic, ecological, social and political.

My most distinguished predecessor began his first speech with a quote from Comenius. Allow me to end my first speech with my own paraphrase of the same statement:

Your government, people, has returned to you!