Jan Doskočil

“Our names were known, and the State Security thus took an interest in us soon after, without us even suspecting anything… At first there was the political screening of those who were not Party members. The communists did their own screening within their organizations, but at first they dealt with non-Party members. Each of us received a kind of a questionnaire and we had to pour all the blame upon us for having supported the so-called renewal movement. We also had to declare that we welcomed the Soviet occupation and that it was actually their brotherly help, and so on. I and several other people refused to do that; on the contrary, I even expressed in writing what I thought about it in a very straightforward way and the committee thus decided that I could no longer work there as a researcher, and I received a notice for so-called disruption of the socialist order… I was quite proud of it, in fact. I have it confirmed in writing that I have disrupted the socialist order. I was told that my further presence in the company was not possible for fear that I would infect others… and so I got fired and I was without a job.”

“It was unprecedented that a scandal regarding some high-ranking communist would get some publicity… it always used to be swept away under the carpet. People started complaining and I - without having permission to do it – called my colleagues to gather in one hall of the research institute, it was a hall which was used for production, and we all gathered there. I jumped up on some box as a pedestal and I had a fervent speech about how we no longer wanted to put up with the Bolsheviks and we had a vote and we agreed on a kind of a petition which we signed and sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. We made it public, and journalists immediately followed upon it, and it was published in the Torch newspaper, which was a local Party newspaper, and of course, it set an example for other factories as well and similar things began happening there as well. Soon after we began criticising the ROH trade union and we prepared an abolishment of ROH and we organized election for the non-communist leaders of the trade union... This was the first sign and it began spreading soon after… Our research institute became famous as a nest of the counterrevolution and we have never gotten rid of that reputation.”