Václav Mikušek

* 1946

  • "They read the signatories on the Voice of America. They named who signed everything. On the one hand, one was pleased to find himself in the good company of important personalities. On the other hand, we thought that something would come of it. Well, it did. Then, sometime in early July, my boss called me and said, 'You have to come to the director's building to the technical assistant's office.' So, I went there and the secretary said to come next. Two such unpleasant gentlemen were sitting there and said they were from State Security and needed information because I was involved in the signing of Several Sentences. They asked: 'Who gave it to you, why did you sign it?' So, I said that I walked down the corridor on the fourth floor, there the corridor is so long that it was lying on the window. I was looking to see what it was. I told myself that I had heard of it before, that these were thoughts I agreed with."

  • "That was exactly the period when purges were being carried out, called inspections or evaluations. There was a time when various people in leadership positions, if they did not approve of what was happening, were moved to other places. I joined and my supervisor lasted about four months. Then they suspended him and he became my co-worker. They put an engineer in the workplace, he was a prospective communist, but he had the slight disadvantage that he had no idea about the problem we were dealing with, electromicroscopy, which was a special topic. If I told him nonsense, he would have to accept it. So, the situation there was that the people who were actually building Tesla, the professional potential, was good. Almost what was done in the West was done here without professional machines. We tried, the results were kind of there, even though the parameters weren't that high-end and the technique wasn't. But it was at a pretty good level, there were a lot of good professionals working there, and if they had started anywhere else, they would have proved themselves successful well, which showed later. So, the atmosphere there was quite tense."

  • "It was instructive that there were fourteen of us and about sixty Komsomol members, and every day after dinner we met and discussed. One Czech, a group of Komsomol members around, we argued about politics and social issues. It was interesting to see how those boys, when they wanted to give an opinion, looked around to see if no one was listening, then whispered something and then disappeared. We once talked about the Eastern Bloc economy behind the Iron Curtain. I said that the economy of Yugoslavia is probably the furthest along, even though it is led by a person who in the West was said to be a bloody dog, but that it is led there on the basis of some market principles. So, we discussed what could and could not be done. The debate ended. I went to wash. One of the boys stopped by me, pulled me along and asked if I meant what I said about Tito and Yugoslavia. I said that of course it was my opinion. He looked around again, shook my right hand and disappeared into the darkness. So, I thought to myself: They probably have it a little stricter here than we do."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, 18.08.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 01:39:35
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

I turned off the corporate radio and it was labeled as an ideological diversion

Václav Mikušek, portrait, 2020
Václav Mikušek, portrait, 2020
photo: filming

Václav Mikušek was born on July 3, 1946 in Vsetín in the family of a teacher and a governess. He graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Masaryk University in Brno. He then worked as an auxiliary scientific worker at the Institute of Instrumentation Technology and subsequently moved to the company Tesla Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. His specialty was working with electron microscopes. Because of his critical attitudes towards the communist establishment, he got into trouble during his studies and later at work. It often involved bizarre situations, for example, he was accused by his superiors of ideological diversion and damaging socialist property because he short-circuited the company radio, which disturbed him at work. He was interrogated by State Security for signing the Several Sentences petition in 1989 and was threatened with losing his job. In 1989, he became one of the organizers of meetings during the Velvet Revolution in Rožnov. In 1991, he ended up at the Tesla company, which was falling apart at the time. He became a project manager at the Wallachian Museum. He alternately held the position of mayor and deputy mayor of Rožnov pod Radhoštěm for a total of sixteen years, and made a significant contribution to the after November 1989 development of this city.