"If one looks at the price development of these two key commodities in terms of Russian exports and state budget revenues, oil and gas prices shot up in the 1970s in connection with oil shocks. Then for part of the 1980s, they were still relatively high, and then Gorbachev comes in, the rebuilding begins, and prices start to fall. The problem with the rebuilding was not that the rebuilding was badly conceived and poorly put together from the beginning. The problem of the rebuilding was primarily due to... Gorbachev managed to - or those reforms managed to increase, for example, the productivity of labour in the former Soviet Union, which is a tremendously important thing in terms of the functioning of the industry and so on. But the money that used to flow in from the sale of oil and gas ran out. That is to say: while these reforms did succeed in changing those stagnant conditions within the Soviet society a little bit, for example, the possibility of private enterprise emerged, albeit only very cautiously and marginally, they succeeded in increasing labour productivity a little bit, which would have been crucial for further development. But at the same time, the money to keep the whole system alive and financed ran out. Actually, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin until the last year and a half or so of the Yeltsin government, the world price curve, in terms of oil and gas, was steadily falling. And then it started to go up, but it was only with the arrival of Putin that the fundamental rise in the curve really started to be felt in the wallets of ordinary people."
"In November 1989, nobody called for the restoration of capitalism, but we wanted free elections, a pluralistic society and so on. And this was, I think, objectively, even in Russia - or in the Soviet Union at that time - many people wanted this. It's just that the raw every day, in quotes 'mundane' but all the more affecting to those people, socio-economic reality turned out to be more important in the end. And we really can't imagine the depth of the decline that the local society experienced. And not the in-quotes 'ordinary Russians', those continued to live their - from our point of view - very miserable way of life. But it hit the middle class there in an absolutely crushing way. The middle class, which in our country was the beneficiary of both processes, the democratic transition and the economic transformation, was actually the worst off in Russia at that moment. Here, for example, restitution, however controversial, was able to begin. In our country, the regime lasted for forty years which means that those who had their house, business or land confiscated were either still living among their families, and it was either returned directly to them or their immediate blood relatives. That is: when they confiscated the field from the parents, it was then restituted by their children. There was nothing to return to anyone in Russia. The society murdered... part of the original owners emigrated. Even if there was some property left, in a large part of the Soviet Union, it was then destroyed by the Second World War because the widespread devastation of those towns and so on made the restitution of houses or flats simply out of the question. The state had prepared important privatisation laws which were supposed to bring the privatisation of the key industries in that country under the supervision of the law, and as far as I know, out of 140 privatisations of the really big ones, the gigantic industrial enterprises, not a single one was carried out under that law. Which again is a crazy testament to the regime that was in power at the time. And since then, it has been going downhill with them."
"For me - and I suppose it was the same for my brother, for my dad and for my mom - whenever someone found out about our last name, it was obvious that they were cautious about what it actually meant when someone with this last name approached them. But then it turned out that the surname was nothing more than a surname, and then it became completely standard. I remember me and my brother once had a terrible run-in with that. Like all the boys at the time, we were chasing a tennis ball in the park with our hockey sticks - nowadays it's called ground hockey, it wasn't called that back then - and in 1979, at the World Championship, which took place in Moscow at the time, our team got knocked down 11-1 by the Soviet national team. And our friends we played with there... I'm Michael, so I was Mikhailov, a famous Soviet hockey player at the time. My brother is Marek, so he was Makarov. Makarov, Larionov, Krutov - they were probably just starting at that time... Well, we got a terrible beating back then because that frustration that our hockey players lost there had to be vented somehow." - "Did that translate into the kids' game?" - "So it translated into that kid's game. So in 1979, we both walked out of that park crying. Well, then it got explained somehow."
"We have invested an incredible amount of energy, money, attention and so on in Russia. No other Eastern European country has received that kind of attention, that kind of care, and look what it has led to. As long as Putin is in charge, or as long as the regime that he created is in charge, we should be glad we can isolate ourselves from them. Let us do everything possible to preserve that. Let us limit contact with Russia to the absolutely necessary minimum and let the Russians become an appendage of China. And once the majority of Russians bump into China, only then will they realise they have the opportunity to communicate with the other side. Now, they hate us, they are convinced we want to destroy them, that we want to steal from them, and so on. So let the Chinese do it because the Chinese want to do it, and the Chinese will do it. And only at that point, I believe, will it be possible to start talking to Russia and with the Russians who will be there again. But first, they just have to -- They have to face the things we don't want to do to them and the things we won't do to them because we're in a totally different position. They first simply have to, as they say, have their tables turned. And it will come from the East. It will come from China."
"Back then, part of Hitler's narrative, as they say, was that the German army was stabbed in the back during the First World War by politicians, primarily inclining to the left, let's say social democrats, or more precisely, Jews. And my great-grandfather fought in the First World War and was in the army in 1918, in the trenches. He was even awarded some German orders during the war. So from his point of view, he had nothing to do with the surrender of Germany in 1918. Quite the opposite. So he supposedly believed that Hitler wouldn't hurt him because he was exactly the one who fulfilled his duty in the context of the First World War. Apparently, that assumption was wrong. And from 1938, when my grandmother and her mother went to Belgium, they exchanged a few more letters with him, but then they lost contact with him. And this great-grandfather of mine then perished in Auschwitz during the war."
Political geographer, pedagogue and publicist Michael Romancov was born on 19 December 1969 in Prague. His paternal grandfather was a Russian emigrant who came to Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s and married a Czech woman. His maternal grandparents were Jewish - his grandmother came from the German Rhineland, and his grandfather Arnošt Kleinzeller from the Ostrava region. They met in Britain, where they both fled from Nazi persecution and where their daughter Anna, mother of Michael Romancov, was born in 1944. Both of Anna’s grandfathers perished in the Holocaust. After the war, the Kleinzeller family moved to Prague. Arnošt Kleinzeller was involved in the re-establishment of post-war health care and the establishment of the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. Being a distinguished biochemist, he emigrated with his family to the USA in 1966 but a year later, the twenty-three-year-old Anna returned to Czechoslovakia because of her relationship with Georgy Romancov and married him. Both of their sons, Michael and his younger brother Marek, grew up in Prague and had family connections to both Russia and America. Michael attended a grammar school, and after graduating in 1988, for lack of other suitable options, he enrolled in the so-called “Red Dual” - Russian language and Civics at the Faculty of Education of Charles University. At the university, he made his first conscious stand against the ruling regime when he refused the offer to join the Communist Party and refused to pay membership fees to the Socialist Youth Union. On 17 November 1989, he joined the students’ parade on Národní třída and escaped unharmed from the harsh intervention of the security authorities, which became the trigger for the Velvet Revolution. After the political situation changed, he dropped his Russian studies and enrolled in Political Science, which he studied at the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University. He taught Political Geography and History of International Relations at Charles University, Metropolitan University Prague and the University of West Bohemia. He is renowned as an expert on Russia, which is why a substantial part of the interview for the Memory of Nations was focused on Russia’s geopolitical situation.
