We bombed the editorial office of Rudé právo in Mladá Boleslav in 1950. The StB did not discover us until a year later.
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Ivan Sova was born in Mladá Boleslav on 2 October 1930 into a music teacher’s family. His mother was a housewife and he had a younger sister. The family survived the war and liberation without harm. Having completed primary school he graduated from a secondary technical school. He was admitted to university in Prague in 1949 but the Mladá Boleslav Action Committee of the National Front thwarted this. Sova was accused of non-conformist views, pre-1948 membership in the National Socialist Party and promoting the American way of life. He had to leave the university and join Stavoprojekt in Mladá Boleslav. He was planning to leave for the West together with his friend Zdeněk Klíbr at the time. Their parents unveiled their plan, so they aborted it. They were still determined to show their disapproval of the regime’s practices. As Pragostav employee, Klíbr got the explosives and another friend Jan Dubický obtained the incendiary cord. Initially they intended to blow up the railway bridge over the Jizera River. Eventually, they decided to bomb the editorial office of Rudé právo in Mladá Boleslav at night because of the symbolic significance. In May 1950, they succeeded without the State Security being suspicious of them. Ivan Sova married in 1951 and enlisted with a tank unit in Žatec a few months later. The StB arrested him at the Žatec garrison on 11 April 1953. His ex-wife had mentioned the attack on the editorial office of the communist daily to a colleague who eagerly reported this to the StB. Sova was taken from Žatec to Prague wearing opaque spectacles and then questioned in Bartolomějská Street, but he did not experience any beatings or torture. The closed trial took place in September 1953 in Pankrác. Ivan Sova was sentenced to eight years in a penal camp for a terrorist act. Klíbr got a twelve-year sentence, and Dubický a ten-year sentence. Sova served his sentence in the Svatopluk camp in the Jáchymov region in the Barbora mine, working as an assistant to a pipe fitter and a quarryman. Thanks to his technical education, he eventually got a job in the design office, from where he was paroled in August 1955. Back home from prison, he could not find a job for a long time. He eventually got a labourer job in a fabric printing company. He joined the paper mills in Mladá Boleslav in February 1956 where he worked until his retirement in 1990. Ivan Sova married for the second time and had two children. He joined the Confederation of Political Prisoners after the collapse of the regime. He received an award for participation in the anti-communist resistance.
