PhDr. Jan Urban

"And then we flew to Moscow, I had a car from the travel agents, they drove me to the hotel, where I left my luggage and drove off to the address. I had a heavy blue coat with secret pockets and stuff folded in them, which could not be found during a usual search. I had the only one address in the middle of blocks of flats at the end of a metro. So I got there, it was terribly depressing - filthy smelly block of flats with metal doors all painted, I rang the bell of Lev Timofejev, a disident, a prisoner, a writer, the door opened, and when I said who I am, a revolution broke out. Everyone began to scream and hug me, as suddenly I was the only one from the Eastern block, who managed to get through. The Pols had their passports taken, Hungarians could not pass the borders, and even within the Soviet Union they were locking people up… In the flat there was the cream of the Soviet disent, there was the later Georgian president, the real cream. We were travelling for three days, they were driving me around, it was a big scandal, the KGB was disrupting it so it all moved to the flats, everything was probably wired, there were the provocateurs following us all everywhere, a meter behind us a volha was driving, at the entrance of the block of flats they put a maringotku s komínkem a s kamerou… And I was successfully slandering the regime and organisers from the press club Glasnosť did something very wise, the last evening they took me to Andrej Sacharovov´s house."

"We had an incredibly beautiful childhood, until I began to realise, that no everyone was so well off as we were. I remember we were a part of the strange supply system, which the party established for the tops, household 109. Mum always called the strange phone: ,Here´s the household 109, comrade, I would like this and that‘ and in two hours two comrades in blue or white coats came and brought anything from Swiss cheese to oranges and I had no clue othes cannot get the same stuff. I remember such first surprises, which were not even rational, when I saw an old lady, who was searching the garbage bins, I felt weird that they did not lock her up… Then I began to understand there are some defeated classes and some blunders. And when I began to talk about those things with my dad he took it with reall difficulties. Later, as a disident and a chartist, he told me and for that I will always keep him as a real character, he said: ,Well I wish to think that I never hurt anyone, I can even think that I helped a number of people, but I was a part of a killing machinery and there is no plaster for it.‘ I will never stop respecting him, as he never tried to excuse himself at all."