"I arrived late and went to the Laterna [Magika]. There was security there, judokas guarding the place, with lots of cameras, and they wouldn't let me in. So, I said to someone, 'Go tell Havel,' and Havel himself ran out and said, 'Let Dr. Dlouhý in!' All the cameras were filming me as I went in. Naively, I didn’t realize the weight of it all. I handed him the paper; Saša Vondra, Křižan, and others were there. I handed over the list of names, and Valtr [Komárek] said, 'Write yourself down too.' So, my name ended up on that piece of paper. Klaus was on it, Komárek, a man named Jurčeka from the State Planning Commission, and others. We were discussing, and suddenly Václav Havel turned to me and said, 'Mr. Dlouhý, wouldn’t you like to join the government?' That’s how he offered it to me."
"I don't even know if they introduced themselves to me as State Security, more like policemen who asked me to keep an eye on the mood at the university and so on. When I come back [from Belgium] they would like to talk to me. Nothing more, nothing to sign, just a kind of one-hour, non-committal call. So yeah, and I was already a bit wary at that time. And I was telling my dad at home, and my dad was really saying, 'Be careful,' and he didn't say anything more than that, he just said, 'Be careful.' And they arranged, and this was in various newspapers and interviews, they arranged to call me under what name they were going to call me when I got home for Christmas. I had a friend in grade school, Jirka Stolař, so I said Stolař. Then they called me when I came home for Christmas, but they called me under the name Černý, because somebody got it mixed up. But we finally agreed and they called me there and they interviewed me a lot. But there I was already careful and basically I didn't say anything. Also because a very big thought transformation took place in me in those three months from October to December 1978."
"Because I was already the party's candidate, they put us in the dumbest regiments. I was in the Fifty-seventh Motorized Artillery Regiment in Stříbro. That was the one where we were always on the border guarding the imperialists. A deserter was something unprecedented. But then again, you can always manage - we put a band together. For one thing, we played a little bit at parties, and for another thing, there was something called ASUT back then, the Army Competition of Artistic Creativity, where soldiers who started bands or theater groups, folk groups, dance groups, and so on, could get out of the barracks and go back to other barracks and compete. And we put together a band, and when the first Czech cosmonaut flew into space in March 1968, Vladimir Remek..." - "Seventy-eight, I said... So when Vladimír Remek flew into space in March 1978 as the first Czechoslovak cosmonaut, we quickly put together a musical and dramatic band in praise of Major Remek's space flight, which of course got us into all these competitions."
Vladimír Dlouhý was born on 31 July 1953 in Prague to parents Vladimír and Jiřina, née Kindlman. In 1967, his father was offered a job in Cuba, where the family lived on and off for two years. He experienced the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 and the demonstrations a year later in Prague. After graduating from the Gymnasium Na Pražačce in 1972, he began his studies at the University of Economics (VŠE), majoring in economic and mathematical calculations. In 1976 he became a candidate for membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). After obtaining his university diploma, in 1977, he began his one-year compulsory military service in Stříbro. By that time he was already married to his first wife Olga and had a son Štěpán, later they had a daughter Markéta. After the war, he went through the Ministry of Education to study for a year at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium. Because of this, State Security Service (StB) became interested in him and until 1984 tried to find out the circumstances of his departure. He then found a new job in the Cabinet of Forecasts of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (CSAV), which was later renamed the Prognostic Institute (PÚ). Under the direction of Valter Komárek, he worked alongside Václav Klaus, Karel Dyba, Tomáš Ježek and others. In December 1989, he was offered to become a member of Marian Čalfa‘s government after the fall of the totalitarian regime, and he resigned from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He first became Deputy Prime Minister from the position of Chairman of the State Planning Commission, and later Minister of Economy. From 1992 to 1997, he served as Minister of Industry and Trade in the government of Prime Minister Václav Klaus, and was a member of the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA). After leaving politics in 1997, he worked in many companies, especially Goldman Sachs and ABB, and also worked as a university teacher. He ran for the office of President of the Czech Republic in the 2013 elections, but his candidacy was rejected due to insufficient signatures. In 2014, he was elected President of the Chamber of Commerce, a position he held until 2023, when he again became President of Eurochambres, an organisation that brings together European chambers of commerce and industry. In 2024, he was living in Prague.
