Jiří Dobrovolný

"The year 69 came when the Brno communists, together with State Security, devised an action to finally normalize, to eliminate, the Šabat section and to put in the right communists who had been in the reserves and had not been elected or had simply been ignored. Well, the second fight... the first one... ended in a big cheering demonstration, so he gave them the idea that when the rematch was on, they'd provoke it so there'd be violence. So they called in the militiamen as backup, and they let them sit in the car for eight hours, and some of them collapsed. They let petty thieves out of the prison up on the hill, but they cut their hair, as was the custom - if you had a permanent sentence, they would shave you. So amongst the hairy students it shone like beacons. They gave everybody a five hundred to go to the pubs, and the students were told that if they won, they had to celebrate and salivate to those Russians and go out on the streets and smash something."

"For example, Petr Cibulka. I used to go to the Ports as a photographer and he used to go there with a tape recorder to record. But otherwise, he also went to clubs and everywhere where music was played - from the Plastiks to the country Brno. He carried a top-of-the-line Revox tape recorder on his back in a wooden box, and it was about fifteen or sixteen pounds. He had a reel to go with it, plus two photo stands that I got him. He had two microphones and cables on it. It might have been about thirty kilos." - "And the Communists let him do this?" - "Well the Communists couldn't forbid him to do it. They didn't know how to get to him. They tried to get him several times. And then he came home, edited it, cleaned up the songs, put it on tape, and the guys made him this Apple network, that's just six tape recorders, they were connected like a network, so they put six tapes in there, and he ran the original, and he dubbed it like that, and then he sold it in the clubs, and he distributed it all over the country. And I'm saying that Cibulka gets a lot of credit for that because there were schools, apprenticeships, industrial schools, acting schools, Divadlo na provázku helped distribute. All of a sudden those songs got... just like today you have Taylor Swift, she's got nine million and she can influence the American election. Now we're waiting to see what he's going to say about [Donald Trump's] blown off ear. That's just the kind of influence I think Petr Cibulka had."

"We did a few things that reeked of trouble with the law. The guys from the TV side, from 4001, built a transmitter. The first TV was this huge box with fifty separate circuits. It still had wires, capacitors, resistors, and a tiny little screen, and that’s what the TV ran on. We drilled into the skeleton of the dorm building; the side panels were just like the ones used in the Bohunice housing estate – reinforced concrete slabs. We drilled until we hit the rebar. I drilled a small hole and attached a copper wire to the rebar, connecting it to the back of the TV as a grounding wire. This essentially turned the entire skeleton of the building – about 160 meters or so – into a broadcasting dipole. And that’s how we managed to broadcast as Radio King for a week during the occupation."

"We went against the ministry as students, asking the ministry for things they wouldn't allow professors to do. For example, they wouldn't give them an rehearsal room that was unused by the soldiers, the army said they needed it. We took some dorms away from VAAZ (Antonín Zapotocky Military Academy) like that. We were doing a kind of fifth column. We actually had the stamp of that college union, which was the central body in Prague, and they... any officer had to react to it - either this or that. And if he didn't have the courage, he approved it. That Prague Spring, that was not done by Dubček or the Central Committee. The people did it."

"Whoever was printing something - a flyer for a fair or something - had to take it there and the guy read it and of course found one mistake in each one because he expected to get a five hundred. If it was political, he just stopped it. But he really abused it, but that was about three. Two were fat, one was thin, one was worse than the other. I'm glad I forgot their faces."