I didn’t feel good about having believed such a thing.
Ivo Klouda was born on the 20th January 1938 in Uherský Ostroh. He grew in the family of a teacher and Communist anti-Nazi resistance fighter. As a child, he witnessed fighting related to the liberation of Southern Moravia by the Red Army. Since his childhood, he was raised in belief that the Soviet Union had liberated us from fascism. He himself believed it for years and joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Gradually, he started to doubt whether the Communist propaganda is telling the truth. He noticed contradictions between those claims and his experience from his travels abroad where he was able to travel with the Radio Orchestra of Folk Instruments of Brno (BROLN). He was a fan of the liberation process going on in the 1960’s and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that followed deeply disappointed him. He passed the normalisation background checks and he could remain a Party member. He says that he believed it was possible to fulfill the idea of communism but at the same time, he was aware of the advantages that the Party membership brought. For some time, she worked in the personal department where he was in charge of personal dossiers, he however claims to have refused the offer to cooperate with the State Security. Nowadays, he claims that communism is as perverted an ideology as nazism.