Ivan Mošna

"Somehow the party and the government influenced everything, so of course they influenced the details of what should be. But at that time it wasn't just the ideological base, it was also economic, that there was actually a precise division of what was allowed to be spent, what it was allowed to be spent on, how many people could be there. These were obligatory values that kept increasing. We were supposed to have 190 employees in a certain year, then 197, 203 and so on. That had to be met no matter what tasks were being addressed."

"I perceived the regime as a necessary evil, but it didn't take much of a toll on us until 1968. We just knew that the heads of the laboratories were usually politically involved, so we took it as a kind of typical at the times and nothing special happened. Besides, I started there in 1961, and somehow in those years a slight thawing of the political climate began. As I said before, it wasn't structurally accompanied by a change in the attitude of the leaders, but they let off steam by letting artists work occasionally who couldn't before, like Škvorecký and so on."

"Not in its basic form, of course. If a person didn't shout anti-state slogans, he could go to school and nothing would happen to him, but it was different at different stages. In the fifties it was not only the external terror that was talked about, but the internal grip was felt at every turn. I'll give you an example: when I was in that eleven-year school, we organised theatre performances. A colleague who was also in the play, a classmate, wrote on the bulletin board: For strong nerves only. And that became the subject of an extensive investigation into what the author meant by that and from what position he was writing it in the first place. Little things like that we must have somehow accept. And then later on in the sixties there was a relaxation, apparent at first sight, or structurally nothing changed, the right people remained in the party functions, but nevertheless outwardly cultural barriers were relaxed, for example, sometimes foreign films were shown that were not just about the Great October Revolution and so on. And there were also very interesting projects on the theatre stages."