Jurij Nikelský

"But the mafia was here. In the '90s, it was fashionable to be a mobster, to live by their rules. Even if you're a little kid. It was fashionable not to do what you should do, it was this set of rules - hairstyles, clothes - you could recognize such a person. Of course, those people also came to Prague. They would be like: “But I can't work, I'm not a fool after all. So let's continue doing this even here.” So they would contact the businessmen and they would offer them protection. Pay us something every month and if you have any problems, we'll come and sort it out. And there were many of them in the country.”

"My peers, or those little bit older, were born in the Soviet Union and spent their childhood during that era. The late Soviet Union was not so bad. The early one, yes, we could talk to our grandmothers, they would tell us a lot of bad things, but the late one wasn't so bad. Of course, at school we were persecuted for our jeans and long hair. We bought a lot from the Poles. They used to come and sell us things. They bought electronics in our shops and sold us chewing gum, T-shirts, shoes. You would go to some highway, you would stop there and then he would come in a Fiat car, full of goods, and you would do business.”

"He wrote letters home and some friend of his told him: 'Come back, it's fine here, it's quite safe.' Probably, they were bought by the communists, or maybe they would just intimidate them. So he came back with his family, but he managed to stay for just two days. Then he went somewhere to this neighboring town and nobody has seen him since. Nobody knew what happened to him. Later, this document arrived, stating that he was shot near St. Petersburg, where the lake was. He was shot in the winter while trying to escape across the ice. That's where he was shot.”