Ing. Petr Tyráček

“Every bridge, there was a booth on one side and on the other side of the bridge, and a man with a rifle and a bayonet or a machine gun stood there. Every bridge was guarded. There were broken Hanomags along the tracks from the Second World War. Only women in red vest worked on the tracks, there was no man. When I… of course we looked out of the window, you know, and so I saw, we went through valleys and I saw one village, second village, now there were straw roofs and thatched roofs and so on. And only two cottages in those villages had tin roof that was the local soviet and a church, these were the only ones with tin roofs. What I completely bought was that there was a cottage nicely placed on a hillside and it had some straw or thatched roof and you could see through the roof, you saw through the hillside and there were holes, and on the roof, there was a TV antenna.”

“Every company, maybe only those bigger, had a special department. And we got it, those who went abroad always got a paper and then we had to make a report. We had to write what happened there, what were we negotiating about and so on, it was compulsory. And the special department, a man from the State Security was visiting it and he controlled it.” – “How did the contacts with State Security take place?” – “It took place through the special department, yes, so we had to do this. I was surprised because of it, when I went to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1975, I was in Vilnius in Lithuania, it was my first meeting. And I did not even have a slight idea. This all – I was there with my boss, technical deputy who prepared the trip and the administration concerning it, and when we arrived, he called me and said: ‘Here you have these papers and you have to write down all of this.’ And I said: ‘Why if I had already made a record? We made all records in Russian so why should we do it…’ – ‘Well, that is compulsory, and everything has to be written down not only those things that you discussed there.”