Mgr. Libor Dvořák

"Actually, I started on the Russian studies path exactly fifty-five years ago. Now we were commemorating the fifty-fifth anniversary of August 21, the Soviet occupation of our country. And it was at that time that I got into the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, where I eventually graduated in philosophy - Russian. I will never forget the first seminar with our then assistant professor, Mrs. Eva Boučková, who uttered a historical sentence that more or less decided my future career. When I was on the fence about whether the Russian language and the Russian world was the right thing to do, Ms. Boučková said: 'Dear colleagues, realize that Russian language, Russian culture and Russian literature are not responsible for all this.' It's true, I've been finding this out all my life, and I find that a career as a Russianist is very important because, for example, the literature will also explain a lot of why Russians are the way they are. Why they are murdering in Ukraine today, where they get it from, how it is possible that a nation that has brought the world such culture, such music, such literature, such ballet, let us say, such theatre as the Russians, are, on the other hand, those rabid chauvinists who - as President Havel used to say - have one big problem, and that is that they do not know where their borders lead. This, as we can see, continues to this day. To go back to the beginning of this idea, literature in particular really helps a lot in making it clear, not only to ourselves, what is going on."

"The interview with Lukashenko was extremely interesting. It was, I think, in 1998. At that time, I was the editor of the Sunday foreign edition of "Jednadvacytka", where we had Zenon Pashniak or some other opposition politician living in the West as a guest, so we had him live. And the next day or the third day after that, I got a call from the indignant press secretary of the Belarusian embassy saying, 'Mr. Editor, what was that supposed to be? If you wanted to know what the real Belarusian situation is, our ambassador himself would be happy to answer your questions. Or even our president. And I said, 'Mr. Secretary, ambassador not, diplomats don't come to us much at all. But I would be interested in the president. So I ran to the then editor-in-chief, now outgoing director of news, Zdeněk Šámal, who was then a former correspondent for Czech Television in Moscow, and I said to him, 'Zdeněk, imagine that this is an opportunity!' He said, 'Well, that's terrific, let's go!' And Zdenek said to me, very informatively, 'So, I will prepared some wuestions for him.' 'Well, I wouldn't do that. He woud say what he wants. That's how it ended up. I did prepare a script, sent it to the Belarusian embassy, and then it was quiet for six months, and then I found out that we had the opportunity to go to Minsk with Zdenek and the cameraman. The truth is that we waited about a week for the interview in Minsk. But after that, baťka (Lukashenko) received us, behaved as I was used from him - with the refinement of a third-rate waiter. But the interesting thing was that he really did, as Zdenek correctly suspected, hold a kind of monologue with us, about an hour and twenty long. Fact is, he probably exceeded the originally promised time by double. And the conversation ended suddenly - Alexander Grigorievich looked at his watch and said: 'Boys, don't be angry, I have to run. I promised the workers that I would play football with them today, so I have to go.' But in the end it was a very interesting conversation. I know that Zdenek and I made a forty-minute documentary out of it, in which we used some of our other footage, like a poll from the streets of Minsk, where you could clearly see how afraid those unfortunate Belarusians were to talk, especially to foreign - and TV - journalists. We were also taken to an industrial plant to be shown how the working class lives. We filmed something there too, but the really interesting part was probably the Minsk street, you know?"

"My father of course talked about politics, he tried very hard to educate us in his image. My brother is now completely blind, but he has been visually impaired since he was young, so he makes his living as a simultaneous interpreter from Russian and English. And dad once said to both of us the historical phrase: 'Come on, boys, I didn't raise you to be what I wanted you to be, but at least it's enough for me at this point that I raised you to be decent people.' And I even got the sense that he just went through a kind of self-reflection and that he said, 'Yeah, well, we screwed up a lot of things, it's futile, so we got what we deserved,' which seems pretty honest to me. On the other hand, it's true that I remember, for example, an episode where my brother didn't go to some by-election or national committee election or some shit like that, and my parents found his ballot paper at home, filed in some book. And there was a big fuss about it. I had the feeling that those unfortunate communist parents didn't understand him well enough at first, but then they understood what he was up to, so it all just sort of died down. I'm just proving that they would have been eager for us to continue in my father's partisan career, which didn't really happen."