„My ideal was democracy. I tried to promote it where I could. It may not have been possible at the faculty, but I succeeded when I was in Dubna for example. There of course was a constituent organization of the Communist Party as well. There was an existing fellowship, the culture among the people worked well. People mostly had acquaintances among the Russians or other nations. It was no problem to meet with anyone. Then the Anticharta was sent to us to sign it. I suggested that we refuse, respectively, not refuse, but: 'How do we sign it when we do not know what we are signing it against? Let them kindly deliver it to us from Moscow so that we can read it and then decide whether to sign it.' The party committee supported me in this. It was pretty rude to force nuclear physicists to sign something against something they couldn't read. The same day, the people in charge of us arrived from Moscow, and somehow it was dismissed at the meeting that we had adopted a meaningless stance, they left and were satisfied that they had something from us."
„I was thinking about it [leaving the party] of course, after 1969. But then my father-in-law and other people I respected told me not to, they told me I have to try to change the party from the inside. I accepted that and I did make these efforts. It was a question of democracy. Running around and declaring that I condemn the entry of troops would be nice, they would lock me up right away, but it wouldn't lead to anything. So I tried to act where I could, to appeal to my classmates and such.”
„I couldn't travel everywhere, I could just go to Moscow. Kind of non-stop. When I drove the route Dubna - Moscow, I was constantly being watched. Even when I drove from Prague to Dubna I was being watched. It had its advantages; in case of any problems, the cops would come to me after a while because they were already waiting for me at the next station. I was being controlled. It was also good for something, for example when one had a problem with their car, the cops would come right away. One was guarded though, uncomfortably. They made a detour around the city of Dmitrov, halfway between Dubna and Moscow. Then they started to reconstruct the city, but I was not allowed to use the detour. I had to go through the dug-up city because the detour would lead to Leningrad and there were none of their guardhouses with the militia. That's why I had to drive through the city. I broke this regulation a few times and they filed a complaint against me at the international department."
He was born on June 4 1948 in Prague. His father worked at the Ministry of Foreign Trade in various positions (including Deputy Minister), his mother was a housewife. Both parents were members of the Communist Party, his mother had experience from the resistance, his maternal grandparents were significantly involved in the communist movement before the Second World War. Milan Honusek has been interested in science since he was a child, he studied nuclear physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague. During his studies, he joined the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Řež as a research assistant, where he worked intermittently until his retirement. At the age of twenty, he became actively involved in politics, and in 1968 he joined the Communist Party, as he says, to protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. From 1972 to 1978 he lived in the then Soviet Union, where he worked at a prestigious research center in Dubna near Moscow. He refused to sign the so-called Anticharta. He remained a communist even after the Velvet Revolution as a member and functionary of the KSČM, from which he resigned a few years ago.
