Jan Milota

"That time and especially the time of normalization, after 1986. The most terrible time, and I did not experience the war that is why I call this time the most terrible. Under Husák, everyone lived in a cauldron suffocating. Slowly until tender so that they were not hard. Moreover, this way we were all nicely stewed with red carrots. In other words, we lived in a time where anyone could be an informer, where anyone could be a villain. Where you could be arrested for anything, I mean for any opposing political opinion or any defiance. There was no avoiding going to the polls, even though it was known that the polls were a total farce. It was so messed up that they did not even need cops to drive them there, no bayonets... to get people there. Those people were so enslaved and under such pressure and living under such fear, even existential fear that they simply participated in these shenanigans."

"A comrade director came among us informing us that if this revolution thinks that they, the communists, will hand over to us such companies as Armabeton, that like them, the communists, that they will hand over to us such companies as the smelters and like the mines, that they will hand this over to us, that we are deeply mistaken. And, suddenly someone stood up there and said: 'Mr. Director, what about your communist houses?' Mr. Director. There was a buzz. That was a shock. That's Mr. Director. So, that's how it was, that's how the beginnings were in Kadaň. At that time, perhaps no one even shouted it, but if someone had shouted it, Havel to the Castle, even those who were openly and strongly against the communists, they would have said: 'Some idiot, dude, Havel, indeed.' This was the prehistory of the revolution; this was the environment two or three days after the intervention on the National Avenue. And that's how things were changing in the countryside, like Kadaň, for example."