"The Civic Forum of Prague 3 attempted to send us an editor-in-chief through Minister Kubát, whom one of our colleagues who had good relations at the Interior Ministry immediately found out was a State Security collaborator under the name Opavský, and we published that. So Minister Kubát, the right-wing leader, had a big problem, and because he didn't want to withdraw him, he made him editor-in-chief in the meantime, I mean, he wanted to, so we went on strike. So the paper came out for two or three days and it was headed Agricultural Newspaper and in the middle of the first page there was a big picture of the whole editorial staff sitting like this in a meeting, and that was it. Of course this didn't last and they had to let the comrade go."
"So they called a meeting in the local cinema, where he [the chairman of the party organization in Bakov nad Jizerou] explained how it worked there [at the Vysočany Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] and what this comrade and that comrade did. And how we, comrade citizens, must help this comrade Dubček and so on. Then he said, 'Who would you like to help? That you should help that party to develop, to develop further. You can join the Communist Party.' I almost did, because... I read Italian communists, neo-communists, yeah, they were not communists for me, the ones in the Soviet Union, you understand. But now my friends, the historians, they said, "Dude, you're a historian. There's a leading role of the Communist Party, so it must be clear to you that if there's to be any change, there can only be one change again through that party. Go in there, they're gonna need guys like you. I didn't enter in the end even though they prepared my candidate card, as it was then. In the meantime, it was developing... I was finishing college in 1969, but I was still living illegally in a dormitory befor that at a friend. And my wife-to-be and I would go to a student bar, as we called it, on the Windmill, about 10 o'clock. We're facing people who've already left the bar, and suddenly someone calls out to me. It was the then chairman of the fourth party organization at the Faculty of Arts, it was a student organization founded in 1968. And he calls to me: 'Peter, we have your candidate card!' I say: 'Vojta, put it back in the envelope and send it back to where it came from.'"
"So it was sometime in 1962, I was in my second year, and suddenly I was called to the headmaster's office. So I knocked. 'Hello, Nováček, sit down.' And there were two people sitting there in some kind of shorts. Well, State Security came to see me from Prague, saying that they had received information that I wanted to emigrate to Austria to join my relative. I said, 'Please, that's a distant relative, and the next thing you see is how thick my glasses are. I am dependent on regular medical care. And thirdly, I'm at home here.' 'We've got it [the information],' the one was wringing it out of me. The other one was just looking at me. But why do I say that, they were such communists too. It lasted about 45 minutes, and the headmaster suddenly stood up and said, 'Nováček, go back to class.' And they were looking, the State Security men, but they understood that they couldn't do anything, and the one, the one who had been silent the whole time, said to me, 'If you can't cope with what we've been talking about here, tell your parents at home tonight that you witnessed a serious car accident.'"
Petr Nováček was born on 15 July 1946 in Velký Šenov in the Děčín region, but since 1949 he lived in Bakov nad Jizerou, where his father came from. After finishing primary school, he entered the secondary general education school in Mladá Boleslav in 1960. In 1964-1969 he studied history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. After graduation he joined the Institute of the History of Socialism. From 1970, when the institute closed down, he worked at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1978, he began working at Zemědělské noviny, where he remained until 1992. He was in close contact with Václav Havel and other politicians of the time. From 1992 to 1995 he wrote for Mladá fronta. After leaving Mladá fronta, he worked for the weekly Týden. He moderated Radio Forum with Jan Pokorný at Czech Radio. He commented on political events for Czech Radio stations (especially Radiožurnál and Plus) for more than a quarter of a century. He received numerous awards for his work. In 2000 he received the Ferdinand Peroutka Award. In 2015, he won the Opus Vitae journalism award for lifetime achievement. In 2020, he received the Medal of Merit First Class from President Miloš Zeman for services to the state. In 2024, he was still working at Czech Radio and living in Prague.
