Ing. Jiří Paroubek

“So in that year 1978, I had completed my compulsory military service about a year before. I was working in the office of the managing director of a large restaurant enterprise, I had an interesting job, I think I actually appreciated that I could do an interesting job. And then I was approached by this one stetsec [State Security officer - trans.]. He behaved very decently, nicely, he showed me his badge. Well, I got all wobbly at the knees, of course, because a twenty-six-year-old boy has no experience of this. I couldn’t tell my parents, because they’d be worried sick. Luckily, I had one female colleague, who I knew had a very close relationship with the managing director, so she’d blab it all out to him. Which I considered to be right, for the managing director to know that something like that had happened. She was an experienced lady who’d worked as the director - until 1969 - the director of the Research Institute of Trade; she’d seen the world, she had excellent class. She liked to talk; in this case, I think she only told it to her nearest colleagues, that is, the managing director and his deputy. The latter advised me to say I wasn’t suited for it, if I didn’t want to collaborate. That I shouldn’t tell them: You bastards, what, do you think I’m some kind of snitch? That that probably wouldn’t be suitable. I came to the same conclusion, that it wouldn’t be the best idea to present myself so strongly. So I said: ‘Well, you know, I’m not really suited for it, I’d feel strange to tell on the people around me, it’s not in my nature. Besides, I have some reservations about the regime.’ And he said: ‘We found that, on the contrary, you have a good political orientation.’ I said: ‘Well, perhaps I am well, well oriented, but I wouldn’t be suited for it.’ So we met twice, he paid once, I paid once, to be even, but perhaps he counted in my expenses as well. And then he stopped bothering me.”

“At the time I realised, about two years before I quit, that the Socialist Party was controlled by State Security. As I was told by that man ten years earlier, when he tried to get me to collaborate, they protected the party, in a way. The protection was broadly defined, and then, as it came to light in Rudá Kráva, practically all the leading members of the party were collaborating with State Security. I sensed that, although I hadn’t known for sure, of course, back then in the mid-eighties. From my point of view, there was no point in me being somewhere where people were playing with you like a cat with a mouse.”