Petr Voldán

"It was a time of perestroika and we were able to do things that I didn't know I could ever do. There was a hunger for information from Moscow because the ice was melting there then. Gorbachev and his wife brought the wind into it. He was extremely popular at the time, even though it was still the Communist apparatus. It was something unprecedented. We know how Mrs Thatcher took it, how the West took Gorbachev. He had more opponents at home than in the world. So for me it was extremely interesting, adventurous and in a way revelatory to find themes and show how things were shifting. The programs I did at that time had a lot of resonance. People were curious about how things were loosening up in Russia, for example, the private sector was suddenly able to function."

"I can say that being the boss of Karel Kyncl meant being the boss of Mrs Kynclova. Karel was a fantastic person, he was not militant, he was gentle and human. He was fantastic for what he went through. He filled me in on the realities, because it was always considered in advance who was going to go where when someone quit somewhere. It was arranged that I would follow Karel Kyncl to London as a reporter. And when Karel Kyncl wrote the Notebooks [the contributions to the radio programme Foreign reporters' Notebook], they were always fantastic. They're still broadcast to this day. They've been made into books. They were actually separate programs. But the length of the Notebook, to get everybody in, was about five minutes. Karel used to send ten to fifteen minutes. He thought maybe it would work or maybe we could manage it. Mrs. Kynclová had the hardest time with our editing. Every time the Foreign Reporter's Notebook finished on a Saturday, my phone rang and Mrs. Kynclová called: 'Peter, what have you done with this Karel again? You cut it for five minutes. You can't do that!' Then we explained. She used to come over for coffee in London. Karel Kyncl was an example of a reporter, like Mr Dienstbier, who also went through the Notebook, who could stand it. They were strong enough to be active opponents of the regime, which I was not."

"I had a moral dilemma when I was given the task of producing, or rather unproducing, a programme called Calls from the Other Side. It was a programme made up of recordings that had been made in places of dissent. It was then that a shipment of Svědectví magazines was unveiled. It was associated with Paul Tigrid. People came to the radio management, apparently from the [Communist Party] Central Committee, brought some texts, and said that it was necessary to make a programme about how this network was exposed. I know I couldn't interfere with those texts. They didn't ask me whether I wanted to do it or not. I know that at that time we fell into it from the reporters' desk together with Ilya Jenča. I guess it needed to be cultured and familiar voices, so we were given the texts to load. So we loaded it in the studio. They were splices between the recordings, which I think were made in the apartments by State Security agents. They weren't very good recordings. Many of them were repeated several times to make it clear to the listener what was actually being said. I guess there was no way to make better quality recordings. This included the discovery of the caravan intercepted at the border. I think there were three or four episodes. I wasn't such a hero as to say I wasn't going to do it. I probably wouldn't have been on the radio much longer."