Milan Horáček

“One time I was assigned to work with a certain truck driver, and my work also included loading the cargo. He told me: ‘Now, we’ll place these four or five bags on the edge, but we will not fold them one over another.’ Then he drove through one bend in the road more aggressively than usual, and these bags slid from the truck down to the ditch. In the rear mirror I could see that some villager ran there from his house with a wheelbarrow, and he started loading the bags onto it right away. We received some hen or duck in return for it, or some home made jams with some pork meat or something like that. The driver himself was usually taking money for it. Everything like that was a part of it – you saw and perceived that there was a double way of living. There is the life which you present in the public, and which the socialist republic declares, and then there is the reality. Those everyday small and big lies, deceit and hypocrisy were even more augmented by straight corruption.”

“The political development was too conservative for us. We were thus looking for a way – perhaps to establish some new, different party, which would be perhaps on the left from the social democracy or in a different relationship with the already established parties. A party which would have nothing to do with DKP – who were the East Germany-Moscow-oriented communists at that time – nor with the Left, which was ideologically restricted in a way: in a Marxist way, in a Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, or Trockist way. That was all sectarian in a way. What we were after was to deal with problems of late capitalism which had certain dimensions of a social market economy. But it was only partly social while it was strongly market-oriented. Deep problems began to ensue. Problems with the way people were treated –the workforce, gastarbeiters, and so on, and then how everything else was treated: the environment, the sources of our being.”