Zuzana Bartošová

Vladimir Meciar won elections and already in his first speech on television personally recalled me from the function- he said, farewell to Mrs Bartosova as a director of SNG. I didn’t know about it. My husband was just accompanying our daughter to our friends in High Tatras and he called me to Liptovsky Mikulas.“Zuzana, do you know, that you were just recalled from the function?“ Meciar just said that on the TV.“ And I did not yet realise the horror, so I organised a press conference, where I protested as if we were living in a free world. I was invited to the Ministry of Culture, where minister Slobodnik and his deputy Mjartan interrogated me. And it turned out that the biggest problem was the House of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship, which the SNG acquired during my predecessor as an adjacent building. This building owned by the Ministry of Culture was attributed to the SNG, but the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship Union did not want to move out of there. So the SNG, led by Fero Guldan, led litigation with the Union. Part of the lawsuit was to solve, where to put the valuable Russian library. I was personally begging, that this collection could be taken to the municipal library. It turned out that every director who promised to accept this library, was scared, he was visited by a representative from Soviet consulate and threatened. They had that library as a position backup. And only afterwards did I realize, after questioning at the Ministry of Culture, that it was a landmark for them - that there were certainly directories. At that time there was no internet, at most a telephone was tapped, and those personal meetings had to take place somewhere, somewhere they had to keep registered addresses. And in the SNG, we have already been granted permission from the Court to move everyone - both the staff and the library. The workers behind the armoured door were renamed the Pan-European Union, but they were still the same people. Perhaps that was why the appeal was so immediate, to prevent SNG (with my signature) from moving this neuralgic point that friends of the Soviet Union knew and used for decades to another place.