Mgr. Ivan Mynář

“We established a coordination center and had to arrange many things. That the State Security files wouldn’t get shredded for example. Mirek Urban was in charge of that. At the beginning, I was in charge of education and was supposed to persuade teachers not be afraid anymore. And we needed to replace many people. There were round table talks with the communist representative of the local national committee and other offices. And what I remember as the most cardinal problem, apart from me being away from home for days, was that we didn’t have enough people. Those affiliated with the regime had to leave. But who was there to replace them? To get a decent, honest person with the relevant expertise was a really big problem that we constantly had to deal with.”

“One of the main problems that we were addressing was whether to dissolve the Communist Party. The opinions on this matter differed. To tell the truth, I wasn’t up for it either. We naively believed that communists would simply die out. They didn’t die out. Another argument was that the extremists would just gather in other parties and that other parties would arise. Truth is that only a few emerged. Only the Communist Party remained intact. Besides, I clearly felt that there was no public demand for this move. People didn’t want it back then. There was one million party members here at that point. But there are moments when I say to myself that we should have banned it, that I made a mistake.”