Communists are bitches

Ivan Landsmann decided to express his disapproval of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw pact armies in 1968 by refusing to go to work for a full year. His period of resistance ended in 1969 when he started his military service in Přáslavice near Olomouc. Ivan Landsmann was able to work with people, which is why he was chosen for an officer candidate school, and having graduated, he became the leader of an anti-aircraft artillery company. His overt anticommunist opinions caused him a lot of trouble during his military service. Landsmann was imprisoned many times, including for indecent behaviour, offending professional soldiers and unauthorised departure from the barracks. Captain Urbášek, a candidate for the Communist Party membership helped to iron out his problems with military discipline. Ivan Landsmann remembers an incident that could have ended in criminal prosecution: “Doing our warm-up exercise, we were running along the yard and some colonel was watching us from the reviewing stand. Running past the stand, I couldn’t stand it and yelled: “Communists are bitches!” What a mess! They tried to find who did it. One soldier turned me in.” Captain Urbášek saved Ivan Landsmann once again and, instead of prosecution, Landsmann paid for his cheekiness with the traditional twenty-one days in military jail. Landsmann has nothing but good memories of the military jail as, according to him, the atmosphere in the prison was much freer than in everyday military service.