Jan Šolta

“I have met lots of people who have in some way influenced my life or given it a certain meaning, and one of them is certainly Oleg Yefremovich Lushnikov, who was a student when I made my acquaintance with him in sixty-five; he was the only Russian at Unity – I mean Jarov – Student Hall, in Žižkov. We met there somehow and got talking. He was mainly studying Czech here, which is why he was sent to the University of Economics for a year, and his main task was to learn Czech properly, so he liked talking with people and socialising. He studied at MGIMO, which is an acronym of the State Institute of International Relations in Moscow, the diplomat school, and he told me – which was interesting – how he had found his way to Czech. It was because he had the least favours, so he couldn’t enrol in a program that would have English or French, or Indian perhaps, as its main language, from which he could go to one of the really important embassies, and so he ended up in the Czech class, which wasn’t exactly the diplomatic top league – from the point of view of Soviet diplomats. Nonetheless, it marked his life, which he actually devoted entirely to Czechoslovakia. So he graduated from MGIMO, then, when he returned from Czechoslovakia he immediately began as an interpreter for even the highest representatives; roughly from sixty-six, sixty-seven he interpreted all of the meetings at the highest level between Czechoslovak and Soviet representatives. So he was present to all the negotiations, whether it was Novotný or other big wigs and Soviet functionaries.”