The end of the Prague Spring - David Bradbury in Prague
David Bradbury is a former director general of the British Library. In 1968, the foreign language student found himself in Czechoslovakia right after the Soviet-led invasion. Despite the unusual times, he formed lifelong friendships with a number of Czechs, and an ongoing affinity for the country. I caught up with David during a recent visit to Prague and began by asking how he ended up in the Czech capital in September 1968.
"I was born in Manchester, England, in 1947. I went to university at the University of Sussex in Brighton. And as part of our course, which was a degree in Russian Studies, we were encouraged to have one year abroad learning the language, in my case the Russian language.
"Unfortunately at that time, the Russians would only allow a very small number of foreign students to come and study in Moscow. So we were given the chance to go and study in another country, which spoke another Slavic language. And because we were making our choice in the spring of 1968, there was already much excitement about the Prague Spring, and about the changes taking place in Prague. And so four of us from Sussex University chose to go to Prague.
"We were originally due to go in August, but after the invasion, the thing was suspended for a few weeks. But then our colleagues in Prague said: “Look, if you don’t want to come, then we quite understand. But if you’d like to come, we would be very happy to have you here.” And so we all said “Oh, yeah. We’ll come!” And we arrived in Prague somewhere around the 5th of September, 1968. And we were then here for the next nine months, living as students in Prague."
It must have been surreal to be in the country in that situation.
"It was very strange to arrive in Prague so soon after the invasion. My father drove two of us to Prague, from England. I remember coming across the border. And I don’t think we even had proper visas and so on. There was just a rather chaotic scene at the border, where they didn’t do much checking and just waved us through. I think we stayed a night in the [western Bohemian town of] Marianské Lázně, and then we came into Prague, and met with our contacts in Prague, who were all from the [Charles University] Pedagogical Faculty – that was the faculty that we were formerly linked with. And our university [in England] also received students from that faculty on exchange with us."
What was your sense of how people were reacting to the apparent crushing of the Prague Spring by military force?
"I think there were mixed views. Some people were very apprehensive. But others did feel that the outlook was not all bad. Because [Alexander] Dubček [the reformist First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party] had come back to Prague, and people were still producing various liberal newspapers and magazines. And there was still a relative amount of freedom for people to say what they want and do what they want, to travel and so on. So there were some people that did hope that things were going to be ok.But for us it was very sad as we saw the gradual realization over the next three months that [Gustav] Husák [who replaced Dubček on 17 April 1969] and the Russians were going to be the victors."
You were there for nine months – what kind of friendships were you able to form with your Czech hosts during this time?
"So we were in Prague from September ‘68, until June-July ‘69. And during that time we didn’t leave Czechoslovakia at all. We spent our holidays with the families of the people who were our exchange students. And we got to know a very nice crowd of people, both in the Pedagogical Faculty – teachers in the faculty – indeed, we spent a lot of our time, not in the faculty, but in U Kotvy, which was the pub just around the corner from the faculty. So we had great times with them. We actually abandoned our Russian studies fairly quickly, because Russian was not the most popular subject at that time. And after about a month, we stopped going to Russian classes in the faculty. But one of our teachers had an elderly mother, who was a White Russian [i.e. anticommunist] refugee, who had lived in Prague since 1920 or something, and she gave us Russian lessons two mornings a week, two three-hour sessions. And that is where we progressed our Russian during that time."
Did you learn to speak Czech?
"We learned kind of very nespísovný [informal, spoken] Czech. We never really had lessons. We never really learned the grammar. But já můžu mluvit, jestli musím mluvit, jestli mi rozumíte! If you understand!"
Did you witness some of the repercussions of the invasion? The beginning of the clampdown that would then lead to the so-called “normalisation” era?
"We obviously saw the changes that were happening to our friends. Several of our friends were teachers, because we had been in the Pedagogical Faculty. And all of them got jobs as teachers. But they had to put up with all the unpleasantness of being a teacher then; of having Party people in the school; having to be very careful what they said, and not allowing their children to talk about what their real thoughts and beliefs were. So that was pretty unpleasant for them. Another of our friends was a dissident, who ended up working as a stoker in a boiler room for many years. And then later on, he became an ambassador – these huge changes that take place! This was a guy called Daniel Kummerman, and I think he was the Czech Ambassador to Israel eventually, many years later [1999-2004]."
What about your own views of the situation after the invasion?
"We didn’t really have any better idea than anybody else as to whether things were going to get better or worse. In some ways, things were not as bad as they might have been in that not so many people were being put in prison, and there weren’t so many people being shot and tortured and things like that. Life could go on for many people fairly normally. But it was just very sad, particularly for intellectuals seeing their futures being lost. Our fellow students in ‘68 were people, who, had Dubček, succeeded, would have had really exciting, rewarding lives in Prague. Instead, they had to really just mark time for twenty years until the Velvet Revolution. And so they lost a very important part of their lives, which is very sad for them."
And you continued to visit Czechoslovakia in the ensuing years…
"We went regularly to Prague. In fact, we used to come Prague almost every year for the next twenty years. And some of the friends that we had here were people with split families, where one of the children had settled in England, and the others were still here, but the child in England was illegal, so they couldn’t travel to each other, and the families here got into trouble. And we were sometimes the contact point between the families in England and here in the Czech Republic."
Were you able to continue to visit Czechoslovakia without problems, even during the 1970s?
"Yeah, we always got visas. We didn’t really have any problems. We had to go to Bartolomějská [street, the headquarters of the notorious StB secret police] just to be interviewed and just to make sure that we could stay on longer. And while we found it unpleasant, they never behaved badly towards us. It had an unpleasant feeling, the place, obviously – much more unpleasant for Czech people than English people, I’m sure. And then when we used to come here on trips afterwards, we never had any involvement with the police. We had to go through the usual searches of our car if we were leaving the country, and they would look for things in our car, but we didn’t normally carry risky or dangerous items with us."
You also befriended some Czechs who went into exile and settled in Britain. Often, such Czechs would have a decidedly right-wing view of the world, filled with praise for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in view of their communist experiences, and also in view of often arriving during the notorious upheavals of Labour-run mid-1970s Britain. Did that make talking politics difficult?
"The fact that they were quite full of praise for Margaret Thatcher and the right-wing in Britain – I think we just found that we could quite understand it after what people had been through. Any idea that one should have some support or sympathy for the left was greeted with some ridicule by them. They would say: “Come on! Are you really saying that some of these left-wing things are a good idea? Look what our generation has been through!” So we could quite understand it. We didn’t argue much about those things. You know, there are different political views.
"One of our friends in England was and is Zdeněk Kavan, the brother of Jan Kavan [former Czech dissident, a Social Democrat, later lived in exile in the United Kingdom, subsequently serving as Czech foreign minister (1998-2002); has faced accusations, often from other fellow former exiles, of alleged StB collaboration, or of having murky loyalties – none of which has ever been proven]. And he [Zdeněk] came to England in the 1960s, and became a lecturer at Sussex University – where he still works to this day, albeit no longer full time. And we met his brother occasionally as well, but never really knew the brother. But we were aware of all the tensions that existed over different groups of people and different ways of thinking."
You also befriended my late father, the journalist Jan Jůn, back in 1968, and later when he emigrated to England. What were your impressions of him?
"My memories of Jan during the year that I was here was that he was always a very jolly, vibrant, enthusiastic person. We always had great fun; it was always very easy to talk to him about everything. He was very interested in everything. He was living in a flat on Pařížská street then. I remember going to the flat and just sitting and chatting. Or we would go out and meet in various pubs. He was just a really lovely person. Very gentle, very good-humoured, very witty. He already spoke pretty good English, so we could have all our conversations in English."
How would you sum up his later work as a journalist in Britain?
"He was someone that was a very important channel, I think, for Czechs, to know about British politics and British life. And we only heard about his death [in July 2022] from one of his listeners, who was a friend of ours and said “Have you heard the terrible news of his death?” So there must be thousands of people who were regular listeners and fans of his."
