A Czech's career

摘要

Inconvenient truths tend to get lost in Bohemia. Jiri Dienstbier, a dissident who became Czechoslovakia's first post-revolutionary foreign minister in 1989, kept a sharp eye on them. He was a journalist at heart: a star foreign correspondent in the 1960s. But his idealism made him one of tens of thousands of the brightest and best Czechs and Slovaks to be purged after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 crushed the reformist hopes of the Prague Spring. The urbane, polyglot Mr Dienstbier took a series of menial jobs, before settling down to work as a furnace-stoker on the Prague subway.