Jiří Hájek was born in 1913 in Krhanice near Prague. He studied law at Charles University, where he joined the Young Social Democrats. At the beginning of World War II, he was arrested as a member of the resistance and spent the entire war in Nazi prisons. After the war he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which he then served for 20 years as member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and from 1955 until 1968 in diplomacy. In the 1960s he joined the reform wing in the Communist Party and during the Prague Spring he was Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister. After the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia (21 August 1968), he protested against this in a speech at the United Nations – this caused his immediate dismissal from all his high offices and soon from the Communist Party itself. During 1969–1972 he worked as historian in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences until he retired in 1973. In the 1970s he joined the opposition against the...