In late March 1968 Jonathan Wills was one of a party of a dozen students from Edinburgh University who travelled by Channel ferry and train to Prague for a three-week exchange visit with the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. The trip was arranged as part of the 'Edinburgh Conversations', established to keep academic contacts open between the West and the Communist East.
They arrived to find many university classes suspended. In their place there was an endless tumult of seminars, meetings and teach-ins, where students, staff and politicians debated 'Socialism with a Human Face', the Czechoslovak Communist Party's brave but doomed attempt to loosen the dictatorship that had stifled all dissent since the coup of 1948.
Some of the dissenters seemed to be advocating a form of Victorian laissez-faire capitalism, which, indeed, enjoyed a revival after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 led to an era of sado-monetarism in the Czech Republic, as elsewhere.
In his introduction,
Jonathan Wills writes: "When we weren't at meetings we were at the theatre, seeing politically provocative productions by playwrights such as Vaclav Havel that would have been impossible a few years earlier. There were films (notably 'Closely Watched Trains' by Jiři Menzel) and exhibitions by painters such as Frantisek Kupka, who had been out of favour for decades.
"In the evenings there was a lot of pivo [beer] in the student bars (some of it undoubtedly purchased for us by gentlemen connected with the CIA) and private parties where we foreign visitors were welcomed into the family homes of our student hosts - something unthinkable under the dictatorship before (and for a long while after) the 'Prague Spring'.
"In among it all I found time to wander the streets of Prague, taking pictures with the old Zeiss-Ikon Contina camera my father had given me. There are a few shots of Marxist students from the West who were trying to convince our Czech student colleagues that reformed 'Euro-communism' was a wonderful idea. But mostly I just tried to record the ordinary life of this beautiful city in the midst of political upheaval...
"It was all fascinating. We made good friends and promised to write, but four months after we left the Prague Spring it withered and died in the August invasion by 'fraternal' Soviet forces. Edinburgh University advised us that contacting our new Czech friends might put them in danger, so we didn't.
"Many years later, when my son married a Czech, I went back to Prague and met one of the students I'd known in 1968, Katia Paderlikova. These days I visit Prague as often as I can, to see my grandchildren. Katia and I sometimes have coffee in a café near the Clementinum, to talk over old times and what has been achieved, and not achieved, since those momentous weeks over 50 years ago.
"If anyone knows where Marie Cervinkova, Jan Zelenka and Suzanna Urbanova are now, please let me know. I would love to hear from them."
Jonathan Wills