John Bradley obituary

My father, John Bradley, who has died aged 93, was a specialist in eastern European and Soviet history and politics, contributing to more than 20 titles, mainly on Czechoslovakia, his native land, and Russia.

John taught in the department of government at Manchester University from 1963 to 1981. During this time he published articles and books including The Illustrated History of the Third Reich (1978), his bestselling work. Wishing to develop his extra-curricular activities, he then took early retirement.

After that, John enjoyed more than 40 years of living at a gentler pace, surrounded by his family. He continued to write books as well as teaching as a visiting professor at the Université de Bordeaux in 1983-84. The overthrow of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989 marked the realisation of a dream for him, but it came too late, as his parents had died and he did not feel he could start there again. In 1991-92 he taught politics at Palacký University Olomouc, Czechoslovakia, before living in Paris and London and eventually settling in Bergerac, Dordogne, in 2004.

John was born Jan Nejez in Brno to Maria (nee Racková), a cook, and Jan Nejez Sr, a soldier and later chief controller of the Brno trams, who was arrested by the Germans for resistance activity in July 1940. In 1949 the young Jan became a student leader and was expelled from the Réalné gymnasium at Královopolská, Brno, for anti-communist activities. A few months later he scouted the border for an escape route and was himself arrested and sent to the Jachymov uranium mine, where he befriended a guard and escaped with another inmate, reaching West Germany in November 1949.

As an undocumented 19-year-old refugee, the multilingual Jan spent six months as an interpreter before securing a travel document for England on a five-year contract to work in a steel mill. He changed his name to John Bradley to evade the attention of Czech secret services. Recruited as a spy by MI5 in 1953, John was quickly dropped when he refused to steal a target’s letters.

To complete his education, he passed O and A-levels at North Western Polytechnic in Kentish Town, London, and studied philosophy, Czech and Russian at Cambridge University, gaining a first degree in 1955 and an MLitt in 1958. Travelling to Cambridge on a bus one day, he met Annie Barennes, a student from Bordeaux, and they married in 1954. In 1964 he obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris with a history of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, 1914-20.

John is survived by Annie, his sons Christopher and Nicholas, daughters Marie-Helene and me, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.