Abstract
Political trials were the harshest form of persecution meted out by the communist regime. They served to help justify the totalitarian government established by the Communist Party and above all to spread fear in Czechoslovak society.
The overwhelming majority of the trials were artificially fabricated and involved every kind of social group. Members of the intelligentsia were very often among those affected by political persecution.
The university professor Bohumil Ryba was an extraordinarily talented and diligent classicist, an excellent expert on old Czech manuscripts, and unfortunately one of those who got on the wrong side of the state authorities. He was arrested in 1953 and subsequently sentenced to 19 years´imprisonment on a trumped-up charge of high treason and espionage.
Although he was granted amnesty in 1960, his academic work and his life in general were considerably restricted by the regime. Professor Bohumil Ryba was not finally rehabilitated until after his death in 1991.