Jiri Dienstbier, a leading Czech anti-communist and Czechoslovakia’s first foreign minister after the collapse of the pro-Soviet regime, died in Prague yesterday at the age of 73, his family said.

A professional journalist and broadcaster, Dienstbier served as foreign minister from December 1989, when he symbolically cut the barbed wire on the border with West Germany with that country’s counterpart Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

In July 1991, he chaired a meeting of leaders of former Soviet Bloc states which officially dissolved the Warsaw Pact tying them to Moscow.

Born on April 20, 1937 at Kladno, near Prague, Dienstbier worked for the Czech broadcasting company from 1958 to 1969, serving as a foreign correspondent in western Europe and the US.

In 1968 he organised anti-Soviet radio broadcasts during Moscow’s crushing of Alexander Dubcek’s reformist Prague Spring movement.

Sacked from the radio, he worked at menial tasks but was imprisoned from 1979-1982 for his activities with dissident rights groups such as Charter 77, when he produced underground samizdat publications.

After leaving the Foreign Ministry in 1992, just before Czechoslovakia split into two separate states, Dienstbier headed the centrist Civic Movement party till 1996.