Professor Sylva Petrova, an art historian based at The National Glass Centre, in Sunderland, recently won the National Book of the Year Award in her native Czech Republic. She tells SARAH FOSTER about her battle against Communism

WITH a sigh of resignation, Professor Sylvia Petrova says foreigners will never understand life under Communism in the former Czechoslovakia. Even so, she tries, explaining carefully in a thick accent, how every sign of nonconformity was snuffed out like a wayward candle.

Naturally, this was disastrous for art - the medium 50-year-old Prof Petrova chose for her career.

So as a promising young student desperate to indulge her passion for art history, she left Prague for the university at Oloumouc, where the Government's grip on education wasn't so tight. There, she found a thriving core of artists and intellectuals, who were cultural refugees from the capital, and revelled in their expert tuition.

She now recognises that they ran a great risk to keep free artistic expression alive, especially following the failed Prague Spring revolution of 1968.

"I was interested in contemporary art but it was a very difficult subject in our country," she says. "Art was under political pressure, and it was considered to be part of the political ideology. The Government believed that it should show the life of the working class, and anything that didn't had to be done in secret."

A sense of secrecy pervaded Prof Petrova's life as a postgraduate when she returned to Prague with a Phd in the late 1970s. Unable to find work as an art historian, she took whatever jobs were available, including working in a graphic art shop. She made contact with the capital's underground artists, who encouraged her to write her first book and introduced her to allies in the publishing world.

"We always had to co-operate with people we could trust," she remembers. "People simply took the risk to do things right. The book, about artistic graphics, is still known today."

After years of pursuing her career surreptitiously, Prof Petrova finally landed her dream job as curator of the Museum of Decorative Art in Prague, in 1985. Its 20,000-piece glass collection, produced by artists and sculptors forced to diversify by the Communist regime, fired her imagination and inspired a lifelong vocation.

"Part of glass making was in the service of official ideology and part of it transferred underground," she says. "Glass was interesting to artists because it was very experimental, so a lot of talented artists and sculptors moved into this area and let themselves go. I immediately fell in love with glass and in a couple of years, I became known for my work in the field."

Over the next heady years, Prof Petrova toured the world with some of the nation's most talented artists, raising the profile of its burgeoning unofficial glass-making industry wherever she went. It became so successful that even the Government was forced to acknowledge it, giving tacit consent for Prof Petrova to attend high profile events.

Then in 1989, the Velvet Revolution came and swept away the old leadership, entrenched in its working class values yet out of touch with real people.

The stranglehold on art was finally released, and Prof Petrova's fight was won.

Partly for this reason, when Sunderland University, which has a glass making department at the National Glass Centre, offered her a job, she jumped at the chance.

At the age of 47 and with little grasp of the English language, she left her mother and teenage son behind to move to Sunderland, which like the Czech Republic, has a strong tradition of glass making. As professor in glass and director of the Institute for International Research in Glass, she now divides her time between research and teaching.

Her final legacy to her mother country is her latest book, Czech Glass, in which she charts the development of the glass industry in which she played so great a part. She is proud of the book's recognition as National Book of the Year in the Czech Republic, but has no regrets about leaving.

"I want to give all my knowledge, contacts and ideas and I want to support the school in becoming an important centre of glass in this country and internationally," she says. "Now I am fighting for something again.