No. II.-III.
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Milan Drápala
Illusion as Life:
The Politics of Vítězslav Nezval
Michal Barnovský
The Democratic Party in Slovakia, 1944–48
Leszek Pajórek
Poland and the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968
Material
Robert J. Büchler
The Illegal Emigration of Jews from Hungary to Israel, 1949, as Seen by the Czechoslovak Security Organs
Horizon
Jitka Vondrová
Soviet Documents on Czechoslovakia 1968
The ‘Prague Spring’ Revisited:
Vladimir Fiodorov & Rudolf Pikhoya
An Evaluation of the Past Has to Take into Interviews Account the Way Things Really Were:
Intervention in Czechoslovakia was Agreed Upon by the Americans
László N. Sándor
János Kádár and the ‘Prague Spring’
Iván Pataky
Kádár in a Different Light
Reviews
Jindřich Pecka
Mussolini and Hitler:
Anatomy of the Political Career of a Totalitarian Leader
Běla Plechanovová
Life in the Age of Extremes
Jan Měchýř
Report from the Realm of the Secret Service
Jan Měchýř
Socialists and the Others during WW II
Veronika Slneková
German Historiography on Fascism
Contemporary History Archive
Helena Nováčková & Ivan Šťovíček
Edvard Beneš on the Moscow Talks of December 1943:
A Document
Oldřich Tůma
The Czechoslovak Communist Regime in the Reports of the GDR Ambassador, 1987–89
Bibliography
Foreign Monographs, Essay Collections and Articles from Scholarly Journals, from 1994 to 30 June 1996
Supplement
The Czech-German Committee of Historians Conflictual Society, Catastrophe, Détente:
An Outline of German-Czech History since the 19th Century
(Reprinted with the kind permission of Oldenbourg Publishers, Munich)
Summaries
The Politics of Vítězslav Nezval
Milan Drápala
This article, based both on secondary sources and newly found archival material, discusses the political views and development of Vítězlav Nezval, arguably the most important Czech poet of the interwar period. Nezval began to make his mark as a man of letters in the 1920s while an active member of the leftwing group of artists, Devětsil. The first section of the paper discusses briefly the fates of some of Devětsil’s other members after 1945, and thereby helps to provide the context of Nezval’s generation. As a member of Devětsil, Nezval experienced an intellectual re-birth, abandoning anarchism and embracing Marxism, and he remained an advocate of the latter until the end of his life. Nezval’s experience of the 1930s is described here as a conflict between loyalty to both the Communist Party and the Surrealists. The conflict was intensified by the show trials in the Soviet Union, and culminated in Nezval’s break with the Surrealists in 1938.
The author then focuses on the post-WW II years. He discusses Nezval as Head of the Film Section at the Ministry of Information and as a member of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers. He points out Nezval’s role in the take-over of this organisation’s leadership, which came to a head in a conflict with the hardliners.
Although Nezval’s uncritical admiration for the Soviet Union and Stalin is made clear, so is the ambiguity of his relationship to the Communist regime. On the one hand, Nezval expressed absolute devotion to it, sung its praises in his verse, and profited from the exclusive position it afforded him. On the other hand, he continuously tried to help artists who were being discriminated against, and endeavoured to defend modern art against single-minded advocates of Socialist Realism.
The last section of the article attempts to define Nezval’s political views as seen in Nezval the poet.
The Democratic Party in Slovakia, 1944–48
Michal Barnovský
This article provides an analysis of the organisational structure, membership, orientation and activity of the Democratic Party (DP) in Slovakia during the short period from the liberation of Slovak territory until the Communist take over. The DP’s foundations were laid during the Slovak National Uprising (beginning in August 1944) when various civilian resistance groups came together, but its membership base was developed only after the war’s end in May 1945. The DP was an influential mass party with its own platform (to which it adhered), on the centre of the classical political spectrum. At the time, however, with the far right excluded from legal political life, the DP appeared right-wing.
The DP’s ideology, though, was not consistent. It was based on several ideological currents, including Christian principles and social reform, agrarianism and, partly, on Masaryk’s ideas. The latter aspect gradually weakened, until it was reduced to a merely political understanding of democracy, but not to the full extent.
A milestone in the DP’s development was the ‘April Agreement’ between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics in 1946, and significant attention has, therefore, been devoted to it in this article. The author sees it as having been both the way out of a quandary and a marriage of convenience. Its consequences are disputable. Although it prevented a split in the DP and assured significant electoral success in Slovakia, it also provoked an attack by the Communists and contributed to the formation of a bloc of anti-DP Czech parties. Thus, the conflicts within the party intensified.
The last section of the article is concerned with the characteristics and context of the Slovak Communist Party’s autumn 1947 offensive against the DP, and considers the nature of the DP’s internal conflicts.
Poland and the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968
Leszek Pajórek
Władyslaw Gomułka was an active advocate of a forceful solution to the ‘Czechoslovak’ crisis, because he believed that it was the only way of reversing the democratic process in Czechoslovakia. From the beginning he had been adamantly opposed to changes occurring just south of Poland, and he made his position clear several times at Party and top-level government meetings concerned with the Czechoslovak ‘problem’. His aversion was rooted in his misunderstanding the significance of the changes in Czechoslovakia, in his assessment of democratic reform as a manifestation of revisionism, his fear that Czechoslovakia would economically and politically open up to the West, leading Czechoslovakia to rethink its policy towards West Germany, and, ultimately, his anxiety that the ideas of the Prague Spring would make their way into Poland. The inability to find a solution to growing social and economic problems, the intensifying conflict with the intelligentsia and the creation of competing groups within the Polish power structures weakened Gomułka’s position in the government and the Party. This led him to recommend radical solutions in support of the status quo. The Polish leader’s role in the intervention enabled him to strengthen his own position in the Polish Communist Party; the intervention itself liquidated the centre of what was for him hostile ‘revisionism’ just across of the frontier, which could have had an undesired effect on Poland. The decision to use force to end the democratising process in Czechoslovakia averted the possibility of a transformation of the political and economic system in Poland, at least of the kind apparent in the Prague Spring.
Polish society was taken by surprise by the military intervention in Czechoslovakia, although Poles’ reactions varied widely. The majority accepted events passively, despite being uneasy about the presence of Polish troops in the operation. A smaller number of Poles reacted more actively, protesting in various ways.
The Illegal Emigration of Jews from Hungary to Israel, 1949, as Seen by the Czechoslovak Security Organs
Robert J. Büchler
This contribution provides information on a little known yet important chapter in the struggle of victims of the Shoah to live in a state of their own.
At the end of 1948, the Hungarian authorities forbade Jewish members of the population to emigrate to Israel. This provoked a wave of illegal emigration, first by way of Austria and Yugoslavia, and then, from the spring of 1949, through Czechoslovakia. According to Israeli sources, in the spring and summer of 1949 almost 20,000 Hungarian Jews crossed Slovakia to Austria and continued on to Israel. The transfer took place with the tacit agreement of the Czechoslovak authorities and under the control of the Czechoslovak and Hungarian security forces, which had apparently concluded some sort of ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with the Israeli Embassy in Prague. The entire operation ended in the spring of 1950 as a consequence of foreign policy tensions between East and West and under the influence of the Soviet bloc’s anti-Zionism.
Soviet Documents on Czechoslovakia 1968
Jitka Vondrová
This article provides an annotated translation of selected sections of Professor Rudolf Pikhoya’s ‘Vzglyad iz Moskvy. Po dokumentam CK KPSS’ [The view from Moscow: From documents of the CPSU Central Committee]. Pikhoya is former Director of the State Archive Services, Russia, and is currently Vice Chairman of the international foundation Democracy. His article under discussion was published in Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya 6 (1994) and 1 (1995). It is based largely on inaccessible material originating in the politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), particularly as working papers from politburo sessions, now amongst Brezhnev’s own records and those of the CPSU department for relations with other Communist parties. (These record groups are now in the Centre for Contemporary Documentation and in the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, Moscow.)
The selected passages endeavour to throw light on the process of Soviet policy-making regarding Czechoslovakia in the crucial months of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. These include the following: the Dresden meeting, where the Soviets made their critical assessment of Czechoslovak events; the days after the May meeting of ‘The Five’, when the Czechoslovak leadership was under pressure from all sides to reverse the ‘counter-revolutionary situation’ by itself; the month of July, when, together with political steps, ‘extreme measures’ were being prepared; and August, when the ‘extreme measures’ were taken and followed by additional steps after the military failure of the intervention.
The ‘Prague Spring’ Revisited:
Pikhoya’s View and Some Hungarian Responses
This is a Czech translation of Rudolf Pikhoya’s recent large interview for the Russian daily Segodnya (23 August 1996) in which he returns to the topic of Czechoslovakia 1968. The opinions he expresses here are far more controversial than those in his article in the scholarly journal Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya (see Jitka Vondrová’s contribution in this issue of Soudobé dějiny). Whereas his academic article sets out to discuss the contents of so far unpublished documents, in the newspaper interview Pikhoya emphasizes the international context in 1968 and the positions adopted by the main actors in the events. His assessment of János Kádár’s role in preparing the armed intervention in Czechoslovakia, for example, evoked two response in the Hungarian paper Magyar Hírlap (10 and 25 September 1996), which are also reprinted here.
Mussolini and Hitler:
Anatomy of the Political Career of a Totalitarian Leader
Jindřich Pecka
Crises, revolutions and war provide the conditions for the making of rapid careers. The five works under review appeared in Czech translation between 1992 and 1994. Concerned with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, they discusses the problem from various vantage points. Luboš Taraba follows Mussolini’s career as ‘brawler and lover’, patriotic soldier, radical socialist and, finally, Fascist dictator (and his collapse). J.P. Stern analyzes Hitler’s career in connection with the ideology and intellectual climate of Germany and Austria. Ian Kershaw turns his attention to the sociological category of the myth of the Führer; Hitler’s image, he maintains, is based on the broader social context. Hitler’s rise from agitator to dictator is outlined by Reiner Zitelmann; where some older authors have tended to demonise their subject, Zitelmann has descended from the heights of irrationality to the firm ground of social and political reality. Here he is joined by Polish historian Karol Grünberg, who, as opposed to a psychologising biography, analyzes the socio-economic factors.
The reviewer concludes that these works show that various conceptions and approaches are justifiable in a pluralistic interpretation of history. By each contributing part of the picture they complement one another.
Life in the Age of Extremes
Běla Plechanovová
The reviewer looks at Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1995), which she considers, ‘as is true of his previous work, a highly provocative view of our era’. She feels, however, that one must bear in mind that Hobsbawm defines this epoch in relation to the attempt to replace the capitalist system with a socialist one. Each of the work’s three main sections, she writes, ‘contains a thorough analysis of the most important phenomena comprising the individual periods’, but although Hobsbawm shows ‘a remarkable ability to see beneath the surface of these periods, to note their paradoxes and to show the connections’, he ‘sometimes contrives a connection or puts forth an ideologically tinted cliché’.
The second part of the work, dedicated to the Golden Age, impresses the reviewer as the most valuable. ‘The analysis of the nature of the changes to our ways of life endeavours to describe the internal connections [...] and provides valuable insight [...].’ She remarks that Hobsbawm emphasizes the profundity of economic, social and cultural changes more than the development of the Cold War, and notes his claim that the failure of Soviet socialism does not mean other forms of socialism will not arise; for Hobsbawm the idea of Marxist socialism remains relevant. The Age of Extremes, the reviewer concludes, ‘is a most valuable contribution to the discussion on the twentieth century. The breadth of the author’s erudition and his ability to provide an analytical view of social processes are admirable, and, in historical literature, unique. What the reader lacks [...], however, is an attempt at a theoretical reflexion of the epoch, which would place the milestones and processes the author discusses into a framework. The course of the socialist revolution, which has helped the author set the chronological milestones, is probably not up to the task.’
Report from the Realm of the Secret Service
Jan Měchýř
The erstwhile Office of Documentation and Investigation into the Activity of the State Security Forces published (in the Czech Ministry of the Interior’s publishing house) two collections of essays and documents under the title Securitas Imperii (Prague, 1994, 1995). The second volume includes German and English abstracts. The publications provide much valuable information on the work of the secret police in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, for example Akce KLÍN [Operation Wedge], designed to create disunity amongst the dissidents. Unfortunately, the essays tend to be amateurish, frequently giving vent to their authors’ emotions.
Socialists and the Others during WW II
Jan Měchýř
This is a review of Zdeněk Kárník’s Socialisté na rozcestí. Habsburk, Masaryk či Šmeral [Socialists at the crossroads: Habsburg, Masaryk or Šmeral] (Prague, 1996). This substantial volume of 554 pages is a revised edition of a 1968 publication. The author depicts in detail, at times microscopic, Czech politicians’ attempts to find an orientation for the future Czech state (which had been part of the Habsburg Monarchy since 1526) after the Great War of 1914–18. The reviewer objects somewhat to the author’s method, but nevertheless ranks this work among the best in contemporary Czech and Czechoslovak history.
German Historiography on Fascism
Veronika Slneková
The author reviews Eduard Nižňanský’s Interpretácie fašizmu historiografiou SRN (1945–1990) (Nitra, 1995), on post-WW II West German historiography’s interpretations of fascism. The book’s eight chapters provide an overview of the important work and trends in the field (Friedrich Meinecke, Gerhard Ritter, Ludwig Dehio, Karl Dieter Bracher, Martin Broszat, Ernst Nolte, theories of totalitarianism, the history of everyday life, the polemics of the intentionalists and functionalists, and the Historikerstreit of the 1980s). Nižňanský has tried to harmonise the chronology with the topics, and analyses the trends. Although he considers his work only an introduction to the problem, it should be appreciated as a clear contribution to Slovak historiography, both because Slovak research into twentieth-century history has been neglected, and because these historiographical approaches can be used by Slovak historians in their own work on the post-WW II period.
Edvard Beneš on the Moscow Talks of December 1943:
A Document
Helena Nováčková and Ivan Šťovíček
Because of their importance for Czechoslovakia’s postwar development, and particularly its foreign policy orientation, Beneš’s journey to Moscow and the talks held there in December 1943 remain of great interest to historians.
People present at the time have commented that Beneš, upon returning from Moscow, reported the results of the talks to the 118th session of the Government, on January 1944. Although documents from the actual talks (held from 11 to 22 December) are already familiar to historians, the document of the Beneš address remained undisclosed because of inaccessibility to the Beneš Papers during Communist rule. Two records of Beneš’s speech have, however, been preserved. One, written almost illegibly in pencil, is in the record group of the erstwhile London-based Council of Ministers Presidium, now deposited in the State Central Archive, Prague. The second is in the Beneš Papers (Fond 40) in the T. G. Masaryk Institute, Prague.
The latter record is the one published here. It exists both in draft version (with Beneš’s extensive marginalia) and final form, containing Beneš’s assessment of all the Moscow talks, but in a version intended strictly for his cabinet. Beneš’s changes to the draft have been indicated here and the omitted passages appear as endnotes.
The Czechoslovak Communist Regime in the Reports of the GDR Ambassador, 1987–89
Oldřich Tůma
This contribution provides a selection of sixteen despatches from the Ambassador of the German Democratic Republic to Prague, Helmut Ziebart, in the last years leading up to the November 1989 changes. In reports based largely on confidential information from top-ranking functionaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CzCP), the ambassador reports on such things as the background to personnel changes in the CzCP, the Czechoslovak leadership’s attitude to the Soviet reforms, Czechoslovak internal politics, and relations between the East German and Czechoslovak Communist parties. The documents were found in the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR, the Bundesarchiv, Berlin. They are accompanied by a well-informed historical and archaeographic introduction, as well as extensive factual commentary.
Conflictual Society, Catastrophe, Détente:
An Outline of German-Czech History since the 19th Century
The German-Czech Committee of Historians
This is a reprint of the recently published report of the German-Czech Committee of Historians. Soudobé dějiny, with the kind permission of the Committee, is publishing here the full Czech and German text of the booklet which first came out in a small print-run in September 1996. The Commission, established in 1990 under the aegis of the foreign ministers of the Czech Republic and the German Federal Republic, is made up of almost two dozen members, Czech, German and Slovak.
The booklet has a brief introduction and nineteen chapters: (1) the break-down of politics of mutual conciliation; (2) WW I and the creation of Czechoslovakia; (3) national minorities policy in the first Czechoslovak Republic’s political system; (4) the ‘negativism’ and ‘activism’ of the German parties in Czechoslovakia; (5) the Weimar Republic and Czechoslovakia; (6) the Great Depression and its political consequences; (7) the consequences for Czechoslovakia of Hitler’s coming to power and the Reich’s approach to Czechoslovakia; (8) the German minority and the changes in its orientation; (9) the Munich Agreement and the break-up of Czechoslovakia; (10) the main features of Nazi occupation policy in the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’; (11) resistance and collaboration in the Protectorate; (12) the separate ‘Sudeten’ territory; (13) the war’s end; (14) the population transfer in the plans of the Allies and the Czechoslovak government-in-exile; (15) the expulsion and transfer of the Germans; (16) the type and extent of material losses; (17) the transferred population and their integration into German society, and the development of the Czechoslovak border regions; (18) the development of relations between the two German states and Czechoslovakia, as well as the importance of German reunification for Czech-German relations; (19) the historiography of Czech-German relations.
The booklet also contains information on the committee’s members and a selected bibliography of their work.
Contributors
Michal Barnovský (1937) is a senior researcher at the Institute of History, the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is primarily concerned with the Slovak military after WW II, and is the author of many books and articles.
Robert Büchler (1930) is Director of the Moreshet Archives, Givat Chaviva, Israel, and Head of the project Encyclopaedia of the Jewish Community in Czechoslovakia, at the Yad Vashem Memorial, Jerusalem. He is concerned with the Shoah and the history of the Jews in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia.
Milan Drápala (1964) has been since 1990 a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, focusing on the political activity of the Czech political élite since the 1930s.
Jan Měchýř (1930) is Docent in the Institute of Economic and Social History, Charles University, Prague. His speciality is post-WW II Czechoslovak history.
Helena Nováčková (1951) is employed at the State Central Archive, Prague. She is concerned with the publishing of sources on Czechoslovak foreign policy up to 1945.
Leszek Pajórek (1959) is a researcher in the Institute of Military History, Warsaw. Since 1990, he has sat on commissions concerned with material from the archives of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defence. His Polsko a „pražské jaro“ [Poland and the ‘Prague Spring’] is forthcoming.
Jindřich Pecka (1936) is a senior researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. He is Docent of History at South Bohemian University, Budějovice, and is concerned with the history of WW II, the Czechoslovak crisis 1967–70, and Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia, 1968–90.
Běla Plechanovová (1956) teaches in the Institute of Political Science, Charles University. She has published on European integration and international relations since WW II.
Veronika Slneková (1967) is a researcher at the Department of History and Archaeology, the School of Education, Nitra, Slovakia. She is concerned particularly with Czechoslovak history.
Ivan Šťovíček (1938) is an employee of the State Central Archive, Prague. His field is the theory and method of publishing modern history documents, particularly on Czechoslovak history, including its foreign policy up to 1945.
Oldřich Tůma (1950) is a senior researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. He is concerned with modern Czech history, particularly the period 1969–89.
Jitka Vondrová (1953), previously an archivist in the State Central Archive, Prague, is now a researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. She is concerned mainly with the publishing of primary sources on the Czechoslovak crisis, 1967–70.
