No. III.
Hlavní stránka » pages » Journal Soudobé dějiny » Volume XI. (2004) » No. III. »
Articles
Martin Groman
Stanislav Budín, a Non-card-carrying Communist
Jiří Pernes
‘The Youth Are Leading Brno’:
Otto Šling and his Career in Brno, 1945–50
Karel Hrubý
Trial and Error:
František Graus’s Difficult Journey out of Ideological Imprisonment
Jana Čechurová
Proponents of Continuity and Innovation:
The Czechoslovak Freemasons from London back in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War
Memoirs
Vladislav Moulis
My Years as a Student of History, 1950–55
Reviews
Jan Křen
A Weak Beginning to a Project with Potential: How Will It End?
Marie Černá
The Political Memory of Communism
Petr Šámal
Cultural Politics in General and in Particular
Zdeněk Kárník
A Useful Reference Book on the History of the Social Democrats
Jiří Křesťan
In Search of the Keys to the Period of the ‘Phoney Peace’
Michal Reiman
How Victims of the Stalin Régime were Rehabilitated
Miluša Bubeníková
Russian Émigrés in Czechoslovakia:
A View from Elsewhere
Doubravka Olšáková
The Onerous Legacy of the Annales School:
French Oral History in the Service of the State Bureaucracy
Vlastimil Hála
‘The Culture of Terrorism’:
Chomsky’s View of US Politics
Chronicle
Jiří Pešek
Was the War the Wehrmacht Waged in Eastern Europe Really Only Slightly Dirty?
Šárka Daňková
Who Is Entitled to Explain History? Remarks on a Conference about the Red Army Faction
Martin Groman
The article seeks to present as complete a picture as possible of the little-known career of the journalist and writer Stanislav Budín (1903- 1979). It does so by focusing on the development of his outlook and his peculiar relationship with Communism and the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) to which he remained inwardly devoted for years, even after having been expelled. It also seeks to determine possible motives for Budín’s positions and decisions, particularly for his loyalty.
Budín was born into the relatively well-off family of a Jewish merchant in Kamenec Podolskij, the regional capital of the Podolia Guberniya, Galicia. He experienced firsthand the political convulsions that affected the town beginning in 1917 – revolution, civil war, pogroms. In the early 1920s he left Galicia for Poland. From there, together with a wave of Russian émigrés, he went to Prague, where he soon took a degree at the Czech polytechnic (ČVUT) and participated in the left-wing youth movement. He tried both Anarchism and Zionism but abandoned them, and was at first inclined to the Socialists. Gradually, however, he came to identify with Communism, which he would remain loyal to for the rest of life. He joined the CPCz in the early 1930s, when it was led by the Stalinist group around Klement Gottwald. Budín was entrusted with journalistic and propaganda tasks. After the dismissal of Josef Guttmann, Editor-in-Chief of the Party paper Rudé právo, Budín was named in his place in 1934 and was later put in charge of the leftwing newspaper Haló noviny. He held these jobs until early 1936, when he met with the same fate as Guttmann. For his allegedly accommodating attitude towards the Socialist in the `united front in the fight against Fascism’ he was accused of `opportunism’ and `Trotskyism’, dismissed from the editorial board, and, together with his wife, thrown out of the CPCz. This experience shook him so much that he even considered suicide. In the summer of 1939 he escaped from the Protectorate of Bohemian and Moravia and made his way to the United States, where he found a job as an editor of New Yorské listy, a newspaper of Czechoslovaks living in the USA. He took the Beneš line in the anti-German struggle, and even criticized the Communists, but, as the war was coming to a close, he again shifted to the left. In 1946 he returned to Czechoslovakia and once more entered the service of the CPCz, though no longer a Party member. He wrote for Kulturní politika and other periodicals, and on the authority of Václav Kopecký, the Minister of Information, he began to build up the Pragopress propaganda agency. After the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia in late February 1948 Budín’s rather non-partisan book about the United States became the target of criticism, and he was again rebuked for alleged Trotskyism in connection with the investigation into a parody of a new collection of verse by the Czech Communist writer Vítězslav Nezval. He was prevented from publishing, and found employment in the archives of the Czechoslovak Press Agency (ČTK) and then in the archives of the Institute of Journalism Studies (Novinářský studijní ústav), where he nervously waited out the Communist show trials of the early 1950s. In the 1960s he published a number of books about journalists and politicians as well as books about his travels. In 1968 he became Editor-in-Chief of the Reform-Communist political weekly Reportér, but with the onset of `Normalization’ policy following the Soviet-led military intervention he went into seclusion and, in 1977, signed the founding document of the Charter 77 human-rights movement.
The author argues that Budín represents the kind of intellectual who approached both his work and his life ideologically. His views and attitudes developed from a desire to bring about profound change in society, to improve the lives of the poor, and to achieve the ideal of social harmony and brotherly love. The author posits the view that Budín’s devotion to the CPCz was born of having been an uprooted Jewish exile who inwardly longed to be part of a community whose actions, solidarity, and transcendental project offered the possibility of going beyond, and denying, the individual dimensions of human life.
`The Youth Are Leading Brno’:
Otto Šling and his Career in Brno, 1945-50
Jiří Pernes
The article presents Otto Šling as a politician somewhat different from the usual Communist functionaries. It shows him to be an intelligent, educated, brave, and ambitious man, who gained renown for his unconventional ways of management. He was born into a German-Jewish bourgeois family in Nová Cerekev near Jihlava, in 1912. While a university student he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz), fought in the Spanish Civil War, and spent the Second World War as an exile in Great Britain, where he was in the leadership of the anti-Fascist Young Czechoslovak organization. After returning home in spring 1945 he became Secretary of the CPCz Regional Committee in Brno and, with his energetic demeanour, he attained a strong position in the Party. According to the testimony of his contemporaries he was at the time one of the non-dogmatic functionaries, who were trying to achieve a Czechoslovak road to Communism.
After the Communist takeover in February 1948 he managed to get an idea accepted to organize an event in Brno, which would draw the largest part of the public, particularly young people, into the CPCz. Under the name `The Youth Are Leading Brno’ it took place on 13 -15 May 1949, and the article considers the event in detail. For three days almost all managers and top employees in Brno (the second largest city in Czechoslovakia) left their jobs and young people – most of whom had no experience in management but were exceptionally self-confident and devoted to the Communist Party – took their place. Almost 20,000 young people participated in the event, for which they had been specially trained. The régime considered it such a success that it repeated the event the next year in a larger form and under the name `May – Youth Month’, in Brno and other places in the country. Šling managed to open the first Czechoslovak Pioneer Centre in Brno, based on the Soviet model, and organized other unconventional propaganda events in the area. Soon, however, he found himself caught in the cogs of the show trials, which would cost him his life. In October 1950 he was arrested, accused of sabotage and espionage, sentenced to death in the trial of the CPCz General Secretary Rudolf Slánský and others, and executed in 1952.
Trial and Error:
František Graus’s Difficult Journey out of Ideological Imprisonment
Karel Hrubý
The article is concerned with the intellectual development of the leading Czech medievalist František Graus, particularly in 1953- 69, as Editor-in-Chief of the Československý časopis historický, the most important journal of history in Czechoslovakia at the time. He was born in Brno in 1921, and as a Jew spent most of the war years in Theresienstadt (Terezín) and other concentration camps. After the war he took a degree in history and began, with exceptional industry, a career as a historian. He devoted himself to medieval history, and as an educated, dyed-in-the-wool Marxist he was entrusted with running Československý časopis historický. This enabled him to influence people well beyond the bounds of his field, and ultimately to shape the development of Czechoslovak historiography in general. In the 1950s he consistently applied the ideas and methods of dialectic materialism in his writing, lectures, and work as an editor, and he advocated a politically expedient conception of historiography. Belief in laws of development based on Marxist-Leninist theory and legitimating the dictatorship of the Communist Party became the basic prerequisites of his work as an historian.
After Khrushchev’s `secret speech’ denouncing the `Cult of Personality’ in 1956, Graus began to lose faith, though he cautiously continued to conform to the views of the Party leadership. From 1963 onwards, Czech and Slovak culture began to escape the throes of politics, and this development began to have a palatable effect on historiography. At this point Graus too resolved to be more openly critical of Party ideology and the existing methods of controlling scholarship and society. He abandoned the dogma about the laws of historical development, and slowly became inclined towards new trends in Western historiography. In his book reviews he introduced new works to Czech readers, particularly works of the Annales School. He published in languages other than Czech and Western universities invited him to collaborate. He began to read primary sources more closely, and tried to interpret them without ideological ballast and he sought inspiration in related disciplines in the social sciences.
With the general shake up of the Czechoslovak political system and attempts at reform in 1968, Graus tried openly to achieve a new conception of historiography, one that was comprehensive and in the international context, including its bright side and its dark. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 provoked him to protest vigorously. The following year he bluntly criticized the dogmatic régime of the 1950s and its brutal methods, yet analyzed only the `objective’ factors, criticizing the `times’, and condemning their `excesses’, but not assigning co-responsibility for this development to his fellow historians or himself. Even as an émigré and as a teacher at Gießen and Basle, he never publicly considered his own role in the deformation of Czech historiography in the 1950s. His mature work met with international acclaim. His development as a citizen, however, remained behind his development as a scholar.
Proponents of Continuity and Innovation:
The Czechoslovak Freemasons from London back in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War
Jana Čechurová
The means of association and social communication of Freemasonry have a tradition going back almost 300 years. This ancient institution, which, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, also prided itself on being progressive, and was in the twentieth century faced with a number of remarkable trials and tribulations. Using as her example the fate of members of the Freemasons’ lodge in London exile, called the `Jan Amos Komenský’ lodge, which maintained the continuity of Czechoslovak Free-masonry during the Second World War, the author describes the ideas, outlines, and limits of this progressiveness and how relative the category can be in revolutionary times. Describing the activity of the Czechoslovak émigré Freemasons against the background of the work of Beneš and his collaborators to liberate Czechoslovakia, she puts the topic into a broader political and intellectual context and also provides insights into the Freemasons’ ideas about the post-war world and their place in it. She also compares these with the reality that emerged, which was in many respects predetermined. The development of the London Lodge also demonstrates the process by which historical advantage and superior position, which was the experience of the ultimately victorious émigrés, became a fundamental handicap. The apparently marginal problems of one social micro-segment, an élite group of Freemasons, thus manifest a number of features in common with the general search for answers to questions that were highly relevant at the time.
The complicated restoration of Freemasonry in Czechoslovakia in 1945- 47, led mainly by Czechoslovak Freemasons from London, was a risky affair, but the period after the Communist takeover of February 1948 meant its unavoidable end. The representatives of this `bourgeois’ organization sought to co-exist with the new régime but its hopes were soon dashed. Secret-police interest in the Freemasons was, however, not particularly acute until after the organization was disbanded in April 1951, in particular with the preparations for the show trial of Rudolf Slánský. Clearly, members of this order, particularly those who spent the war years in London and established themselves within the government and bureaucracy at home, could be used as a textbook example of collaborators of the `conspiratorial centre’ cited so often by the prosecution in the show trials. The author clearly demonstrates, however, on the basis of the available records, that the interest of the state security forces in the Freemasons stemmed exclusively from the suspicion that the Freemasons maintained, as part of their activity, dangerous contacts with the capitalist West. The essence of Freemasonry appeared to be of utterly secondary interest to the state security forces, which was at the time a blessing for the Freemasons.
Memoirs
My Years as a Student of History, 1950 – 55
Vladislav Moulis
The author devotes this chapter of his memoirs-in-the-works to the years when he was a student at Charles University in 1950- 55. After a description of the atmosphere (including the ideological campaign) at the university following the Communist takeover in February 1948, he acquaints the reader with lectures in the field of history and the teachers giving them. He names colleagues and describes their future lives. He returns to his academic interests at the time and the literature he read. He then recalls the international situation at the beginning of the 1950s and the internal political events of the days, particularly the trial of Rudolf Slánský and those associated with him. He adds his own present views (also of himself) and sees the years 1953- 54 as having been important for his own maturing. In conclusion he describes the last year of his studies, his completing his dissertation (on Czechoslovak recognition of the Soviet Union and the signing of the treaty of alliance in the mid-1930s), and beginning his first job (in the Slavonic Library, Prague).
Reviews
A Feeble Start to a Project with Potential:
How Will It Be End?
Jan Křen
Kárník, Zdeněk and Kopeček, Michal (eds). Bolševismus, komunismus a radikální socialismus v Československu, vol. 1: Prague: ÚSD AV ČR and Dokořán, 2003, 317 pp.; vol. 2: Prague: ÚSD AV ČR and Dokořán, 2004, 363 pp.
The project `The Czechoslovak Communist Party and Radical Socialism in Czechoslovakia’, which has so far resulted in the two volumes of essays under review, constitutes, according to the reviewer, a breakthrough, because the history of the local Communist movement is a neglected topic of historical research. He has ambivalent feelings about the two volumes, however. Their strength, he argues, lies in the distinction they generally make between radical socialism and Communism as the main lines of research, as well as the variety of genres and the thoroughly high level of the contributions, particularly those by the young historians. Their weakness, however, lies in the fact, he maintains, that the leaders of the project have not attempted an inventory of previous research, not sought to present an overview of the topic, and have failed to provide a clear conceptual keystone that would have prevented the topic from being so diffuse.
The Political Memory of Communism
Marie Černá
Mayer, Françoise. Les Tchčques et leur communisme: Mémoire et identité politiques. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2004, 304 pp.
The reviewer describes the book under review as a many-layered, inspired work, in which the author, a French historian, examines how the memories of Communism were formed in various interest groups of Czech society after 1989 and how they shared in shaping their socio-political identity. Her actual topic is an analysis of the discourse of the `politics’ of memory, with an emphasis on disputes about its legislative framework, and, at the next level, an interpretation of important factors of Czechoslovak political history in the 1990s. In her individual chapters the author focuses on former dissidents, Communists and heirs of the CPCz, former `Normalizers’, political prisoners, agents, collaborators of the secret police, and historians.
Cultural Politics in General and in Particular
Petr Šámal
Knapík, Jiří. Únor a kultura: Sovětizace české kultury 1948 – 1950. Prague: Libri, 2004, 359 pp.
The reviewer maintains that Knapík’s book constitutes the most complete charting out of Czechoslovak policy on the arts in the years the totalitarian régime was being formed. Diverse sources, thoughtful interpretation, and sober judgment have enabled Knapík convincingly to describe events in the arts and the emerging State mechanisms to control them, and to reconstruct the establishment of their institutional framework. The period is usefully divided into four stages with a description of their determining features, an appraisal of the power dimension of the conflict between two centres (the Ministry of Information, led by Václav Kopecký, and the Cultural-Propaganda Department of the CPCz Central Committee, led by Gustav Bareš) seeking to control policy in the arts after the Communist takeover 1948, and a discussion of the context of the ideological campaign against some artists.
A Useful Reference Book on the History of the Social Democrats
Zdeněk Kárník
Tomeš, Josef (ed.). Průkopníci a pokračovatelé: Osobnosti v dějinách české sociální demokracie 1878- 2003. With Jiří Malínský, Karel Zemek, and the Historical Commission of the Czechoslovak Social Democrat Party. Prague: Demos and Česká strana sociálnědemokratická, 2004, 197 pp.
Apart from some minor faults the reviewer praises the professional approach and high-quality editing of this factual, well-balanced dictionary. In addition to the biographical core containing about 500 entries, the dictionary includes an introduction, entries on topics related to the Social Democrats, and nine highly informative appendixes.
In Search of the Keys to the Period of the `Phoney Peace’
Jiří Křesťan
Pynsent, Robert B. (ed.). The Phoney Peace: Power and Culture in Central Europe 1945 – 49. London: The School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, 2000, 536 pp.
The work under review is a volume of articles based on papers from a conference that took place in London at Easter, 1988. Edited by Robert B. Pynsent, Professor of Czech and Slovak literature at University College London, it is a volume, the reviewer believes, which should not be ignored by any person seriously interested in central Europe from the end of the Second World War to the formation of the Soviet bloc. The concept of `culture’ is understood here in the widest possible sense, and the contributions cover a wide range of topics, considering phenomena in the arts, cultural politics, foreign policy, and economics. Although they do not constitute an internally coherent whole, they do offer in sum a number of remarkable analyses and impetuses to further research.
How Victims of the Stalin Régime were Rehabilitated
Michal Reiman
Artizov, A. N., Sigachev, Y. V., Shevchuk, I. N., and Khlopov, V. G. (Eds). Reabilitatsiya: Kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TSK KPSS i drugiye materialy, vol. 1: Mart 1953 – fevral 1956; vol. 2: Fevral 1956 – nachalo 80-kh godov. (Rossiya XX vek.) Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond `Demokratiya’, 2000 and 2003, 503 and 959 pp.
This two-volume publication contains more than 400 documents on the exoneration of victims of Soviet political repression and its consequences, under the Soviet government led by Nikita S. Khrushchev. The reviewer summarizes the key questions of this complicated process, which lasted from Stalin’s death to Brezhnev’s coming to power, after which rehabilitation was more or less stopped. He reproaches the editors, however, with having made a somewhat tendentious selection of documents, in the sway of Khrushchev’s positive self-portrayal on the question of rehabilitation, though the work as a whole, he argues, adds considerably to our knowledge of the dismantling the Stalinist system in the USSR.
Russian Émigrés in Czechoslovakia: A View from Elsewhere
Miluša Bubeníková
Chinyaeva, Elena. Russians outside Russia: The Émigré Community in Czechoslovakia 1918 – 1938. Munch: Oldenbourg, 2001, 280 pp.
The reviewer believes that this work, the first English-language monograph on the topic, does not quite meet our expectations. Its structure and the depth of the analysis, she argues, suffer from unevenness. Moreover, some activity of the Russian émigrés (for example, their work in academia) is insufficiently considered here. The overall picture of the Russian émigré community in Czechoslovak between the wars, its emergence, composition, influences shaping it from within, and relations with the Czech milieu, the attitudes of Czechoslovak officials, as well as the international context of refugees and immigration in the Europe, is, nonetheless, presented, and the author has used sources unknown in the Czech Republic (for example, the record groups of the League of Nations). She considers the most striking fruit of Russian-émigré intellectual activity to be the theory of Eurasian-ness, which they developed mainly in Paris and Prague.
The Onerous Legacy of the Annales School:
French Oral History in the Service of the State Bureaucracy
Doubravka Olšáková
Descamps, Florence. L’Historien, l’archiviste et le magnétophone: De la constitution de la source orale ŕ son exploitation. Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financičre de la France, 2001, 864 pp.
By international standards this monumental work, written by a French historian, belongs among the basic works on oral history. In terms of methodological thoroughness it surpasses American reference books and it contains a useful interpretation of the history of the field. Nevertheless it ignores several important conceptual questions. The reviewer judges the book against the background of the complicated process of establishing oral history in French historiography in the twentieth century. What was decisive in this sense was its relationship with the Annales School, which in its research `appropriated’ the special topics which oral history usually distinguishes itself by (for example, the history of the `ordinary man’ and of social minorities), and which occupied key positions in the institutions of French historiography. Histoire orale had to define itself in this small space and this led to its orientation towards research of institutional memory, its affinity with the political rightwing, and defining itself in contrast to American oral history. The book under review fulfils these tasks this very well.
`The Culture of Terrorism’:
Chomsky’s View of US Politics
Vlastimil Hála
Chomsky, Noam. 11. 9. Prague: Nakladatelství Mezera, 2003, 121 pp. Translated from the English by Natálie Nerandžičová.
The work under review is the Czech translation of Chomsky’s 9–11 (New York, 2001). The volume comprises interviews with Chomsky, the American linguist-philosopher, which he provided to various mass media after the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. In the interviews he posits the basic thesis that Islamic terror is to a certain extent the product of US `state terrorism’ he presents a purely humanitarian (pacifistic) solution of conflicts in contrast to the expediential conception of US politics. Although Chomsky’s critical sallies are, in the reviewer’s opinion, occasionally thought provoking, his greatest weakness lies in the absence of practicable alternatives.
Chronicle
Was the War the Wehrmacht Waged in Eastern Europe Really Only Slightly Dirty?
Jiří Pešek
The author reports on a conference in Hamburg, in March 2004, which arose out of a debate about the controversial exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe (`Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944′) and was devoted to this topic. He also mentions the change in `mood’ in German historiography, which has partly shifted attention from an interpretation of German crimes to an interpretation of German victims of the war.
Who Is Entitled to Explain History?
Remarks on a Conference about the Red Army Faction
Šárka Daňková
In connection with a conference that took place in Arnoldshain, Hessen, in September 2004, the author consider the question of whether the Red Army Faction terrorist organization is present in the German historical consciousness and, if so, how.
