No. IV.
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Michal Reiman
Conflicts and Rivalry in the Soviet Leadership after World War II:
Soviet History in Recent Publications by Russian Authors
Jiří Pernes
Czechoslovak in 1956:
Concerning the History of De-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia
Reviews
Jiří Suk
The Life of Václav Havel in Fifty-five Vignettes by the British Political Scientist John Keane
Alexej Kusák
Central Europe in the 1990s:
Law and Culture in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland
Jan Měchýř
Another Report on the So-called ‘Beneš Decrees’
Jan Měchýř
Useful Information about Trade Unions and Other Topics in the Czech Republic
Geoffrey Swain
Could the World Have Been Spared Communism?
A New Work on the Alternative Represented by the Conflict between the Czechoslovak Legionnaires and the Bolsheviks in 1918
Horizon
Hans Lemberg
Frontiers and Minorities in Eastern Europe:
Their Genesis and Correlations
Annotations
Bibliography on Contemporary History
Articles from Western scholarly journals and edited volumes published in 1998–2000
Archive of Contemporary History
Jan Pelikán
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia:
Five Documents on the Events of August 1968
Summaries
Soviet History in Recent Publications by Russian Authors
Michal Reiman
The author bases his article on many works of literature recently published on the topic. This is not, however, merely a review essay. It also provides a picture of events at the top-level of the Soviet leadership as they appear from these new works. On a number of points this picture is fundamentally different from the usual descriptions of the topic.
The conflicts in the Soviet leadership after World War II, according to the author, grew out of the power ambitions of its members. But because they took place against the background of complicated international politics and the situation at home, they were also influenced by material and ideological factors. The main actors in these conflicts were not rival groups of Stalin’s potential successors. Rather, it was Stalin who initiated the changes in personnel and the politically motivated secret-police terror. The relationship between him and other members of the Soviet leadership, and, above all, the members of the middle generation, was marked by great differences in experience, influence, and authority and also the nature and symbolism of the régime, which placed a single highly lauded leader at its head. One particular source of continuous tension consisted in the relations between Stalin and Molotov. Since Stalin saw him as his potential rival and successor, he tried to squeeze him out of key positions and even to eliminate him from politics altogether.
The relations between Stalin and the top members of the middle generation of the Party experienced a serious rift just after World War II. That was largely the result of Stalin’s support of Zhdanov and his political circle; that support had made possible the grouping of the apparat of the ‘Russian party’, which was trying to achieve dominance in the leadership. Consequently, a successor leadership began to form ‘behind Stalin’s back’; its main figures were Molotov and Zhdanov. Stalin reacted by undermining Molotov’s power position and construing what is known as the ‘Leningrad Affair’, in which he had a number of important representatives of the middle generation executed. He thereby weakened and destablized the Soviet leadership and caused a lasting trauma in the Soviet apparat class. After originally being outside the core of the successor group, the Malenkov-Beria duo made their way to the fore. These two men had great organizational and management experience but were lacking a broader base among the apparatchiks and the public. Not one of them, though for different reasons, had the prerequisites to become the leading figure in the Soviet Union. They conformed to Stalin’s policy, which was marked by advanced geriatric schizophrenia and dementia, yet developed a set of critical views, which made possible a transition to positive solutions and changes in foreign and domestic policy.
The conflict between Stalin and the middle generation of the Party, argues the author, came to a head at the 19th Congress of the CPSU in October 1952 and was caused by Stalin’s attempt to change the composition of the Soviet political leadership; further escalation was eventually marked by the antisemitic ‘doctors affair’, which Stalin evidently wanted to use to bring about changes in the leadership. The resistance to Stalin’s plans came mainly from Beria and Malenkov, who took power after Stalin’s death, and introduced a set of measures that constituted the beginning of de-Stalinization. Both men were ‘outsiders’ to the Soviet political élite but they were not the principal ‘baddies’. While they bore clear responsibility for the crimes of the Stalin régime, that was essentially the same responsibility as held by other members of the middle generation of the leadership – they had carried out the crimes, but had not been the originators of them. The author believes that complicity for the Stalin-era crimes did not prevent Beria and Malenkov, in their ‘hundred days’ between March and June 1953, from influencing post-Stalinist Soviet politics profoundly and for years to come. The doing away with the ‘cult of the personality’, the breaking up of the Stalinist system of mass repression, the introduction of legal and political rehabilitation, steps for a basic détente between East and West, the re-orientation of the economy towards satisfaction of consumer wants of the population, the suppression of attempts by Russians for dominance in the Soviet Union, and proposals for the relaxation of tensions between the Soviet Union and its satellites – all that, though often only in nascent form, comes from the intellectual arsenal of Beria and Malenkov and was the starting point for Khrushchev’s policy. Good and evil are not divided by a distinct line in history; in totalitarian régimes their relationship is distorted by the nature of the system, its ideology, and mentality. When studying contemporary history, the author concludes, there is no greater offence than to adopt tendentious ideological and political constructs of the time under examination.
Czechoslovak in 1956:
Concerning the History of De-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia
Jiří Pernes
Political relaxation in the Soviet Union and certain other countries of the Soviet bloc, which began immediately after Stalin’s death, appeared more markedly in 1956, after the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Some members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) were increasingly demanding that the Party abandon the dogmatic legacy of Stalin. More than two hundred basic organizations of the CPCz came forth with a demand for an extraordinary Party congress where a new ‘general line for the building of socialism’ could be laid down. The CPCz leadership balked at the demand, fearing an extraordinary congress where rank-and-file Party members could use complex procedure to interfere with the composition of the Party leadership and sweep it from office. Consequently, instead of an extraordinary congress they successfully pushed for a state-wide CPCz conference of select members of the District Committees of the Party. These members had no interest in fundamental change, and only confirmed the mandate of the existing Party leadership and expressed support for the existing political course. They did, however, pay lip-service to condemning the ‘mistakes and errors’ of the preceding period, and rejected the ‘cult of Stalin’. Alexej Čepička, a CPCz Politburo member and Minister of National Defence, became the sacrificial lamb, and was consequently stripped of all his Party and state functions in April 1956.
Part of society did not agree with this sort of approach, and said as much at the second Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in April 1956 and in spontaneous student demonstrations during the ‘majáles’ festivities in various places throughout Czechoslovakia in April and May. In both cases demands were made for increased democratization of public life and for individual freedom. The state leadership tried to calm the stormy situation with a number of extraordinary measures, particularly in the social sphere, which sought to achieve an increased standard of living for the whole population. Retail prices were twice reduced, some categories of employees were given wage increases, and new legislation was passed guaranteeing other important advantages in the social sphere.
The situation in Czechoslovakia was also influenced by developments in neighbouring countries, particularly in Poland and Hungary. Though first accepted with evident sympathy, the Hungarian anti-Communist revolution in October and November 1956, which involved much violence, put a damper on the mood for reform among more active groups of Czechoslovak society, particularly among the intellectuals, students, and some rank-and-file members of the CPCz. Many of those who had in the spring of 1956 called for political change, changed their position in the autumn of that year, under the influence of Hungarian events, and were now expressing support for the CPCz leadership. That circumstance, together with extraordinary measures, eventually calmed the situation in Czechoslovakia and buttressed the position of the Party. In the following years those who had most actively tried to achieve political reform, were persecuted.
The Life of Václav Havel in Fifty-five Vignettes by the British Political Scientist John Keane
Jiří Suk
John Keane, Václav Havel: Politická tragedie v šesti dějstvích. Trans. from the English by Jiří Vaněk. Prague: Volvox Globator, 1999, 432 pp.
The review has two parts. The first is a critical assessment of the biography, the second adds factual information concerning the December 1989 agreement between Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček on who would get which of the two top-level state offices. Keane’s large book on the life of the Czech writer, dissident, and politician Václav Havel is a text that, with its controversial content, virtually begs for a critical reaction. The reviewer argues that various shortcomings in the book dominate some the contributions Keane’s research and interpretations make to our understanding of Havel. These shortcomings are in the areas of historical fact, historical critique, and presentation. The description of Havel’s life up to the mid-1980s is a true contribution and is at times inspirational (one thinks in particular of where Keane discusses Havel’s entry into literary and public life). The case is quite the opposite, however, in the passages dedicated to Havel’s activity before the collapse of the Communist régime, in the period of what is known as the ‘Velvet Revolution’, and, later, Havel’s terms in office as President. In these cases Keane abandons critical work with primary sources and neglects the facts, expresses events imprecisely, and sometimes severely misinterprets events. Above all Keane has failed to emphasize what is essential about Havel’s activity in the 1980s; in the last two chapters Keane falls victim to his a priori scheme of a President obsessed with power (and in several places it would even be fair to say that the author’s ability to criticize was not at all in evidence.) In general one would be right in saying that Keane has tried to create an effective and comprehensive picture of Havel’s life as a ‘tragedy’ in the dramatic sense of the word (including his epilogue of the fictive death of the hero) at the expense of undertaking the less rewarding, minute work that such fresh material demands. A separate matter for review is the language Keane uses in his attempt to appeal to readers not educated in history or political science; in many places the result is banal, elsewhere it is merely pompous.
Central Europe in the 1990s:
Law and Culture in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland
Alexej Kusák
Wolfgang Eichwede (ed.), Recht und Kultur in Ostmitteleuropa: Analysen zur Kultur und Gesellschaft im östlichen Europa, vol. 8. Bremen: Edition Temmen (Forschungstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen), 1999, 506 pp.
Eight authors, who were brought together by the Bremen University Centre for Research on Eastern Europe, recapitulate the development of culture and law in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia in the 1990s. The individual contributions are concerned with the institutional changes and also the changes in the consciousness of the populations of these countries. Some of the articles include statistics or analysis of the culture and legal cases in the individual countries. The reviewer praises the contributions mainly by authors living in the countries about whose events they are able to write with great background knowledge, particularly knowledge of many of the subtleties, but he considers the whole large volume to be an important work that ought to be read by everybody interested in recent cultural and political developments in central Europe.
Another Report on the So-called ‘Beneš Decrees’
Jan Měchýř
Jindřich Dejmek, Jan Kuklík, and Jan Němeček, Kauza: tzv. Benešovy dekrety: Historické kořeny a souvislosti. (Tři české hlasy v diskusi), Prague: Institute of History, Academy of Sciences, 1999, 104 pp.
The volume comprises five articles by three authors, which are supplemented with a section of documents. The articles discuss the historical roots of the ‘Sudeten German problem’ in the Bohemian Lands, German policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech resistance, disputes over the validity of the Munich Agreement, relations between Czechoslovakia (or the Bohemian Lands) and the German-speaking countries, and does so against the background of the Sudeten-German Question. The reviewer pays particular attention to the fifth article, in which Kuklík objectively, in a matter-of-fact way analyzes the historical and legal context of what are often called the ‘Beneš decrees’, legislation that continues to evoke polemics from historians and especially political commentators.
Useful Information about Trade Unions and Other Topics in the Czech Republic
Jan Měchýř
Jana Kašparová and Jaroslav Jarkovský (eds), Cesty, křižovatky, střety nových odborů: 10 let hájíme práva a zájmy lidí práce, Prague: ČMKOS and Sondy, 2000, 151 pp. and 35 photographs.
Though the volume under review was published by the Confederation of Bohemian and Moravian Trade Unions in collaboration with the weekly newspaper Sondy, it is not a piece of propaganda. Rather it is a factual and serious contribution to the history of Czechoslovak trade unions and Czech society after the fall of the Communist régime. Current and former employees of the Confederation contribute here to describe, without emotion, the birth and subsequent work of the most important central trade-union organization in the country. Some of the chapters, the reviewer feels, could have been included in a text book on contemporary history, others constitute a source of great importance.
Could the World Have Been Spared Communism?
A New Work on the Alternative Represented by the Conflict between the Czechoslovak Legionnaires and the Bolsheviks in 1918
Geoffrey Swain
Victor M. Fic, The Rise of a Constitutional Alternative to Soviet Rule in 1918: Provisional Governments of Siberia and All-Russia. Their Quest for Allied Intervention. Boulder CO.: East European Monographs, 1998, 481 pp.
This work represents the culmination of twenty years of research by Victor M. Fic for the ‘Czechoslovakia and the Russian Question, 1914–18’ project, for which Fic has already published three books. The reviewer emphasizes Fic’s depiction of the history of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires in Russia in the international context and their conflict with the Bolsheviks, Fic’s description of the creation of constitutional alternatives to the revolutionary régime in 1918, and, above all, his novel interpretation of the war plans of the USA in connection with considerations of American support for the anti-Bolshevik intervention in Russia. If Wilson’s resistance to the Bolshevik revolution had been surmounted, Fic argues, the revolution would have been but an episode in the history of the twentieth century.
Frontiers and Minorities in Eastern Europe:
Their Genesis and Correlations
Hans Lemberg
The article, by a professor of modern history at Marburg, was developed from his lectures during the Tagung zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, held in Marburg in 1995, and was first published in German in Hans Lemberg (ed.), Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Aktuelle Forschungsproblem. Marburg: Herder Institute, 2000.
The author is concerned here with changes in the perception and function of borders in relation to the forms of political sovereignty and its legitimization and also the formation of ethnic minorities. He places particular emphasis on the dramatic developments in central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. According to the author no borders or even ethnic minorities in today’s sense of those two terms existed in the Middle Ages. Minorities were born together with the way the modern nation-states were formed and how the social relations in them (founded on traditional privileges) were replaced with the abstract principle of democratic equality before the law and the principle, derived from that, of government by the majority. In justifying the geographical boundaries of political formations during the Enlightenment, arguments about natural rights dominated over claims based on historical rights. The view of Montesquieu was put forth that every state has its limites naturelles, mainly rivers and mountain ranges, which often corresponded to the ethnic composition of the population and to actual possibilities for defending these frontiers. With the awakening nationalism in the nineteenth century a number of utopian national maps were drawn up on this basis, and were presented as the right of one nation or another to its ‘native’ land. From there it was not far, the author argues, to the idea of the nation-state and ultimately the implementation of the nation-state under the slogan ‘ein Volk, ein Reich’, just to mention one of many examples.
The nation-state idea experienced an enormous boom after the Great War, particularly in the form of the principle of the ‘self-determination of nations’, which was being promoted by the American President Woodrow Wilson and also by Lenin. As early as 1915 the Swiss anthropologist Georges Montandon formulated the terrifyingly prophetic thesis that a condition for lasting peace comprises ‘natural’ borders of nation-states, fixed by the ‘mass resettlement’ of members of other nations beyond them. The principle of ethnic homogenization of a state was first applied shortly after the war in the population transfers between Greece and Turkey. After the failure to achieve an ethnic synthesis or at least co-existence within the countries of central and Eastern Europe, a number of forms of homogenization developed before the middle of the century, which are now described with terms such as ‘transfer’ (odsun), ‘expulsion’ (vysídlení), ‘Home in the Reich’ (heim ins Reich), or ‘ethnic cleansing’.
In another analysis the author traces these means of solving ethnic problems in connection with the break-down of the Versailles system, the propaganda and military aggression of the Great German Reich, and the plans of the anti-Hitler coalition for the post-war organization of Europe. Though other factors were at work in the processes the author is examining, the red thread running through all of them is the idea of the beneficial nature of matching territorial and ethnic frontiers to guarantee the solution of political conflicts. This is evident, for example, in the wartime records of the British Foreign Office.
After the war there was a gradual disillusion with this means of solving ethnic problems. Nevertheless the international community chose it again in the 1990s in an attempt to end the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the basis of the Dayton Accords. In Kosovo several years later it set great store by the attempt to maintain ethnic pluralism on the basis of tolerance imposed by an international protectorate. Whether this or that approach will provide a lasting satisfactory solution has yet to be seen. The vision of a Europe without frontiers has so far become a reality only in part of the Continent; elsewhere, frontiers are a painful reality, the author adds. He concludes by asking whether it would not be better to return to the international policy of protecting minorities as is enshrined in the principles of the United Nations, on the condition, however, that a precise legal framework is provided together with the internationally declared will to apply this protection consistently.
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia:
Five Documents on the Events of August 1968
Jan Pelikán
This volume includes documents from the Yugoslav Archive, Belgrade (record group 507-CK SKJ). The documents reflect the policy of the Yugoslav leadership immediately after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and some of the international contexts of this event. They originated in the few days between 21 August and 2 September 1968. The selection contains a substantial part of President Tito’s speeches, which he made behind closed doors at meetings of the top-level state organs. In them the Yugoslav leader comments on current events, but also returns to the recent past, particularly to his talks in Moscow in April 1968. The volume also contains a record of talks between Tito and the Soviet Ambassador to Belgrade, Ivan Benediktov, and part of confidential information about a meeting between Tito and Ceauşescu on 24 August 1968.
Tito welcomed the developments in Czechoslovakia, which began in January 1968. The main reason was that they aimed to weaken Soviet dominance in the East bloc. The reform efforts, he believed, were the culmination of the course begun after the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Tito was clearly taken by surprise by the Soviet occupation. Neither immediately after the Warsaw Pact intervention nor in the following days did Belgrade attempt to provide Czechoslovakia with real help. Tito and his colleagues did not particularly regret that reform there had been halted. They were interested in the international aspects of the military intervention and, in particular, the impact that the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia could have for the security and stability of Yugoslavia.
Alexej Kusák (1929) took a degree in journalism and Czech at Charles University and did postgraduate work in aesthetics and art history. Till 1968 he worked for a number of arts and culture journals, and in 1969 became Senior Researcher at Munich and Saarbrücken. He has also worked with Radio Free Europe and was curator of galleries in Düsseldorf and Hamburg. Among his recent work is Kultura a politika v Československu 1945–1956 (Prague, 1998).
Hans Lemberg (1933) is Professor of East European history at Philipps University, Marburg. From 1997 till the present he has been Chairman of the German Section of the Czech-German Commission of Historians. He is concerned with the history of the relations between Germany and the nations of Eastern Europe and the history of the Bohemian Lands and Czechoslovakia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A festschrift of his studies in Czech translation was recently published to mark his sixty-fifth birthday – Porozumění: Češi – Němci – východní Evropa (Prague, 1999).
Jan Měchýř (1930) is Docent of History in the Institute of Economic and Social History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. His chief area of research is Czechoslovakia after World War II. His most recent work is on the fall of the Czechoslovak Communist régime, Velký převrat či snad revoluce sametová (Prague, 1999).
Jan Pelikán (1959) is a Researcher in the Institute of World History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He specializes in the modern history of the Balkans, particularly the Yugoslav area. He is the author of Dějiny jihoslovanských zemí (Prague, 1998) and Národnostní otázka ve Svazové republice Jugoslávie: Geneze – vývoj – perspektivy (Prague, 1997).
Jiří Pernes (1948) is a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, where he is concerned mainly with the crisis of the Communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1953–7. His many publications on nineteenth and twentieth century Czech and European history include Habsburkové bez trůnu (Prague, 1995) and Až na dno zrady: Emanuel Moravec (Prague, 1997).
Michal Reiman (1930) is emeritus Professor Political Science and Modern East European History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is now in the Institute of International Studies, at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. His area is world history and the history of the Soviet Union. His most recent publication is O komunistickém totalitarismu a o tom, co s ním souvisí (Prague, 2000).
Geoffrey Swain (1950) is Professor of History at the University of West England, Bristol. His main area of interest is Russia and Eastern Europe, the Russian Revolution, and Soviet-Yugoslav relations during WW II. He is currently working on Latvian history in the period 1940–7. His recent publications include Eastern Europe since 1945 (1992; 2nd edition 1998) and The Origins of the Russian Civil War (1996).
Jiří Suk (1966) is a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Contemporary, Prague. He read history and archival sciences at Charles University and is now in charge of the Documentation Department in the Institute. His professional interests include Czechoslovak developments in the years 1969–89.
