No. IV.
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Vilém Prečan
Handing over the Reins
Articles
Soňa Szomolányi
November ‘89:
Opening the Way for the Transition and Its Actors in Slovakia
Jiří Hoppe
From Distrust to Alliance and Back:
Czechoslovak-Romanian Relations, 1967–70
Jiří Maňák
The Czechoslovak Communist Party:
Changes in the Number of Members and Social Composition, 1948–68
František Křížek
The Beginnings of Television Broadcasting in Czechoslovakia
Essay
Jan Křen
An Interpretation of National, Central European, and European Histories:
More Questions Than Answers
Materials
Valentina V. Maryina
Soviet-Czechoslovak Relations, 1938–41, in the Diary of Ivan M. Maisky
Discussion
Leonid Gibiansky
Documents on Zorin’s Prague Mission in February 1948:
Towards an Interpretation of Soviet Sources Related to the Sovietization of Eastern Europe
Milan Hauner
Treason, Sovietization, or an Historical Oversight?
A Critique of Two Documents on Czechoslovak-Soviet Relations in 1938
Horizon
Timothy Garton Ash
Ten Years After
Reviews
Hans Mommsen
A Reluctant Loyalty:
Workers under the Swastika
Zdeněk Kárník
A Sticking Plaster for a Sore Spot in Czech History
Documents
Vilém Prečan
Bedřich Loewenstein’s ‘A Settling of Accounts’ from 1948:
A Primary Source on the History of Czech Historiography
Looking Back Fifty Years Later (Bedřich Loewenstein)
A Settling of Accounts:
An Analysis of the Political Situation at Home
(Bedřich Loewenstein)
Jaroslav Bouček
Documents on the Criminal Proceedings against Jan Slavík in 1948
Chronicle
Annotations
Bibliography of Contemporary History
The Road to Democracy in the Countries of the Former Soviet Bloc:
A Selection of Czech and Other Publications from 1998–9
Summaries
Opening the Way for the Transition and Its Actors in Slovakia
Soňa Szomolányi
This study aims to identify the nature of events in November 1989 from a comparative point of view, at two levels. First, it identifies the way the path was opened for a change in régimes in the former Czechoslovakia in comparison with transitions elsewhere, in particular in the neighbouring countries of central Europe. Second, it compares the ‘Czechoslovak’ transition with the transition in Slovakia.
Unlike in Poland and Hungary, Czechoslovakia did not experience a typical negotiated transition; though elements of ‘roundtable’ talks were present in Prague, their content and political context were substantially different. The author takes issue therefore with scholars of comparative politics who, like Huntington, classify the changes in Czechoslovakia and, later, in the Czech Republic, as a negotiated type of transition. Her study is an attempt to draw a finer distinction between regions, and she defines the Czechoslovak type as a ‘transition by collapse’, namely the collapse of the old régime, negotiations between moderate representatives of the old régime and a non-governmental opposition, but only after the application of pressure by a mobilized public.
Tens year after, it turns out that wherever there occurred a negotiated transition preceded by a phase of liberalization of the old system of power and wherever national élites were reconciled, namely in Poland and Hungary, there are today fewer problems with political stability and the countries are proceeding more successfully with the transformation of society. The author demonstrates that the absence of a phase of liberalization in the pre-transition period also affects development in the period of consolidation of democracy.
The differences in the way the transition took place in Slovakia have their roots in the pre-transition period. In short, the opposition in Slovakia, though only in the form of civil groups protesting against the Communist régime, was the weakest among the countries of central Europe and less visible. Furthermore, the opposition was seriously fragmented into numerous grouplets of non-conformist individuals, so-called ‘islands of positive deviation’. The régime collapsed before these ‘islands’ managed to link up and form a common political platform of opposition. They linked up only in consequence of the brutal police intervention in Prague on 17 November 1989 as a protest against violence.
In terms of people and organization the sources of the formation of the liberal democratic civil movement The Public Against Violence and the sources of the new non-Communist élite were to be found in the environmentalist movement to an extent not seen in the neighbouring countries. In the absence of a more influential group of dissidents, the environmentalists in Slovakia were its functional equivalent. The environmentalists were the only all-Slovak organization that really ignored the leading role of the Party. Environmentalism, however, also had an impact on the profile of The Public Against Violence, in that its character was influenced by the persistence of elements of non-governmental organizations and social movements at the expense of the formation of a functional political organization fully oriented to political activity and taking power. That, too, enabled the representatives of the old élite to participate more in the process of changing the ruling élite.
The political careers of some leading politicians, so-called ‘transition Communists’ are evidence that in Slovakia an evolutionary kind of change predominated. The identified continuity of personnel in the élites indicates that in the Slovak case the transition began, like in Prague, with the collapse of the old régime, but elements of the kind of ‘negotiated’ transition among moderate representatives of the old and new élites were more clearly present in it. A further reason is that the upcoming élite lacked sufficient capacity for taking power to the extent they had in Prague.
The presence of former nomenklatura cadres at the upper and top level of the political hierarchy (for instance, Rudolf Schuster, J. Migaš, and Milan Čič) even ten years after the changes, however, is not a decisive factor in developments in Slovakia. What is decisive is that these transition Communists are already operating in a fundamentally changed institutional framework, and that in view of the main political splintering between nationalist-populist and democratic parties they are not part of the nationalist-populist bloc. On the contrary, they have participated in the defence of democratic principles against the authoritative tendencies of the third Mečiar government.
The identified continuity of persons in the political élite on the whole testifies to two signs of the last change of political régime. November 1989 also opened the way to transition from the old régime, which, unlike the other revolutions in Slovak history, did not bring with it a revolutionary change of élites. It also testifies to the lack of preparedness of the subsequent, non-Communist élite when taking power. This part of the political spectrum in Slovakia continues to this day to have problems with that.
From Distrust to Alliance and Back:
Czechoslovak-Romanian Relations, 1967-70
Jiří Hoppe
Official relations between two Soviet satellites, Czechoslovakia and Romania, followed a sort of sinusoid in the years 1967-70. In mid-1967 both sides still looked on their mutual relations with a marked degree of reserve. In the course of 1968, however, this state of affairs changed fundamentally and when the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu visited Prague in August 1968 (before the Warsaw Pact intervention), crowds of Czechoslovaks welcomed him with shouts of "Long live Romania!". After the intervention and with the implementation of the Czechoslovak Communist policies of "Normalization" mutual relations again settled at the point from which they had started before the Prague Spring.
The reasons that led to the sudden about-faces in Czechoslovak-Romanian relations must be sought on both sides. At least from the point when the Central Committee of the Romanian Worker’s Party passed the resolution known as the "April Declaration" in 1964, Romania was perceived as the enfant terrible of the Soviet bloc. Though a member of the Warsaw Pact, Romania, like Yugoslavia, Albania, and China, refused to recognize Moscow as the centre of international Communism. Ceausescu’s advent to power in the spring of 1965 meant an intensification of this trend, and was manifested mainly with a considerable offensive in Romanian foreign policy towards the West and an attempt to build a bridge between the antagonistic blocs. Romania, however, remained a model Soviet-type dictatorship; foreign diplomats posted in Bucharest called the Romanian regime "extraordinarily rigid". This peculiar schizophrenia led to the fact that Romania, in 1968, thanks to Nicolae Ceausescu, very actively and bravely intervened internationally in favour of Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak reform politicians at first rejected all contacts, in order not to complicate further already tense relations with Moscow. But it turned out, in mid-July 1968, that Romania was the only state in the East bloc willing (together with Yugoslavia) to stand up to Soviet diplomatic pressures. As a result, Czechoslovak pro-reform politicians decided to invite Ceausescu to Prague, in order to acknowledge his favourable approach and to demonstrate the close, though somewhat forced, alliance between the two states. Owing to his active support of the Prague Spring, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party earned the admiration of the democratic world and also the hate of the CPSU Politburo. It is no surprise therefore that when the first Soviet tanks began to roll over the Czechoslovak borders on the night of 20-21 August 1968, speculation (ultimately unconfirmed) was immediately voiced concerning the possibility of a similar fate for Romania.
As a logical consequence of the Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia, all social and political processes of the Prague Spring were halted, and with that came a gradual cooling of Czechoslovak-Romanian relations. Romania was visited by US President Richard Nixon, in 1969, so that he could, among other things, pay honour to that country for its position on the Soviet-led intervention in August 1968. Czechoslovakia, in the mean time, was once again quickly becoming just another insipid Soviet satellite.
The Czechoslovak Communist Party:
Changes in the Number of Members and Social Composition, 1948–68
Jiří Maňák
In the first decade of its monopoly on power, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz) went through considerable changes concerning the number of members and its composition. After the huge increase in membership in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Party stabilized essentially to the level it had before taking power. For most of this time one in five Czechoslovaks in the Bohemian Lands was a member of the CPCz, while in Slovakia the proportion was one in ten. Despite all efforts to compensate the decline in membership by winning over almost exclusively young people from the working class, the CPCz could not prevent its quick aging or the loss of its predominantly working-class character. In its social structure, the proportion of members of the intelligentsia was increasing, and was more apparent in the elected organs of functionaries than among members of the CPCz. The application of views based on class and politics in the selection of elected functionaries and workers in the Party apparat was manifested in a preference for Communists who had originally been employed as workers and with many years of Party membership. The most marked change in the twenty-year period under discussion was a marked improvement in the number of educated and highly trained persons among CPCz members and also among apparatchiks at all levels, where there was a positive correlation between the increase in education and position in the Party hierarchy.
The increase in the level of education and qualifications of the rank-and-file Communists, functionaries, and apparatchiks accelerated in the 1960s, particularly among younger Communists and persons who had more recently become Party members, though among functionaries and apparatchiks this was partly the result of a group of middle-aged Communists and members who had been in the Party longer.
The Beginnings of Television Broadcasting in Czechoslovakia
František Křížek
This article is concerned with the post-WW II history of television technology in Czechoslovakia from the first developments to the commencement of regular test broadcasts. First the author discusses the importance of the German company Fernseh, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which enabled Czechoslovak technicians the first contact with modern television technology, and describes the history of Fernseh till it became a war trophy of the Soviet Union. He then describes his own first work in this field – the presentation of the first Czechoslovak television facilities at the International Radio Exhibition, 1948, broadcasting from the 11th Sokol Meet, and other presentations at Prague Sample Fairs. An important role in ensuring the development of television broadcasting was played by Czechoslovak Radio, which tried to commence television broadcasting as part of the first Five Year Plan. The Czechoslovak Government, however, was opposed, and did not change its views till 1952. Afterwards, there were extensive developments in a number of companies and the first Czechoslovak television studio was built. The first regular test broadcasting began on 1 May 1953.
An Interpretation of National, Central European, and European Histories:
More Questions Than Answers
Jan Křen
This essay is conceived as a call for discussion. In its first section the author considers the attitudes and possibilities of historical interpretation with different pretensions to making a universally valid statement about reality. Though macro-historical conceptions were in many way thrown into doubt by the failure of the great historic projects and disrupted by the incursions of untraditional micro-historical approaches (socio-economic, anthropologic, semanticizing), that does not mean they should be buried as being unnecessary or detrimental straitjackets. Efforts at a synthesis cannot be abandoned by the historian, but they need to be injected with new life and made fertile with various methodological impetuses. Apart from historical individuals and singular aspects there remains the legitimate topic of the history of nations and states as well as the history of Europe. The first of them, however, can no longer ignore transnational and regional contexts; the second should look at the plurality of events taking place beyond the dominant centre and trends. The central link in the move from national history to European could be the history of macro-regions like central Europe.
In the second part of the article the author presents several global conceptions of historical development, investigates their ability as an instrument of interpretation, and the purpose of their mutual combination. The concept of the East-West polarity suffers, in the author’s judgement, from a number of shortcomings; in particular, it is rather incoherent and somewhat static. The centre-periphery model is more dynamic and enables a more differentiated view, but it also tempts one to dogmatism and does not, for instance, provide a guideline for the explanation of essential cultural phenomena. Marxist theory of structure and superstructure and the replacement of social classes may in its totality have turned out to be a cul de sac, but in some resects it inspired creative researchers to remarkable results. On the whole, however, the theory of modernization, open and far less burdened with normative statements, has proved to be more useful, and a productive concept of civil society has been developing.
In the third part the author considers the applicability of these schemes of interpretation to the key phenomena of the ‘age of extremes’: the First World War, the ascent and expansion of Fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevism, the mutual coalitions and clashes of democracy and various kinds of dictatorships from the 1920s through the first half of the 1940s, the Cold War, consolidation, de-totalitarization, and, ultimately, the collapse of the Soviet power bloc and its political system. The author states that in the space defined by extremist political régimes these concepts, to a certain extent, lose their validity; nevertheless they can in many senses complement one another. One of the new interpretive models was the theory of totalitarianism, which in its black-and-white counterpoising of two kinds of rule may not have been able to capture nuances, and after the defeat of Fascism lost its comparative force, but it contributed considerably to our understanding of the tragic historical turning points of the 20th century. In the post-WW II period, by contrast, the East-West model has experienced a boom. In essence the non-violent break-up of the Communist system in Europe raised new questions about a satisfactory framework of interpretation of this process, and, in the author’s opinion, the theory of civil society must, above all else, be taken into consideration.
Materials Soviet-Czechoslovak Relations, 1938-41, in the Diary of Ivan M. Maisky
Valentina V. Maryina
The author discusses commentary on Czechoslovakia, which is found in the office diary of the Soviet diplomat Ivan M. Maisky. The four-volume diary, which covers the years 1938-41, is deposited in the Foreign-Policy Archive of the Russian Federation. Maisky (1884-1975) worked as a Soviet plenipotentiary (1932-41) in Great Britain and then as Envoy there from 1941 to 1943. In 1938 he carefully observed events connected to the preparation of the Munich Agreement, and critically evaluated the policies of the Western powers. According to his diary entries he met several times in 1939 with members of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London. The diary, however, contains no entry about Czechoslovakia for the years 1940 and 1941, though it is known that he participated in talks with Beneš and Fierlinger. Though the diary is mainly a source relevant to the study of Soviet-British relations, it is also valuable for understanding Czechoslovak politics and the formation of Soviet-Czechoslovak relations at this time.
Discussion Documents on Zorin’s Prague Mission in February 1948:
Towards an Interpretation of Soviet Sources on the Sovietization of Eastern Europe
Leonid Gibiansky
The author takes up the thread from the discussion in Soudobé dějiny concerning the documents related to Zorin’s Prague mission which were discussed by Galina Murashko in Soudobé dějiny 2-3 (1998) with a commentary by the present author and Karel Kaplan. A letter from Murashko, which was then sent to the editors of Soudobé dějiny, was replied to by Vilém Prečan in Soudobé dějiny 1 (1999). In connection with this debate, Gibiansky emphasizes that an historian must, when examining newly declassified documents, take into consideration a number of factors, including the concrete circumstances and causes of the provenance of the documents, their purpose and meaning, as well as their authorship and the hierarchical level where they originated and according to whose ‘rules of the game’ they adhere to; the researcher must also compare a particular source with other documents and the actual events. Moreover, archive records on this period have only partly been made accessible. What researchers still lack in their work on the Sovietization of East European countries is, above all, material on decision-making by the Soviet political élite. It can then happen, for instance, that an American historian like Melvyn P. Leffler can identify prognoses compiled in 1943-5 by special commissions of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) of the USSR on the Post-War Organization of Europe and the World, which were then presented to the Soviet leadership to be judged, with the viewpoint of the Soviet power élite. Other very problematic sources are Stalin’s talks with foreign politicians; these statements often served as propaganda or camouflage concealing other aims. In interpreting these records one must consider who the Soviet side was negotiating with and what Soviet aims were. Soviet policy in Eastern Europe was oriented to ensure that the internal policy of these states was as Moscow desired it. Stalin’s statements about the ‘new democracy’, addressed, for instance, to the Poles, have been considered by some authors to be evidence of his conception of a national road to socialism, but these scholars have not sufficiently considered whom Stalin’s words were addressed to. His statements, in particular, always require thorough critical analysis.
Treason, Sovietization, or an Historical Oversight?
A Critique of Two Documents on Czechoslovak-Soviet Relations in 1938
Milan Hauner
The article is in two parts. The first consists of an analysis of two documents the author suspects of being forgeries. The second is a polemic with books and their authors, which have used the two forged documents as primary evidence that central Europe was imminently threatened in 1938 by Sovietization brought on the bayonets of the Red Army (in other words the now familiar view that Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe in 1944-45 had been envisaged as early as 1938). The authors in question are Ivan Pfaff, an émigré Czech historian, who recently published two books in which he uses the two suspect documents: Sovětská zrada 1938 (Prague, 1993) and Die Sowjetunion und die Verteidigung der Tschechoslowakei 1934-1938: Versuch der Revision einer Legende (Cologne,1996). The second author, Igor Lukeš, is an American historian of Czech origin, who (for reasons best known to himself) ignores the existence of the second document, and relies excessively on the first in his Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s (Oxford, 1996; also in Czech translation, Prague, 1999).
The first document under investigation is a Czech translation of Andrei A. Zhdanov’s fiery speech inciting the Czechoslovak working class to overthrow their bourgeois masters; the speech was allegedly given in Prague at a meeting of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee on 20 and 21 August 1938. The Zhdanov document has been known for years to a handful of historians (including Karel Kaplan and Michal Reiman) who formerly had privileged access to the Archives of the Communist Party Institute of History; they, however, have never bothered to question its authenticity. Even within the archival administration the document has a somewhat dodgy pedigree, having been shifted from one folder to another. The question of its authenticity should have been resolved long time ago.
If the elementary characteristics of place and time had been properly examined the document would not have survived even the first round of research. Apart from Zhdanov, three more witnesses are named in the document. Accompanying him to Prague in August 1938 on behalf of the Comintern were the members of its Executive Committee, Harry Pollitt (Secretary General of the Communist Party of Great Britain) and Marcel Cachin (a founding member of the French Communist Party and editor of L’Humanité).
Neither of them, however, was elsewhere ever reported to have been in Prague in August 1938, let alone in the company of Zhdanov. The third person, a translator with the frequently occurring name of Hájek, never surfaced. None of the CC members ever recalled this meeting; nor is there any other evidence of it, photographic or oral. Moreover, the Moscow dailies Pravda and Izvestiya carry a large photograph of Zhdanov among the Supreme Soviet delegates in the Kremlin, on the very day when he, or somebody else going by the same name, was supposed to be in Prague. As though the presence of Zhdanov were not evidence enough for his Sovietization thesis, Pfaff depicts the Comintern boss, Georgi Dimitrov, in Prague in mid-September; Dimitrov was allegedly there to subvert the students and workers in the streets. We know from Dimitrov’s diary, however, that he was on vacation in the Caucasus at the time.
The second document under scrutiny here has a most unusual history wrapped up in the mystery of its origins. It purports to be a ‘note’ from Nicolae Petrescu-Comnen, the Romanian Foreign Minister, to his Soviet colleague, Maxim Litvinov, which was sent from Geneva, on 24 September 1938. If proved genuine, it could revolutionize the entire interpretation of Soviet foreign policy at a critical juncture, for the Romanian Government, so the note clearly says, having consistently refused the Red Army the right to cross Romanian territory if the Soviet Union had wanted to come to the rescue of Czechoslovakia, suddenly opened the floodgates and invited the Red Army to cross its territory by rail and the Red Air Force to fly over it almost without limitation. For six days the Romanians offered to shut their eyes and allow up to 350,000 Soviet troops to cross by rail and air into Czechoslovakia. These details provide sufficient evidence, the author of the present article argues, for one to denounce the document as a fake. Comnen’s note to Litvinov is written in lamentable French with such serious grammatical errors that it is unimaginable it could ever have passed as an official Romanian document. The designated railway line on which the military trains with Red Army soldiers and matériel were supposed to travel, Hauner argues, was pure fiction, and so were the numerous airfields in eastern Slovakia waiting for the arrival of Soviet heavy bombers loaded with men and equipment. Moreover, if Comnen ever wrote this important document, why did he never mention it in the memoirs he published after the war? Why does he not mention the document when he spends a whole evening with Litvinov in Geneva? Why is there no trace of the document in Litvinov’s papers and no trace of the copies elsewhere, in Bucharest, in Prague? Although the full text of the Comnen note has been available in Jiří Hochman’s book since 1984 (courtesy of Ivan Pfaff who claimed to have ‘discovered’ and acquired the document from Romania under the most extraordinary circumstances in the early 1980s), western historians have with one or two exceptions tended to ignore the sensational document. (One of the exceptions was the senior American diplomatic historian Gerhard Weinberg). Curiously, it has never been mentioned by east European historians.
Even if we assumed that both documents were genuine, it would be difficult to accept Pfaff’s main argument charging Moscow with a kind of double felony: an ambition to Sovietize Eastern Europe and betray their Czechoslovak ally at the same time. Why should the Soviets invest in all the preparations to assist militarily, if they were crooks anyway and had been continuously conspiring to stage unlawful takeovers by means of Communist subversion? This answer is complex. Unlike supporters of the Sovietization thesis, ranging from Ivan Pfaff to Viktor Suvorov (a nom de guerre, used by the author of Icebreaker and former Soviet intelligence officer), the critical historian cannot ignore the startling fact that Stalin had ordered the slaughter of most of his senior officers, which hardly comports with preparations to use the Red Army as an instrument for taking over Eastern Europe. Finally, it might be useful to ask whether Pfaff and Lukes’s books help to reveal the secrets of Soviet behaviour during the Sudeten Crisis in 1938, that is, whether it was the drive towards world domination in the name of Soviet Communism which resulted in the betrayal of their Czechoslovak ally, or something else. The carelessness with which some respected Western publishers reviewed Pfaff and Lukes’s manuscripts, argues the author, and their ignoring the manipulation of historical evidence (at a time when it was trendy and risk free to do so) in favour of the strongly anti-Soviet messages the books contained has helped to obscure rather than to clarify the issue. This particular case is a prime example of how low standards of historical research lead to concatenations of misinterpretation.
Timothy Garton Ash
This is a translation of an article by the same name, which was first published in The New York Review of Books Vol. 46, no. 18 (19 November 1999) and appears here with the kind permission of the author and that journal.
A Reluctant Loyalty:
Workers under the Swastika
Hans Mommsen
This is a translation from the German book review, which was first published in Die Zeit (7 October 1992), and published here with the kind permission of that newspaper. The book under review, Michael Schneider’s Unterm Hakenkreuz: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung 1933 bis 1939 (Bonn, 1999), is, argues the reviewer, predominantly an analysis of the status of the workers in the pre-war years of the Third Reich. It describes the steps taken by the Nazi régime to suppress and channel organized labour, liquidate labour parties, and bring the labour movement into submission. Schneider also describes the transition to full employment and wage policy, as well as the role of propaganda and terror. In his analysis of Nazi social policy, the reviewer notes, Schneider attributes the Nazi régime with a high degree of purposiveness, but this obscures the fact that it was a system of improvisation, trial and error, and, consequently, low efficiency. In answer to the question concerning the extent to which the National Socialists managed to integrate the workers politically, Schneider describes the workers’ attitude as a ‘reluctant loyalty’.
Reviews A Sticking Plaster for a Sore Spot in Czech History
Zdeněk Kárník
The reviewer calls Ralf Gebel’s large ‘Heim ins Reich!’: Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland (1938–1945) (Munich, 1999) one of the first works to analyse systematically the history of the Bohemia and Moravian border regions (often called the Sudetengau) from the time of the Munich Agreement of 1938 to 1945. He notes, however, that the author gets somewhat distracted when he devotes attention to the life of the German nationalist leader Konrad Henlein, and to the history of the Sudetengau. The most important aspects are nevertheless covered, and it is to be commended that he has researched extensively in Czech archives and used Czech sources and has tried with some success to give a fair account of this sensitive topic. Besides some over-simplification Gebel can also be criticized for having paid too little attention to the sphere of ideas (neglecting to analyze Nazi ideology and Spannism) and also the fact that when examining the last months and even weeks of the existence of the Sudetengau the Gebel places too much importance on the fate of Henlein himself.
Bedřich Loewenstein’s ‘A Setting of Accounts’ from 1948:
A Primary Source Document on Czech Historiography
Vilém Prečan
Looking Back Fifty Years Latter (Bedřich Loewenstein)
A Settling of Accounts: An Analysis of the Political Situation at Home (Bedřich Loewenstein)
This document, introduced here by Vilém Prečan and commented on in retrospect by its autor, Bedřich Loewenstein, is an essay, written in the summer of 1948, while Loewenstein was still a student. It sought to penetrate the veils of Communist propaganda and understand what had just happened in Czechoslovakia in February of that fateful year. The essay circulated among students of secondary schools in the autumn of 1948, particularly the one in Prague 7 from which the author was to graduate in 1949.
The essay is divided into three chapters. The first demonstrates the illegality of the totalitarian take-over by the Communists. The second ponders what was at the time reasonable to expect from a Communist dictatorship. The third reflects on the spiritual and moral situation of the Czech nation after the takeover.
Documents Documents on Criminal Proceedings against Jan Slavík in 1948
Jaroslav Bouček
Jan Slavík (1885–1978) was the most outspoken historian in Czechoslovakia in the period between the two world wars. As a young man he had been concerned with Slav history, in particular Russian. His work based on a comparison of the Russian revolution with the course and consequences of the previous revolutions was for years a great contribution to historiography. Slavík’s inspirational approach is manifested above all in his two most successful works – Lenin (1934) and Leninova vláda [Lenin's government] (1935). The Russian Revolution was the subject, too, of much of his journalism.
Slavík also tackled the question of the meaning and conception of Czech history, as the most serious opponent of his teacher Josef Pekař and as a critic of the positivistic fact-heavy approach of the Goll school from the position of a sociological interpretation of history presented by Max Weber and T. G. Masaryk. Slavík outlined his conception of Czech historian in the first two volumes of his unfinished Vznik českého národa [The emergence of the Czech nation] (1946, 1948).
As a temperamental journalist Slavík often tackled political questions. In the 1930s he came out against the rising wave of Fascism and defended Czechoslovak policy against attacks by the political party of Konrad Henlein. After WW II, he protested against the introduction of totalitarian methods, which led to his arrest in February 1948 and then years of silence, which lasted till his death (with the exception of the few months of the Prague Spring of 1968). From the time of his imprisonment we have three documents, which are deposited among the records of the Regional Criminal Court, Prague. They cast light on Slavík’s career as an historian and journalist.
Report on the International Conference ‘The Democratic Revolution in Czechoslovakia: Its Preconditions, Course and Immediate Repercussions, 1987–89’
Vít Smetana
From 14 to 16 October an international conference titled ‘The Democratic Revolution in Czechoslovakia 1989, Preconditions, Course and Immediate Repercussions’ was held in Prague. It was part of the international project Openness in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The aim of the project has been to gather new archive documents and make them accessible to the public, and to acquire new testimonies concerning the historical process of liberation from Communist rule in Eastern Europe during the Gorbachev era. With the financial support of several foundations the conference was organized by the National Security Archive (Washington, D.C.), the Czechoslovak Documentary Centre (Prague), and the Institute of Contemporary History (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague) in collaboration with the Institute of History (Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava), the Milan Šimečka Foundation (Bratislava) and the Czech-Russian Commission of Historians. The two Czech organizers published an edition of documents related to political developments in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. A briefing book was also published in English with the title The Democratic Revolution in Czechoslovakia: Its Preconditions, Course, and Immediate Repercussions, 1987-89, comprising 120 documents. About 150 historians, journalists, sociologists, economists and other professionals from the former Czechoslovakia and from abroad participated in the conference.
The conference programme comprised six panels: ‘International Preconditions and Context’, ‘Czech and Slovak Societies on the Eve of the Overthrow and Revolution’, ‘Civic Forum (The First Three Weeks)’, ‘Public Against Violence (The First Three Weeks)’, ‘Exile at Home’, and ‘Revolution? Political Overthrow? Problems of the Transition Period (till the Elections of June 1990)’. The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion, ‘Results of Gorbachev Reforms in the Soviet Bloc’, organized by the Czech-Russian Commission of Historians.
Vilém Prečan (Institute of Contemporary History) in his opening address noted the conference’s place in the series of international conferences related to `the year of miracles’, 1989. He noted the historian must remain the guardian of the historical context and must remind today’s actors (for whom the past is mainly a battlefield of contemporary politics and its current interests) the way they had been decades before, how they thought, and what achievements they had been capable of. Apart from the many scholars from abroad, the conference was also well attended by numerous former actors in the historic changes of ten years ago – both from the Czech Republic and Slovakia – who had come to share their first-hand knowledge of the 1989 events. President Václav Havel, too, paid a brief visit to the conference.
The first panel confirmed the well-known witticism that the fall of the Communist regime in Poland took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks, and in Czechoslovakia ten days. Georgi Shakhnazarov, former adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, provided important testimony on the Soviet attitude towards events in Czechoslovakia: during the week after 17 November, he himself had written a telegram to Soviet Ambassador Lomakin requesting him not to intervene in any way. This strengthens the argument that the fate of the Velvet Revolution was decided in Czechoslovakia alone. Petr Pithart, the vice-chairman of the Senate of the Czech Parliament, confided that the dissidents had been caught off guard by the events of November. Three panels were dedicated to ‘oral history’. In the final panel Soňa Szomolányi (Comenius University, Bratislava) pointed out that the Communist régime in Czechoslovakia had collapsed so suddenly because it had not opened up to non-Communist elements. The participants of the conference more or less agreed that November 1989 was more an ethical than a political revolution. Even now, many questions remain unanswered, though they were discussed at the conference (the role of the Armed Forces in the plans of the Communist Politburo, for example). Unfortunately, the Czechoslovak Communist leaders of the 1980s (unlike the Polish ones, including General Jaruzelski) refuse to cooperate with historians, and none was present at the conference. It is to be hoped that with the growing quantity of documents being made available by Czech and foreign archives we shall be able to fill in the remaining gaps in our knowledge of these events.
Contributors
Jaroslav Bouček (1952) read history, art history, and political economy at Prague. He is concerned primarily with recent history, particularly Czecho-American and Czecho-French relations and the history of historiography.
Timothy Garton Ash (1955) is a research fellow in contemporary European history, St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has published widely in a number of journals; his more recent monographs include In Europe’s Name, Germany and the Divided Continent and History of the Present (1999). Some of his work, including The Magic Lantern (1990) and The File, has been translated into Czech.
Leonid J. Gibiansky (1936) is Senior Researcher in the Institute of Slavonic Studies, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. His principal interest is contemporary history and the history of international relations in central and southeast Europe.
Milan Hauner (1940) read history at Prague and Cambridge. He lives in the United States and lectures at universities there and in Europe. He is author of India in Axis Strategy (1981), Hitler: A Chronology of His Life and Time (1983), and editor of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (1988), What Is Asia to Us? Russia’s Asian Heartland Yesterday and Today (1990).
Jiří Hoppe (1968) read history and Czech studies at Prague, and is now a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. He is concerned primarily with the Prague Spring.
Zdeněk Kárník (1931) is Professor at the Institute of Economic and Social History, Charles University, Prague. His areas of interest include 19th and 20th century Czech and German social history. His most recent large publication is Habsburk, Masaryk či Šmeral: Socialisté na rozcestí [H., M., or Š.: Socialists at the crossroads] (1996).
Jan Křen (1930) is a Professor of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. His chief research interests are Czech-German relations and 19th and 20th-century German and Austrian history.
František Křížek (1925), till he retired, had been a researcher at the Radio and Television Research Institute since 1949. He was concerned with equipment for processing television signals. Recently, he has been in charge of a group concerned with television studio technology, including its digitalization.
Bedřich Loewenstein (1929) was employed at the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences till 1970. From 1979 to 1994 he was Professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has published extensively on fascism and revolution.
Jiří Maňák (1932) was a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social and Political Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Since retiring he has been associated with the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. His area of professional interest comprises sociological aspects of Czech history since 1945.
Valentina Vladimirovna Maryina (1929) is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Slavonic Studies, Moscow. Her primary area of research is 20th-century Czechoslovak and East European history.
Hans Mommsen (1930) is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the Ruhr University, Bochum. He is a leading expert on the social and economic history of Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy, the history of the labour movement, Social Democracy, and Nazism. Among his many important works is Von Weimar nach Auschwitz. Zur Geschichte Deutschlands in der Weltkriegsepoche (1999).
Vilém Prečan (1933) was a founder of the Institute of Contemporary History, and Director for its first eight years. His primary research interest is Czechoslovak history in the European context, from 1938 to the present.
Vít Smetana (1973) is a doctoral student at the Institute of International Studies, the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University and a researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. His main research interest is the history of international politics and diplomacy from the 1930s to the 1960s. He has edited the a Czech translation of Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days (Prague, 1999).
Soňa Szomolányi (1946) is Docent of Political Science at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Bratislava, and Head of its Department of Political Science. Most recently, as editor, she published Slovensko: (Bratislava, 1997).
