No. IV.
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Along the Roads of Exile
Articles
Jiří Pernes
Lion in a Cage:
Lev Sychrava’s Return in 1955
Drahomír Suchánek
The Beginning of the Czechoslovak People’s Party in Exile:
Adolf Procházka, Adolf Klimek, and Struggle over Who Would Succeed Šrámek, 1948–53
Peter Hallama
The Communist Takeover and the Czechs of Vienna:
An Example of “Concern for Expatriates” in the First Year of the Communist Regime
Michal Přibáň
1956: A Writers’ Congress with a Difference
Doubravka Olšáková
In the Land beyond the Looking Glass:
Émigrés in Czechoslovakia and the Aymonin Case
Memoirs
Petr Hrubý
Czech Realism in Exile:
The Periodical Skutečnost, 1948–53
John P. Matthews
The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind
Horizons
Walther L. Bernecker–Sören Brinkmann
Between History and Memory:
Contemporary History in Spain
Discussion
Jan Gebhart–Jan Kuklík
Some Thoughts on the Biographies of Emil Hácha
Reviews
Vítězslav Sommer
“The Czechoslovak Communist Party and Radical Socialism, 1918–1989” Project:
The Tally
Jiří Večerník
The First Comprehensive Social History of Post-war Czechoslovakia
Lenka Kalinová
Concerning the “Ruling Class” in Communist Czechoslovakia
Alice Hudlerová
How Czech Small Businesses Were Eliminated
Jan Randák
The Construction of National Martyrs
Daniela Kolenovská
Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union between the Two World Wars
Martin Čížek
The Czechoslovak Army and the Nationalities Question in the First Republic
Milan Scholz
Two Works about Communist Czechoslovakia and Sub-Saharan Africa
Radek Slabotínský
Exile Became Their Second Home
Zdeněk R. Nešpor
New Church Architecture in the Czech Republic
Documents
Jitka Vondrová
“The Rampaging of Right-wing Individuals Must Be Dealt With”:
Václav Král’s Thoughts on the State of Czechoslovak Historiography in 1969
Chronicle
Martina Miklová
Czechoslovak Émigrés in Archive Records Abroad:
A Report from the Brno Conference
A Brussels Conference on Central European Émigrés and Dissidents (Doubravka Olšáková)
Events Marking the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Charter 77: A Report (Jiří Suk)
Annotations
Summaries
Lion in a Cage:
Lev Sychrava’s Return in 1955
Jiří Pernes
Lev Sychrava (1887–1958) was an important Czechoslovak journalist, the only top-ranking exile to take advantage of the 1955 amnesty offered by the Czechoslovak régime to those who wished to return home. The author tells Sychrava’s story with an emphasis on this particular aspect towards the end of his life. First, he discusses Sychrava as a “Masaryk and Beneš man,” connected to the fate of the First Republic: from his start in politics in the Czech Progressive State Rights Party in Austria-Hungary to his time as an émigré during the First World War, where he became a close collaborator of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), his short career as a legate in Paris, his career as Deputy Chairman of the Community of Czechoslovak Legionaries, from 1921, and particularly as Editor-in-Chief of the ex-Legionary daily Národní osvobození (National Liberation) from 1924. He remained in these posts till the German Occupation, which began in mid-March 1939. After the outbreak of war, Sychrava was interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the Liberation in May 1945, he returned to his vocation, but remained there only till the Communist takeover. At the end of May he tried to emigrate, but was unsuccessful. A month later, however, he managed to leave the country with official permission. Once abroad he joined émigré organizations, and played an important part particularly in establishing the Edvard Beneš Institute for Political and Social Studies, in London, in 1950, and in its subsequent work. At the same time, however, his views earned him the reputation among his fellow-émigrés of being left-wing, and he found himself isolated. (Sychrava interpreted the show trial of Rudolf Slánský [1901–1952] and others, for example, as the victory of the Gottwald Stalinist line over the Trotsky line and as the arrival of democratic Socialism in Czechoslovakia.) In 1952 Sychrava therefore inquired into the possibilities of returning home to Czechoslovakia.
His efforts were more than facilitated by the amnesty for émigrés to return home voluntarily, which was announced by President Antonín Zápotocký in May 1955. Operation “Return,” as it was called, was run by the State Security Forces (StB) with the aim of dividing and weakening the émigrés. Sychrava took up the offer in December 1955. The author demonstrates that in returning home Sychrava fell prey to illusions about the regime and the possibilities of resuming his previous work in his homeland. The author describes the largely poor conditions Sychrava lived in as soon as the regime lost interest in him. Although he did not come out publicly against the émigrés, the StB managed to use his one public meeting for their own propaganda purposes. Amongst the émigrés, Sychrava’s return to Czechoslovakia caused indignation, and his old friends at home treated him with scepticism, mistrust, and disdain, partly because, despite certain reservations, Sychrava in essence identified with Communist policy and made no secret of his anti-American sentiments. He ended up once again in social isolation, disappointed and embittered, and died of an illness in early January 1958.
The Beginning of the Czechoslovak People’s Party in Exile:
Adolf Procházka, Adolf Klimek, and the Struggle over Who Would Succeed Šrámek, 1948–53
Drahomír Suchánek
This article traces the process of the organization of the Czechoslovak People’s Party and its programme in the first six years in exile. It focuses on the power struggle and general relations among its leading figures and interest groups. The author points out that the victory of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) in February 1948 meant a turning point for the People’s Party. Robbed of the opportunity to carry out its policy freely it henceforth worked in the country under a new leadership within the “revived” National Front as a satellite of the Communists. At the same time, however, a number of its members gradually joined in the resistance to the dictatorship, which often resulted in harsh repressive measures against them and the Party, and many of its pre-takeover functionaries and members left for the West. Similarly to the leaders and members of other democratic parties in exile, they built up a new party structure and tried to maintain continuity in their institutions and programme. These efforts were from the start, however, accompanied by internal disputes and competition amongst the individual would-be leaders. The intensity and persistence of the disputes were, argues the author, due to the fact that the People’s Party, unlike the other émigré parties, was without its chairman and leading party authority, Mgsr Jan Šrámek (1870–1956), who had been arrested while trying to escape Czechoslovakia.
The People’s Party in exile soon began to split in two: on the one hand, the uncompromisingly anti-Communist right-wing critics of the idea of the National Front gradually created their own party platform; on the other, within the People’s Party in exile there was a struggle over the orientation of the programme, the leadership, and the senior members, which took place among factions around the general secretary of the party, Adolf Klimek (1895–1990), and the former minister of health, Adolf Procházka (1900–1970). The author discusses mainly the twists and turns of this conflict. Whereas Klimek represented the more traditional Christian-Socialist line in the spirit of Šrámek, the intellectual Procházka was inclined to modernize the party in the direction of the Christian Democrats. The balance of power between the two factions changed, but neither one gained the upper hand. The author argues that this situation very nearly paralyzed the People’s Party. It caused a great exodus of rank and file members, weakened the party’s position in the non-partisan émigré institutions (like the Council of Free Czechoslovakia) and made it impossible to push through the priorities of its Christian political programme. Towards the end of the article, the author endeavours to look behind the “curtain of personal relations,” focusing on 1945–48 in order to elucidate the positions, alliances, and rivalries amongst the important political figures of the Czechoslovak People’s Party, which clearly continued in exile.
The Communist Takeover and the Czechs of Vienna:
An Example of “Concern for Expatriates” in the First Year of the Communist Regime
Peter Hallama
This article by an Austrian political scientist and historian discusses how the Czechoslovak Communist regime influenced the political life of the Czech minority in Vienna. The author argues that the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) tried to influence the Czechs of Vienna right from the end of the Second World War through the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Czechoslovak Ambassador to Austria, and the Foreign Czechoslovak Institute. After the Communists took power in February 1948 most of this work shifted to the central institutions of the Party, particularly the international department of the Central Committee, and direct contact was ensured by various emissaries sent from Prague to Vienna. The activity of the Vienna Czechs (and some Slovaks) after the war was conducted under the umbrella of the Central Committee of Czechoslovaks, in which four political parties on the Czechoslovak model and non-political associations were associated. The Communists among them formed a special section in the Communist Party of Austria, but were subordinate to the authority of their comrades in Prague. In February 1948 they endeavoured to copy the Czechoslovak Communist approach, and created a Central Action Committee of Czechs and Slovaks in Vienna, in which members of other parties were also represented. This step brought dissension into the ranks of the Czech minority, which was manifested clearly in the conflict between Communists and Social Democrats over who would control the Czech minority press. The rising tensions were commented on by the Austrian and Czechoslovak news media. The CPCz, fearing its influence on the minority waning, intervened in favour of maintaining unity amongst them. In autumn 1948 Communist Party emissaries managed to stage the restoration of the paralyzed Tschechoslowakischer Zentralausschuss in Vienna, led by a Communist and an accommodating Social Democrat whom they were confident they could manipulate. The quarrels amongst the members of the Czech minority quickly worsened, however. The situation from the 1950s to the 1990s is concisely described by the author as “four decades of Cold War within one minority.”
1956: A Writers’ Congress with a Difference
Michal Přibáň
This article is a discussion of a lesser-known episode in the history of Czechoslovak émigrés. In 1956, the year of the historically important Second Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, some of whose participants spoke out against the repressive aspects of Communist policy on the arts for the first time, a meeting of Czechoslovak émigré writers was held in Paris. It was organized by the Arts Council of Czechs Abroad, which was founded and run by the poet, literary critic, and publisher Robert Vlach (1917–1966). Called the “Arts Council Congress,” it was attended, for example, by Jan Čep (1902–1974), František Listopad (born Jiří Synek, 1921), Jaroslav Strnad (1918–2000), and Jan M. Kolár (1923–1978). The principal topics of the congress speeches and discussions were the starting point, possibilities, and position of the artist in exile (given by Pavel Želivan, b. 1925, and Listopad), reflections on the most recent social, cultural, and political developments in Czechoslovakia (Jaroslav Jíra, 1929–2005), and the possibilities and limits of communication with readers at home after the hypothetical return of émigrés to their native country (a speech given by Čep). The congress sessions, the author argues, can reasonably be considered the height of work in the arts amongst the Czech émigrés in the first half of the 1950s.
In the Land beyond the Looking Glass:
Émigrés in Czechoslovakia and the Aymonin Case
Doubravka Olšáková
In this article the author considers the less usual phenomenon of exile on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain, that is, émigrés in Czechoslovakia after the Communist takeover of February 1948. Their existence was a complementary feature of the Cold War with respect to the work of the democratic émigrés in the West, and served both to form a picture of the “class enemy” and to confirm the legitimacy of the Communist regime as the guardian against “exploitation and oppression.” The author first considers the status of political asylum in interwar Czechoslovakia, and says that despite the existence of numerous communities of Russian, Ukrainian, and, later, German émigrés, the right to political asylum was not legislatively defined, and was instead determined largely by international custom and convention. This state of affairs continued even after the war. Émigrés in Communist Czechoslovakia were granted asylum on the basis of a proposal drafted by the international department of the Central Committee of the CPCz, which stemmed from the relevant article of the Soviet Constitution, and was ultimately, in 1960, codified in the new Constitution of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
The author then moves on to the composition of the Western émigrés in Czechoslovakia. By far the most numerous were the Greek and Macedonian refugees, who sought asylum in countries of the Soviet Bloc after the Communist defeat in the Greek Civil War. About 12,000 came to Czechoslovakia in several waves between 1948 and 1951. The next largest group was the Italians, mostly former partisans, of whom 214 were in Czechoslovakia in late 1950. Then come the Yugoslavs, opponents to the regime of Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) after his split with Stalin; there were 152 of them in late 1950. Among the 58 Spaniards, mostly workers and members of the intelligentsia opposed to the Franco regime, there were two leading functionaries of the Spanish Communist Party, Vicente Uribe (1897–1961) and Juan Modesto (1906–1968). The exile Spanish Communist Party held two congresses in Prague in those days. Apart from these groups fourteen US émigrés lived in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1950s and various individuals from other countries of Western Europe and the Third World. Among them were also four Frenchmen, the most important of whom was the cultural attaché Marcel Aymonin (1911–?), who is the focus of the article.
The author considers Aymonin in the context of Czechoslovak-French relations, which began to worsen in summer 1947, and from the early 1950s were shifted on purpose from the usual bilateral state level to the sphere of communications between the Communist Parties of the two countries under the patronage of Moscow. At the request of the French and Italian comrades, as part of the efforts to achieve closer collaboration, Czechoslovakia also commenced propaganda radio broadcasts to France and Italy, which were entitled “Ce soir en France” (This Evening in France) and “Oggi in Italia” (Today in Italy). Aymonin worked in Czechoslovakia from 1933 as a teacher at the Lycée in Prague, and later became the cultural attaché at the French Embassy, and after the war was appointed head of the Institut Français in Prague. In late 1949 he was transferred to Sofia. After returning to Prague in April 1951 he officially asked at a press conference to be granted asylum. (Jean Fakan, the secretary of the French consulate in Slovakia, did the same.) This gesture was made at the moment when the French cultural institutions in Czechoslovakia were about to be closed, allegedly owing to their employees’ being spies. With the help of contemporaneous and later testimonies the author attempts to explain what was behind such an unexpected and isolated act by a French diplomat, which was triumphantly seized upon by Communist propaganda, and he endorses the opinion that it was the result of Aymonin’s opportunism, political intrigues, and, perhaps, also a sincere love for Czechoslovakia. Aymonin then worked in Czechoslovakia editing the works of the French Stalinist André Stil (1921–2004) and translating Czech authors into French, before returning to France, probably after 1968. At that time he was already translating the works of Czech émigrés and dissidents, for example, Žert (The Joke, 1967) by Milan Kundera (b. 1929) and plays by Václav Havel (b. 1936).
Memoirs
Czech Realism in Exile:
The Periodical Skutečnost, 1948–53
Petr Hrubý
In this article the author discusses Skutečnost (Reality), a remarkable Czechoslovak émigré periodical published after the Communist takeover. The author was one of its founders and editors. Skutečnost was started up in Geneva in late 1948 essentially as a students’ monthly. The first number was published in March 1949. Owing to its high quality, openness, non-partisanship, forthrightness, critical approach, and non-conformism, however, Skutečnost soon gained an extraordinary standing amongst émigré periodicals. Its programme and name reflect its affiliation with the realism of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), in the sense of its perspicacity and critical assessment of reality, advocated an active, uncompromising defence of democracy against totalitarianism, supported the integration of European values, castigated émigré politicking, boldly held up an unflattering mirror to its countrymen, and detested platitudes. Its critical jibes were a thorn in the side of many an émigré; the special issue criticizing the post-war expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans, for example, caused an uproar. Its editor-in-chief was the Slovak journalist Karol Belák, and its regular contributors included a number of distinctive émigré figures from around the world, for example the literary historians Peter Demetz (b. 1922) and Jiří Pistorius (b. 1922), the journalists Ferdinand Peroutka (1895–1978) and Pavel Tigrid (1917–2003), the writers Jan M. Kolár (1923–1978) and Jiří Kárnet (b. 1920), the historians Jiří Kovtun (b. 1927) and Zdeněk Dittrich (b. 1923), and the politician Jaroslav Stránský (1884–1973). It increasingly published translations of articles by non-Czechoslovak authors, including émigrés from other central and east European countries. Its range of action expanded considerably, when the selection of articles from Skutečnost began to be published in Czech, English, and German versions in Democratia militans. In his discussion the author mentions the conflict that arose after Meda Mládková (b. 1919), an art historian and collaborator of Skutečnost, took over its administrative work and moved the editorial office to London in 1951. He concludes by stating that this initiative of the young generation of émigrés contributed to overcoming the sense of disappointment, apparent deadlock, and genuine lack of programme amongst the Czechoslovak émigrés.
The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind
John P. Matthews
This memoir-like article in Czech translation was originally published in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, vol. 16 (autumn 2003), no. 3, pp. 409–27. It tells the story of a remarkable project of “cultural enlightenment” during the Cold War. The author took part in it during the second half of the 1950s as head of the Munich office of the Free Europe Press. The project was initiated in April 1956 by Sam Walker, the head of the publishing house, with the original aim of adding to the “balloon operation” or balancing it out. Whereas balloons carried leaflets over the countries behind the Iron Curtain intended for people with anti-Communist sympathies, the new project involved posting parcels with various information to Communist or revisionist-minded people. At first the selection of recipients and the composition of materials sent out were quite random; their content was usually of a negative nature in the sense of counterpropaganda. Its conception became clearer after George Minden, a Romanian émigré, took charge and led the project for the next thirty-five years. The shipments were given the positive aim of reducing the cultural and intellectual deficit of the populations in the Soviet Bloc, including the USSR, and therefore contained mainly belles-lettres, art books, scholarly books and periodicals, and dictionaries. They were sent out from various towns in Europe and America, and were aimed at selected members of the intelligentsia and reform Communists. Several publishing houses and other institutions were involved in the project, but only a relatively small circle of people knew about its real nature; the names of the originators remained secret till the collapse of Communism. With the exception of the Poles, the operation at first met with a negligible reception. It soon gained strength, however, and in the 1960s hundreds of thousands of shipments made their way over the Iron Curtain each year, for which a large number of thank-you letters were received from the addressees. The programme ended only in 1993. During the thirty-five years it was in operation about ten-million publications were successfully smuggled into Eastern Europe at the low cost of less than two million dollars in all.
Horizons
Between History and Memory:
Contemporary History in Spain
Walther L. Bernecker and Sören Brinkmann
This article continues the Soudobé dějiny series on developments in the discipline of contemporary history in selected countries of Europe. It was originally published as “Zwischen Geschichte und Erinnerung: Zum Umgang mit der Zeitgeschichte in Spanien” in Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Pesrpektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), pp. 79–106. According to the authors the beginning of contemporary history (historia contemporánea) in Spain is usually considered to be 1808, with the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars on the Iberian Peninsula, which also led to the liberal revolution. Unlike in Germany and France, there was no formal singling-out of contemporary history in Spain and its periodization (called, among other things, the historia del tiempo presente), nor was there a clear conception of research into this era. That does not mean, however, that this research was neglected in practice. Its stormy development in the last three decades, represented by the wide variety of scholarly books, periodicals, and research institutions, is more or less covered by the broad term historia contemporánea, which is also true of the special fields like oral history and the history of film. Another characteristic feature of Spanish contemporary history, and one that is sometimes criticized, is its institutional and thematic decentralization and regionalization. This is linked with the constitutional devolution of powers in the country, the weight of the regions, and the reception of the Annales school in the form of a methodologically modernized histoire regional.
The development of a liberal Spanish historiography was disrupted by the Civil War in the mid-1930s. Continuity could then be maintained only in exile, whereas historiography at home suffered from having been made an instrument of politics, serving to legitimize the regime, and it completely lost importance internationally. The situation began to change in the 1960s when foreign impulses in Spain started the development of economic and social history. After the restoration of democracy in the 1970s Spanish historiography did not follow on from the pre-war liberal positivist tradition, but showed a strong inclination to follow European tendencies, particularly Marxism and the Annales school. At the same time the conditions for the expansion of political history were created. The authors none the less point out that in accordance with the negotiated, accommodating, and peaceful nature of the Spanish transition to democracy, historians implicitly pledged themselves to collective amnesia concerning the dark chapters of the Civil War and the Franco regime. This social consensus of reconciliation, bought at the price of making it taboo to consider past crimes, is what some critics call the “pact of forgetting.” In Spain it has not really been a matter of either legal reflections on the dictatorship or a wider social discourse about the degree of responsibility of individuals or groups for the crimes that were committed. Consequently, repressed memory has spoken up by means of art, in particular literature and film.
The authors devote the end of the article to two key topics of contemporary Spanish history, the Civil War and the transition to democracy. Today the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship arouse great interest amongst scholars and the general public. Since the mid-1970s several thousand historical works have been published on the topic. Historians overcame the limitations carefully and gradually. At first, mainly memoirs were published. Social histories and everyday life during the Civil War came to the fore. A number of historians and political scientists concentrated on structural and typological analyses of the Franco regime. Later, interest turned also to the lives of the members of the anti-Franco opposition, resistance fighters, and émigrés. Beginning in the 1990s the important but sensitive topic of repression at the front and in the rear by both sides in the Civil War was taken up in historiography. More recent research has shown that Falangist terror, unlike Republican, was systematic, directed from above, and continued unabated even after the war. The Franco concentration camps also finally became a focal point. General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) continues to be a contentious topic, and dismantling his legend is a long-term process. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists, regardless of political stripe, agree that the transition to democracy constitutes an historic achievement. Liberal-conservative authors stress the role of King Juan Carlos I (b. 1938) and Premier Adolfo Suárez (b. 1932), while left-of-centre authors point to the pressure of the lower classes and the role of the labour movement; others point to the peculiarly responsible, positive approach of the news media. None the less, criticism is also being heard with increasing clarity, for example, owing to the preserving of certain functional shortcomings of democracy and the failure to come to terms with the past during the transition. Also in accord with this is a recent trend, in which, in contrast to the absence of an official “culture of remembering,” the general public is becoming increasingly interested in the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship. A manifestation of this trend is the emergence of non-governmental organizations endeavouring to find the mass graves of “the disappeared,” exhume them, and give them a proper funeral.
Discussion
Some Thoughts on the Biographies of Emil Hácha
Jan Gebhart and Jan Kuklík
The authors consider the historical role of Emil Hácha (1872–1945), the President of the Second Republic of Czechoslovakia (which lasted for the six months from the Munich Agreement of late September 1938 to the German Occupation of mid-March 1939) and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945). They compare and assess the four biographies of Hácha published since the collapse of Communism: Dušan Tomášek and Robert Kvaček’s Causa Emil Hácha (Prague, 1995), Tomáš Pasák’s JUDr. Emil Hácha (Prague, 1997), Vít Machálek’s Prezident v zajetí: Život, činy a kříž Emila Háchy (Prague, 1998), and a new, expanded edition of Pasák’s work, with the title Emil Hácha (1938–1945). Gebhart and Kuklík note that all four authors use similar basic sources and, logically, concentrate mainly on Hácha as President. They differ, however, in their emphasis on various events and in their interpretations. They argue that the most critical are Kvaček and Tomášek, whereas Pasák is positivist and neutral. Machálek, on the other hand, is, according to them, almost an apologist, having selected his sources to suit the image of Hácha he wishes to portray; compared to the other three writers, he devotes the most attention to Hácha’s childhood and youth and also to the posthumous dispute often called the “Hácha case” (causa Emil Hácha). A weakness shared by all these works, according to Gebhart and Kuklík, is their failure to use records related to the development of the attitude of the resistance at home and abroad towards Hácha. Gebhart and Kuklík discuss important points in Hácha’s career – from his becoming president (elected by the parliament in 1938) to his death in prison after the war, and they consider the trial that was being prepared for him. Without doubting the sincerity of his patriotism, they argue that Hácha’s career was as a downward development from a state representative endeavouring to preserve his country’s legal continuity with the pre-war period to a passive object of manipulation by the German occupying forces and the people around him. In conclusion they state that this tragic political fate will surely continue to attract the attention of historians, as was demonstrated, for instance, by “The Case of Emil Hácha,” a seminar held by the Institute of Contemporary History and the Masaryk Institute, Prague, in June 2005.
Reviews
“The Czechoslovak Communist Party and Radical Socialism, 1918–1989” Project: The Tally
Vítězslav Sommer
Kárník, Zdeněk, and Michal Kopeček (eds). Bolševismus, komunismus a radikální socialismus v Československu, vol. 3. Prague: Dokořán and the Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2004, 223 pp; vol. 4: Prague: Dokořán and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2005, 279 pp; vol. 5: Prague: Dokořán and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2005, 383 pp.
This article is an overall assessment of “The Czechoslovak Communist Party and Radical Socialism, 1918–89,” a five-year project run by Zdeněk Kárník, and is also a review of three volumes of the five-volume series Bolševismus, komunismus a radikální socialismus v Československu, considering the main publications to come out of the project. The first two volumes were reviewed by Jan Křen in “Silný projekt – slabší začátek – jaký konec?” (A Feeble Start to a Project with Potential: How Will It Be End?), Soudobé dějiny, vol. 11 (2004) no. 3, pp. 127–32.
The reviewer judges the contributions to the volumes by theme, and finds several praiseworthy points. They succeed on the whole, he argues, in achieving the project aim of being Czecho-Slovak; the contributions are written by historians of several generations (though mostly younger); and they provide on the whole a considerably diverse range of themes. On the other hand, he is disappointed that the volumes under review do not represent even the start of the desired comprehensive history of Czechoslovak Communism and that the grant-funded project did not entail original systematic research. The development of the project is faithfully illustrated by the twelve grant-funded reports in ten booklets, which also include some high-quality articles. In conclusion, the reviewer calls the project an extraordinary achievement, but has doubts about its future.
The First Comprehensive Social History of Post-war Czechoslovakia
Jiří Večerník
Kalinová, Lenka. Společenské proměny v čase socialistického experimentu: K sociálním dějinám v letech 1945–1969. Prague: Academia, 2007, 363 pp.
The reviewer calls this work an important, comprehensively conceived contribution not only to the social history of Czechoslovakia, but also to its economic, political, and cultural history in the period of revolutionary changes following the Second World War. The main achievement of the work, the reviewer says, is in revealing that the so-called “achievements of socialism” (socialistické vymoženosti) had to be demanded from the regime and were never completely achieved.
Concerning the “Ruling Class” in Communist Czechoslovakia
Lenka Kalinová
Heumos, Peter. “Vyhrňme si rukávy, než se kola zastaví”: Dělníci a státní socialismus v Československu 1945–1968. (Česká společnost po roce 1945, vol. 2) Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2006, 143 pp.
Thanks to his outstanding knowledge of the primary sources, Peter Heumos has, according to the reviewer, written a breakthrough, conceptual work on a little researched topic in the history of labour in post-war Czechoslovakia, He has also managed to link it with stimulating meditations on the nature of the Czechoslovak Communist regime. The work presents a more complex, more nuanced picture of reality than usual. The regime, as Heumos depicts it, never gained control of the workers, who constituted its main social support. It was confronted with their dissatisfaction, and had to accept their various demands. Heumos has carefully recorded the number of short-term strikes: most of them demanded wages be increased, productivity not be raised, and supplies be improved, but rarely did they cast doubt upon the regime.
How Czech Small Businesses Were Eliminated
Alice Hudlerová
Marek, Pavel. České živnostnictvo 1945–1960: Likvidace živnostníků, řemeslníků a obchodníků v českých zemích. Brno: Doplněk, 2006, 328 pp.
The work under review is the first comprehensive discussion of the end of small businessmen as a social stratum in Communist Czechoslovakia. The author considers in detail the attitudes of the individual political parties to small businesses after 1945 and the systematic efforts of the totalitarian regime from 1949 to 1953 to eliminate them, the temporary letting up of pressure in consequence of economic difficulties in 1954–55, and the repeated campaign against them, which was completed in a year with a thoroughness unparalleled in any other country of the Soviet Bloc.
The Construction of National Martyrs
Jan Randák
Zwicker, Stefan. “Nationale Märtyrer”: Albert Leo Schlageter und Julius Fučík. Paderborn: Schöning, 2006, 369 pp.
The author juxtaposes the real lives and particularly the posthumous lives of two at first apparently unrelated figures – the German nationalist officer Albert Leo Schlageter (1894–1923), who was sentenced to death by the French authorities for anti-French sabotage in the occupied Rhineland in 1923, and the Czech Communist journalist Julius Fučík (1903–1943), who, twenty years after Schlageter, was executed by the Germans, for his work in the resistance during the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. The lives and deaths of both men were soon put to use ideologically, and they were catapulted as heroes into the position of national martyrs – Schlageter in the Weimar Republic and particularly under the Nazi regime, Fučík after 1945, particularly under the Communist regime. The author finds remarkable similarities in the way their lives and deaths were mythologized; he demonstrates how every community appears to need to legitimize itself with heroes. The reviewer finds this a well-informed work; he demonstrates a sound knowledge of the literature on the lieux de mémoire and the culture of memory.
Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union between the Two World Wars
Daniela Kolenovská
Stern, Ludmila. Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1940: From Red Square to the Left Bank. Abingdon, London, and New York: Routledge, 2007, 270 pp.
The reviewer puts this publication by an Australian Russianist into the context of research into Western intellectuals and their attitudes to the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. She praises it as an excellent, erudite work of historiography. Using recently declassified Soviet and French sources, the author discusses the carefully planned and changing institutional system with which the Soviet Union ensured itself the sympathy and support of Western intellectuals and contact with them. Its organization basically came under the Communist International, and was formed by structures posing as initiatives in the arts and education or societies of friends of the USSR. Whereas in the 1920s the reasons for Western intellectuals’ positive interest in the Soviet Union were mostly cultural and social, in the 1930s, particularly after the Nazis took power, political aspects came to the fore; at the personal level, the author then distinguishes the main motives for the selfless sympathy: money and vanity. The author adds several case studies to her systematic analysis.
The Czechoslovak Army and the Nationalities Question in the First Republic
Martin Čížek
Zückert, Martin. Zwischen Nationsidee und staatlicher Realität: Die tschechoslowakische Armee und ihre Nationalitätenpolitik 1918–1938. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006, 354 pp. + appendices.
The author of the work under review compares and contrasts ideas of the nation-state with the multi-national reality as it was manifested in the Czechoslovak Army during the First Republic. Through this lens he considers the build-up, structure, daily operations, and conditions during the crisis leading up to the Munich Agreement. The author is, according to the reviewer, the first to treat the topic so comprehensively, and some of his judgements can be applied to the First Republic in general.
Ivan Jakubec
Kuklík, Jan. Do poslední pence: Československo-britská jednání o majetkoprávních a finančních otázkách 1938–1982. Prague: Karolinum, 2007, 472 pp. (including a 20-page English résumé).
The book under review is a discussion of the Czechoslovak-British talks on property rights and financial questions, 1938–82. The topic is examined chronologically, comprehensively, using largely exhaustive original archive research. The author devotes most space to Czechoslovak-British relations and negotiations in the short period of less than three years from the end of the Second World War to the Communist takeover. Thanks to a sense of broader historical contexts the work, according to the reviewer, makes a clear contribution to our understanding of Czechoslovak economic history, the history of both domestic and foreign policy, and the mechanisms leading to the Cold War.
Two Works about Communist Czechoslovakia and Sub-Saharan Africa
Milan Scholz
Zídek, Petr. Československo a francouzská Afrika 1948–1968. Prague: Libri, 2006, 248 pp.
Zídek, Petr, and Karel Sieber. Československo a subsaharská Afrika v letech 1948–1989. Prague: Ústav mezinárodních vztahů, 2007, 322 pp.
The authors of these two works, argues the reviewer, merit recognition for having set out into an almost entirely neglected field of research – namely, the relations between the Czechoslovak Communist regime and the countries of the Third World. With thorough archive research they endeavour to provide a comprehensive description of developments in one of its areas, Sub-Saharan Africa. In the process they contribute to our knowledge of political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence history, while leaving economic and culture relations more or less aside. When the two publications are compared, however, the volume that Zídek wrote independently comes out better. For one thing, Zídek has taken advantage of a considerably wider range of sources (including records from French archives, contemporaneous periodicals, and his own interviews with people once involved in the events); for another, he has endeavoured to capture the whole context, the prerequisites, and mechanisms of Czechoslovak foreign policy towards the countries of francophone Africa. The reviewer considers the work relatively well informed and conceptually well considered. By contrast, however, he argues that the other work under review lacks any theoretical conception and does not even attempt interpretation; the result, he concludes, is a rather superficially structured, boring, descriptive summary.
Exile Became Their Second Home
Radek Slabotínský
Hrubý, Petr, Pavel Kosatík, and Zdeněk Pousta. Rozchod 1948: Rozhovory s českými poúnorovými exulanty. Prague: Ústav dějin and the Archiv Univerzity Karlovy, 2006, 268 pp.
For the work under review, Petr Hrubý, an émigré political scientist, Pavel Kosatík, a writer and journalist, and Zdeněk Pousta, head of the Charles University Archive, interviewed twelve émigrés who left Czechoslovakia after the Communist takeover of February 1948. Though they have had different occupations and their lives have taken different directions, all the interviewees were contributors or editors of Skutečnost, an émigré periodical, which was first published in Geneva and then in London, from 1949 to 1953. The volume presents distinctive individuals, of whom probably the better known are the literary and cultural historian Peter Demetz (b. 1922), the historian Zbyněk A. B. Zeman (b. 1928), and Radomír Luža (b. 1922). The volume contributes to increasing awareness of “post-February” émigrés.
New Church Architecture in the Czech Republic
Zdeněk R. Nešpor
Vaverka, Jiří, et al. Moderní sakrální stavby církví a náboženských společností na území Čech, Moravy a Slezska. Brno: Jota, 2004, 364 pp.
The publication under review is the first academic work systematically to document contemporary church architecture in the Czech Republic. The reviewer praises the quality of the general chapters as well as the description of the structure, engineering, and functions of the individual buildings and their documentation in photographs. He does, however, have some objections regarding the criteria for selecting the buildings, and also points out some factual errors.
Documents
“The Rampaging of Right-wing Individuals Must Be Dealt With”:
Václav Král’s Thoughts on the State of Czechoslovak Historiography in 1969
Jitka Vondrová
In this edition, Jitka Vondrová presents a hitherto unknown report by the historian Václav Král (1926–1983). Entitled “Informace o stavu československé historiografie” (Information on the State of Czechoslovak Historiography), the report was presented at the Soviet Embassy, Prague, on 21 August 1969 (on the first anniversary of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia), and was intended primarily for Piotr N. Demichev, Secretary for Ideology at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Vondrová discovered the document amongst material of the Propaganda Department of the CPSU in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow. The document is an assessment of the state of Czechoslovak contemporary history from extremely dogmatic positions. Král “exposes” a powerful interest group, which he portrays as a “terrorist gang,” amongst the historians. With the help of “reactionary elements” in the central organs of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (that is, the reform Communists) the group was trying to gain the upper hand in historiography and return the interpretation of Czechoslovak history in the twentieth century from the Marxist conception to the bourgeois in the sense of Masarykian ideology. He calls Milan Hübl (1927–1989) and Jan Křen (b. 1930) the leaders of the group, which included Vilém Prečan (b. 1933), Milan Otáhal (b. 1928), Karel Bartošek (1930–2004), and Václav Kural (b. 1928). He also identifies the centre of “counter-revolution in historiography,” particularly the Institute of History of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the Party University, the Department of Contemporary History in the Institute of History at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and the Czech Historical Society. He concludes with some concrete proposals for the reorganization of the individual institutions of historical research, and recommends dismissing about 140 historians and banning them from the field altogether.
In a comprehensive introduction, the editor puts this document into the context of the political activities of the radically left wing of the Czechoslovak Communist Party after the Soviet-led occupation in late August 1968 and also into the context of contemporaneous developments in Czechoslovak historiography and the career of the author of the document. Král was a dogmatic Marxist historian of contemporary Czechoslovak history, particularly of the end of the First Republic and the German occupation. His career began in the 1950s, and in 1962 he became head of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Institute. In the 1960s, however, the ideological models he employed in historiography came under criticism, and Král found himself isolated from the mainstream of Czechoslovak historiography as the leading historians endeavoured to have historiography restored as a critical discipline free from direct dependence on politics. Král was given another chance after the Soviet-led military intervention, when he became seriously involved in the extreme left wing of the Communist Party. A direct instrument of Soviet influence, this wing of the CPCz put forward radical demands for the condemnation of the “Prague Spring” as a counter-revolution and for the dismissal of all those who supported it. It also put pressure on the new general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPCz to take up increasingly conformist, pro-Soviet positions. In his report, Král is also settling personal accounts with historians who criticized him. Soon after writing it, he himself mercilessly carried out the policy of purges in the Czechoslovak-Soviet Institute and the Historical Institute. In the period of “Normalization” he then shored up his own position as a prominent historian when he became Chairman of the Academic Board of the Czechoslovak Academy and Head of the Department of History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, and was also given a professorship.
Chronicle
Czechoslovak Émigrés in Archive Records Abroad:
A Report from the Brno Conference
Martina Miklová
The author reports in detail on “Czechoslovak Émigrés, 1938–89, in the Archive Records Abroad,” a conference organized by three institutions – the Department of Social Sciences and Law at the Faculty of Economics and Management, the University of Defence, Brno, the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and the Centre for the Study of Czechoslovak Émigrés at the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University, Olomouc, in Brno, 21–22 November 2007.
A Brussels Conference on Central European Émigrés and Dissidents
Doubravka Olšáková reports on “L’exil et la dissidence en l’Europe centrale,” an international conference held at the Centre d’études tchéque, Université libre de Bruxelles, under the direction of Jan Rubeš, on 14 March 2008.
Events Marking the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Charter: A Report
Jiří Suk provides an overview of the important events held in the Czech Republic in 2007 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the emergence of the Charter 77 human-rights movement. He mentions the documentary films broadcast by Czech Television, the special February issue of Dějiny a současnost, “Charter 77 and the Opposition of the Religious in the Years of Normalization,” a seminar held at the CEVRO Institute in November, and the publishing of the complete, annotated edition of almost six hundred Charter 77 documents, compiled and edited by Blanka Císařovská and Vilém Prečan, and provides a detailed report on “Charter 77: From the Assertion of Human Rights to the Democratic Revolution, 1977–1989,” an international conference held in Prague, 21–23 March 2007, the proceedings of which have just been published.
