From Where and to Where? / New Impulses at the 7^th COHA International Conference on Oral History in Times of CrisisChronicle

Přemysl Vacek

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):804-809  

A Conference Commemorating 100 Years Since the Founding of the KSČChronicle

Lucie Marková

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):801-803  

Transforming Worlds of Work / Post-1989 Privatization in Poland through the Eyes of Factory WorkersBook Reviews

Veronika Pehe

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):791-797  

The subject of this review is the monograph Cięcia: Mówiona historia transformacji [Cuts: An Oral History of the Transformation] by Aleksandra Leyk and Joanna Wawrzyniak. The book is the output of a larger project conducted at the University of Warsaw between 2010 and 2018. The project gathered the life stories of workers of initially socialist enterprises in Poland, which were then privatized through foreign direct investment in the 1990s. The review argues that although the volume lacks a comprehensive analytical and interpretive framework, the highly readable oral histories that form the core of the book are an invaluable historical source in themselves....

Journalists as Communism's Fellow Travellers? / A New Look at the International Organization of JournalistsBook Reviews

Mikuláš Pešta

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):787-790  

The author of the book under review here is at the same time an important actor in the history presented. This presents an opportunity to assess not only the role of this "Communist front organization" in the Cold War and the authenticity of representation of journalists' interests, but also generally the role of non-communists in such organizations. In the reviewer's opinion, the book often reads more as a chronicle rather than as a historical analysis, but given the lack of other syntheses, it serves its purpose as an introduction to the history of the IOJ.

Childhood and Youth in Socialist CzechoslovakiaBook Reviews

Veronika Knotková

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):776-786  

The ten-member team of authors, under the lead of Jiří Knapík and Martin Franc, in their collective volume entitled Mezi pionýrským šátkem a mopedem: Děti, mládež a socialismus v českých zemích 1948-1970 [Between a Pioneer Scarf and a Moped: Children, Youth and Socialism in the Czech Lands in 1948-1970] (Praha, Academia 2018) deals fairly successfully with the task of sketching a comprehensive picture of childhood and growing up in the Czech lands in the period between the communist coup and the beginning of the normalization era in Czechoslovakia. In the chapters thematically focused on the perspectives of state, party and parents as authorities,...

The Quest for Freedom Under the Starry SkyBook Reviews

Zdeněk R. Nešpor

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):771-775  

The review deals with an extensive book on the history of a quintessentially Czech leisure activity, the "tramping movement". The movement emerged in the early 20^th century and its popularity lasted throughout the whole of the century. In the book under review, five cultural historians describe the history of the tramping movement in Czechoslovakia in admirable detail and also provide supplementary material and unique pictures. The reviewer welcomes the analysis of a highly interesting and academically overlooked phenomenon and recommends a shortened version for publication in English.

Social History of State Security in Postwar Poland, Czechoslovakia and East GermanyBook Reviews

Marián Lóži

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):766-770  

In Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe (New Haven - London, Yale University Press 2020), historian Molly Pucci approaches the difficult topic of the State Securities in Stalinist Eastern Europe. She examines the formation and development of the security forces during the crucial years of 1945-1953 in three countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. This allows for comparative findings on both the personnel and the functioning of the respective institutions in these countries. In the reviewer's opinion, Pucci offers a highly descriptive, informative analysis, providing a deeper understanding of the State Securities...

Beyond Economic Growth in Postwar East-Central Europe?Book Reviews

Martin Babička

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):760-765  

The book Austerities and Aspirations: A Comparative History of Growth: Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe Since 1945 (Budapest, Central European University Press 2020), written by the Hungarian historian Béla Tomka, provides a "triple approach" to economic development in East-Central Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia and its successor states, and Hungary). Aiming to go beyond the perspective of economic growth alone, Tomka considers economic growth along with consumption and quality of life. Taking a comparative perspective, he assesses convergences and divergences between East-Central Europe and Western Europe. In the reviewer's...

The Many Faces of European Parliamentary Cultures / Revisiting the Latest ResearchBook Reviews

Adéla Gjuričová

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):751-759  

The review article discusses several publications dealing with various aspects of parliamentary history in 20^th century Europe. It argues that although the books deal with very different topics and have been created at research institutions with varied backgrounds, they share the approach of studying parliamentary cultures. This perspective has the capacity to include rhetorical, procedural, social, gender, visual and other characteristics in the analysis and as such represents a rare opportunity to make political history research highly relevant, sensitive and interdisciplinary.

The Myth of Defending the Homeland / Combat Preparation in Conscripts’ Reflections of Compulsory Military Service (1968–2004)Essays and Articles

Jiří Hlaváček

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):725-747 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.051  

The article focuses on conscripts' reflections of compulsory military service in the Czechoslovak and Czech army in 1968-2004, as experienced by different generations. I pay attention mainly to the narrative representation of certain aspects of the meaning of compulsory military service, namely the conscripts' preparedness for the defence of their country and actual deployment in combat. This is done through an analysis and interpretation of oral history interviews. On a practical level, I explore reflections of military exercises, the relation of contemporary witnesses to weapons and their potential use, evaluation of combat vehicles and effectiveness...

From Democrats to Liberals / The Ambiguous Origins of Liberals and Civil Society in Slovakia after 1989Essays and Articles

Matej Ivančík

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):706-724 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.052  

This paper critically examines the process of politicization of the Slovak democratic protagonists gathered in and around the civic movement Public Against Violence (Verejnosť proti násiliu, VPN), from the 1989 democratic revolution to the 1992 elections. By politicization I mean the process through which the examined subjects underwent a transformation from a democratic movement to a liberal-democratic political party. I focus on particular protagonists within VPN as well as on their interactions with other political subjects. For this purpose, I employ two methodological approaches. The first is borrowed from Robert Brier’s reading of Skinnerian...

Anglo-Czech Relations and the Munich CrisisEssays and Articles

Peter Neville

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):676-705 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.033  

The focus of the article is the poor quality of British diplomats in Prague between 1919 and 1939. The article shows this to be a result of a cult of ignorance in the British Diplomatic Service. The Sudetenland German aristocracy was much preferred to Czechs and Slovaks, something which was clearly evident during Lord Runciman's mediation process in 1938. The inability of diplomats like Basil Newton to profit from periods of service in Berlin, where the true nature of Nazism should have been clear, was evident. The article does also show however, that the Czechoslovak government did not always act to its best advantage. Remarks by President Tomáš Masaryk...

“Tripe Soup for All Women!” / Transgression of Gender Boundaries as Part of Female Identity in Communist and Contemporary BulgariaEssays and Articles

Albena Shkodrova

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):648-675 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.050  

There is growing interest into how cultural frameworks produce stereotypes of "masculine" and "feminine" foods. The patterns and dynamics of this process have been discussed mainly from a socio-cultural perspective, but the research thus far has failed to create a conceptual framework to explain both the persistence in the association of some foods with a specific gender and shifts in others. Based on a case study of attitudes in communist and post-communist Bulgaria towards tripe-soup - a dish with great potential to be perceived as manly - this article suggests that it is useful to consider food gendering as composed of several levels of codification....

Socialist Luxury on a Fork / Haute Cuisine in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1969Essays and Articles

Martin Franc

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(3):619-647 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.049  

The study deals with top gastronomy in Czechoslovakia from the establishment of the communist regime in 1948 to the end of the 1960s. I first recall the local tradition of haute cuisine in the interwar era when Czechoslovakia was clearly on the periphery of the gastronomic map of Europe and was trying to adapt the inspirations from more advanced centres. This effort, however, was seriously undermined by the Second World War and by the communist takeover soon afterwards. If in 1945, after all the post-war difficulties, it was still possible to hope for a positive turnaround, the consequences of the changes in 1948 were absolutely devastating, making...

AnotaceAnotations

Jiří Křesťan, Marek Šmíd, Pavel Kreisinger

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):589-595  

Spanish Communist Exile Behind the Iron CurtainBook Reviews

Hana Bortlová-Vondráková

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):573-586  

In her book Españoles tras el Telón de Acero: El exilio republicano y comunista en la Europa socialista (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2018), the Spanish historian Matilde Eiroa seeks to draw a vivid image of the political and social trajectory of the Spanish anti-Francoist exile in the countries referred to as people's democracies after the Second World War. The author builds on a solid knowledge of specific cases and individual countries but in her conclusions she goes beyond the borders of individual states. The book therefore fulfils its synthetic ambitions and represents a fundamental contribution to the study of the Spanish Republican and...

Post-Soviet Wars over the Great Patriotic WarBook Reviews

Klára Trávníčková

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):567-572  

The review presents a collective monograph entitled War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, Memory Studies series), which is a work by an international team of authors and was published thanks to the care of four editors: Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila and Tatiana Zhurzhenko. In the individual studies that are grouped into bigger parts, the authors seek to capture the place and role of World War II in the politics of memory and collective historical memory of three East European countries. The reviewer praises the work for giving Ukraine and Belarus the same attention as Russia and also for echoing...

On Underground Over and Over Again and Never OtherwiseBook Reviews

Marta Edith Holečková

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):561-566  

In her summary review, the reviewer assesses three collective volumes on the Czechoslovak, or rather Czech, underground culture of the 1970s and 1980s, which were published under the titles Reflexe undergroundu [Reflections on the Underground], Podhoubí undergroundu [Hotbed of the Underground] and Od mániček k undergroundu [From Long-hairs to the Underground], and edited by Ladislav Kudrna (Praha: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2016, 2018 and 2019). The individual volumes summarize contributions from three conferences on the issue of the underground during the normalization period. According to the reviewer, the books suffer considerably from...

Novotný’s Museumsberg and a Rather “Wild” MacuraBook Reviews

Petr Roubal

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):555-560  

Art historian Veronika Rollová's book entitled Pražský hrad na cestě ke komunistické utopii [Prague Castle on the path to the communist Utopia] (Prague: Vysoká škola uměleckoprůmyslová, 2019) studies the interactions between political power, Marxist ideology and artistic creativity at Prague Castle in the first two decades of the communist regime, and represents, according to the reviewer, an important attempt to capture the place and transformations of this unique symbol on the political-geographic map of post-war Czechoslovakia. Focusing on the role of Czechoslovak presidents, in particular Antonín Novotný (1904-1975, in office 1957-1968), and the...

Collective Violence in the Czech Lands as a Way of GovernanceBook Reviews

Jakub Střelec

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):547-554  

Jaromír Mrňka's monograph entitled Limity lidskosti: Politika a sociální praxe kolektivního násilí v českých zemích 1944-1946 [Limits of Humanity: Politics and Social Practice of Collective Violence in the Czech lands, 1944-1946] (Prague: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2019) focuses on the social practice of collective violence in the Czech lands in the last months of German occupation and the first months of liberated Czechoslovakia. The author portrays the Czech lands in this period as a space of uncontrolled violence, which was committed by different actors and related, first, mainly to the Nazi terror during the death marches, death transports...

Well-made Czech Monograph on the Resistance in Occupied EuropeBook Reviews

Tomáš Hubálek

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):542-546  

According to the reviewer, in this monograph, entitled Evropa v plamenech: Protifašistický odboj v období druhé světové války se zaměřením na region střední Evropy [Europe in flames: Anti-fascist resistance in the World War II with the focus on the Central European region] (Prague: Epocha, 2019), Pavel Kopeček offers interested readers from the ranks of expert and lay public a clear, readable and high-quality summary of the findings on different forms of anti-Nazi resistance in the individual countries of occupied Europe in 1939-1945. While focusing primarily on the Central European countries (including Germany), which he describes in separate chapters,...

Major Shift in Research into Slovak State HistoryBook Reviews

Michaela Lenčéšová

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):532-541  

The reviewer sets the monograph of the Slovak historian Miloslav Szabó, entitled Klérofašisti: Slovenskí kňazi a pokušenie radikálnej politiky [Clerical fascists: Slovak clergy and the temptation of radical policy (1935-1945)] (Bratislava: Slov- art, 2019), in the context of contemporary transnational research works and debates on the relation between Catholicism and fascism in the 20th century. The author drew inspiration from the methodological tools of research into hybrid forms of fascism and from the concept of clerical fascism, which he applied to the environment of the Slovak Christians, mainly Catholic clerics, in the late period of the First...

Transformation of Czech Labour from Nazism to SocialismBook Reviews

Adam Šumichrast

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):526-531  

For some period after the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, the history of workers and the labour movement have been marginalized in the local historiography. The reviewer notes with gratitude that with the publishing of the extensive synthetic work of Dušan Janák, Stanislav Kokoška and a team of their collaborators entitled Průmyslové dělnictvo v českých zemích v letech 1938-1948 [Industrial workers in the Czech lands in 1938-1948] (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) this situation changes considerably. The publication captures the transformation of Czech labour during the critical decade from the end of the First...

Trilogy on Czechoslovaks in the Gulag campsBook Reviews

Milada Polišenská

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):513-525  

In the three volumes published under the common title Čechoslováci v Gulagu [Czechoslovaks in the Gulag] (Prague: Česká televize and Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2017, 2018 and 2019), the authors Jan Dvořák, Jaroslav Formánek and Adam Hradilek chart the fate of Czechs and Slovaks who had been interned and in some cases executed in the Soviet camps in the period between the 1920s and 1950s (the first volume's subtitle is Životní osudy krajanů postižených politickými represemi v Sovětském svazu [Life fate of the compatriots suffering political repressions in the Soviet Union], the two following volumes were both published with the subtitle Příběhy...

Experience and Think about 1968 while Watching TVBook Reviews

Jiří Hoppe

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):502-509  

The author provides information on the "Programme 68" project which makes available on the Czech TV website records of a number of programmes that had been broadcast by Czechoslovak TV in 1968, including political journalism and reporting. The project was put together by the historians and television archivists Jakub Adamus and Jakub Hošek and is available under the title "TV programme 1968" on the website https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/specialy/totostoleti/program-68#/. The author draws attention to some noteworthy programmes in which important public figures of the time come to life and points to the authentic visual atmosphere of the debates, interviews...

Prominent, Permitted, Undesirable, Prohibited... Lists and files of Czech writers as a tool of transforming the structure of literature during the ProtectorateMaterials

Kateřina Piorecká

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):469-498  

With this research into the cultural policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the author demonstrates the importance of official lists, records and files of Czech writers in the process of creating a comprehensive system of regulation of Czech literature and culture in 1939-1945. She describes the administrative changes in the management of Czech culture at the time, which gradually became concentrated in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment under the leadership of Emanuel Moravec (1893-1945) and in the Office of the Reich Protector. The lists and records created within these institutions became the main instrument of this centralized management....

Inventor and Innovator. Small socialist business within the limits of normalization plansEssays and Articles

Blanka Nyklová - Hana Daňková

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):433-466 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.008  

The inventions and innovations movement in Czechoslovakia, which developed here on a massive scale with state support after the communist coup of 1948, has so far received little attention in historical research. The study examines how this movement was reflected and  publicized on the pages of the Inventor and Innovator (Vynálezce a zlepšovatel) journal, which was published from 1969 to 1990 by the Czechoslovak Scientific and Technical Society (until 1989). The authors focus principally on three levels: firstly, the normative definition of inventions and innovations in the legislation during the period of state socialism and its institutional...

Immanuel Wallerstein: History of Capitalism, Global Inequality and World RevolutionEssays and Articles

Karel Černý

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):390-432 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.035  

This review essay is published on the occasion of the recent death of the American historical sociologist Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1930-2019) and seeks to present, in outline, his ambitious work resulting in a major theory of the evolution of global capitalism. The author therefore looks first into the origin, expansion and structure of the world capitalist system and later examines the way in which Wallerstein explains the persistence or increase of inequalities in this system. In this context, he develops thoughts on Kondratieff waves, but also offers other alternative views on the long economic cycles not explored by Wallerstein. Apart from...

Conceptual Labyrinths. For as many concepts of totalitarianism as you know, so many times are you a revisionist?Essays and Articles

Radek Buben - Martin Štefek

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):353-389 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.007  

The article offers an insight into the intellectual history of theories of totalitarianism and in an innovative way approaches the conflict between the proponents of different concepts of totalitarianism and the so-called revisionists. It seeks to provide a brief overview of the very complicated and, on both sides, very diverse debates and disputes. The authors deal with intellectual, societal and political sources of the theories of totalitarianism and offer their periodization in two waves and in important national contexts (Germany, Italy, France, and the United States). They also point out that more often than not the term "totalitarianism" is...

To Know and to Build. Continuities of urban expertise illustrated by the case of Bratislava in the “short” twentieth centuryEssays and Articles

Matěj Spurný

Soudobé dějiny 2021, 28(2):315-352 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.009  

Between 1918 and 1989, Bratislava witnessed at least four major political upheavals, formed part of different states, and its entire social, political and economic order fundamentally changed several times, as well as the position of the city – from the centre of part of Czechoslovakia to the capital of the formally independent state. The main aim of this study is to analyse the development, planning and construction of Bratislava throughout this entire turbulent period, while pointing mainly to the continuities and connections that go beyond these political upheavals. The study focuses on a largely Slovak epistemic community of architects and...