The Shifting Boundaries of Dictatorship in the Light of Citizen Complaints

Tomáš Vilímek, Václav Rameš

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):17-42 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2022.002  

In the introductory essay to the thematic section “Citizen Complaints in Communist Czechoslovakia”, the authors present the theoretical background of this project as well as foreign research into complaints made to official institutions in communist dictatorships (especially in the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union). They draw on the concept of the “shifting boundaries of dictatorships” that has emerged in German historiography since the 1990s in an attempt to clarify the embeddedness of communist rule in the interactions and interrelationships between power structures and society in the GDR and how it played out...

“Dear Comrade President!” Complaints of Czechoslovak Citizens Addressed to the President of the Republic between 1970 and 1989

Tomáš Vilímek

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):43-89 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2022.001  

The study focuses on the hitherto neglected issue of complaints that citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic made to their President and his Office between 1970 and 1989. The author describes the activities of the Complaints Department of the Presidential Office and how the complainants' agenda evolved both quantitatively and qualitatively during the period of normalization. He presents the social, ethnic, regional and gender profile of the authors of the complaints, their motivation, common themes and the typical linguistic means the writers used. Using archival sources, he then analyses the five most numerous and important problem areas of...

Under the Supervision of the VLK. The People’s Control Committee of the Slovak Socialist Republic and Citizen Complaints and Suggestions, 1971–1990

Jaroslav Pažout

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):90-129 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2022.017  

The People's Control Committee of the Slovak Socialist Republic (Výbor lidové kontroly - VLK SSR) was the highest control body in the eastern part of the Czechoslovak Federation from its establishment in 1971 until its termination in 1990. An important part of its work was monitoring the agenda of citizen complaints, statements and suggestions, which represent an important source for our understanding of society and its interactions with the state authorities and bodies during the period of Czechoslovak normalization. The People's Control Committee dealt with submissions directly addressed to them, but also kept records of submissions addressed to...

Insights into the Changing Mood of Society. Czechoslovak Radio and the Letters of Its Listeners, 1948–1989

Oldřich Tůma

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):130-146 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2022.018  

The article deals with the letters sent to the Czechoslovak Radio by its listeners during the communist era. The author first characterizes this type of source and suggests that its testimonial value is diminished by the fact that the letters have not survived and have only been reproduced in selective samples (with varying degrees of reliability), mostly in overview reports for a certain period. In terms of the subject matter, the author distinguishes four stages during this forty-year period. From February 1948 until roughly the mid-1950s, propagandistic rhetoric dominated radio broadcasts with the surviving letters from the listeners being mostly...

“Don’t Put a Full Stop at the End of My Manuscript...”: More on the Case of Konstantin Biebl’s Suicide

Jana Tůma Königsmarková

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):147-187 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2021.036  

This article addresses the last creative period of the poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) in the late 1940s and early 1950s and explores in a broader cultural-political context, taking into consideration the poet’s specific character, the genesis of his last collection of poems entitled Bez obav [Unafraid] (1951) as well as the unexplained circumstances of his tragic death. Biebl was one of the leading representatives of the leftist art avant-garde in interwar Czechoslovakia. In the early 1940s he stopped writing. After the Communist coup in 1948 he tried to adjust to the period’s ideological-aesthetic norms applied to the new literature...

The Documentary Context of the Konstantin Biebl Case (1940–1988)

Jana Tůma Königsmarková

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):188-251  

Jozef Tiso Through the Eyes of a Polish Historian and Diplomat

Aleš Černý

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):257-261  

The subject of the review is a biography of the Slovak Catholic priest and politician Jozef Tiso (1887-1947). Tiso was the head of the independent Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945 under the patronage of Nazi Germany and was executed as a collaborator in April 1947, following a judgment of the National Court in Bratislava. The book Kněz prezidentem: Slovensko Jozefa Tisa [Priest as President: Jozef Tiso's Slovakia] is a translation of the Polish original Słowacja Księdza-Prezydenta: Jozef Tiso 1887-1947 (Kraków, Znak 2015). Its author, Andrzej Krawczyk, is a Polish historian and diplomat, the former ambassador to the Czech Republic and then to Slovakia....

This New Biography of Tiso Does Not Reach the Level of Today’s Historical Knowledge

Miloslav Szabó

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):262-269  

The subject of the review is a biography of the Slovak Catholic priest and politician Jozef Tiso (1887-1947). Tiso was the head of the independent Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945 under the patronage of Nazi Germany and was executed as a collaborator in April 1947, following a judgment of the National Court in Bratislava. The book Kněz prezidentem: Slovensko Jozefa Tisa [Priest as President: Jozef Tiso's Slovakia] is a translation of the Polish original Słowacja Księdza-Prezydenta: Jozef Tiso 1887-1947 (Kraków, Znak 2015). Its author, Andrzej Krawczyk, is a Polish historian and diplomat, the former ambassador to the Czech Republic and then to Slovakia....

An Attempt at an Objective View of Jozef Tiso

Michaela Lenčéšová

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):270-273  

The subject of the review is a biography of the Slovak Catholic priest and politician Jozef Tiso (1887–1947). Tiso was the head of the independent Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945 under the patronage of Nazi Germany and was executed as a collaborator in April 1947, following a judgment of the National Court in Bratislava. The book Kněz prezidentem: Slovensko Jozefa Tisa [Priest as President: Jozef Tiso's Slovakia] is a translation of the Polish original Słowacja Księdza-Prezydenta: Jozef Tiso 1887–1947 (Kraków, Znak 2015). Its author, Andrzej Krawczyk, is a Polish historian and diplomat, the former ambassador to the Czech Republic and...

Dimensions of Post-Stalinist Thinking

Marián Lóži

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):277-286  

The review deals with two monographs that examine the post-Stalinist period from different perspectives: Soudruzi a jejich svět: Sociálně myšlenková tvářnost komunismu [Comrades and Their World: The Social Mindset of Communism] by Pavel Kolář, originally published in German under the title Der Poststalinismus: Ideologie und Utopie einer Epoche (Köln/R. - Weimar - Wien 2016) and "Rehabilitovat Marxe": Československá stranická inteligence a myšlení post-stalinské moderny ["Rehabilitate Marx!" The Czechoslovak Party Intelligentsia and Thought in Post-Stalinist Modernity] by Jan Mervart and Jiří Růžička. The review describes both studies and focuses on...

A Joint Czech-Austrian Book on the History of Both Countries

Miroslav Šepták

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):287-294  

Sousedé: Česko-rakouské dějiny [Neighbours: A Czech-Austrian History Book] edited by Václav Šmidrkal, Ota Konrád, Hildegard Schmollerová and Niklas Perzi and its parallel Austrian version Nachbarn: Ein österreichisch-tschechisches Geschichtsbuch (Weitra, Bibliothek der Provinz 2019) is a remarkable and unique attempt by a collective of twenty-seven Czech and Austrian historians to work together on the history of Austria and the Bohemian/Czech lands (and Czechoslovakia) and their mutual relations from the Middle Ages to the present day. The book is a product of the Permanent Conference of Czech and Austrian Historians on Common Cultural Heritage, which...

A Voluminous Compendium of the Communist Secret Services

Prokop Tomek

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):295-308  

The comprehensive publication Čekisté: Orgány bezpečnosti v evropských zemích sovětského bloku [The Chekists: Security Organs in the European Countries of the Soviet Bloc] by the editors Krzysztof Persak, Łukasz Kamiński, Pavel Žáček and Petr Blažek is the Czech edition of the work produced by an international team of historians, which emerged from a project run by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. The book was originally published in English in 2005 in Warsaw under the care of the two Polish editors with the title: A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe 1944-1989. A German edition followed in 2009 in Göttingen,...

Czechoslovak Intelligence on the Eve of the Cold War

Klára Staňková

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):309-314  

Na prahu studenej vojny: Československé vojenské výzvedné spravodajstvo v rokoch 1945-1946 [On the Threshold of the Cold War: Czechoslovak Military Intelligence in the Years 1945-1946] by Slovak historian Matej Medvecký comprehensively maps the functioning of Czechoslovak military intelligence in the first two years after the Second World War. The work is the result of the study of a wide range of official sources and fills a vacuum that existed in the scholarship on the topic in Czech and Slovak historiography. The book describes the structure and the essential changes which took place in the intelligence services in these two years, and elucidates...

Cultural and Historical Images of the Enemy in Postwar Czechoslovakia

Johana Kłusek

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):315-320  

Obrazy nepřítele v Československu 1948-1956 [Images of the Enemy in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1956] by Czech cultural historian Denisa Nečasová examines four groups of enemies constructed by the Czechoslovak media between 1948 and 1956: the bourgeoisie; the so-called "kulaks"; Catholic priests; and the United States of America. The study follows the postmodern linguistic turn and focuses on the relationship between power, ideology and language. The discourses she examines are described and interpreted in four consecutive chapters. Nečasová captures the generally diminishing intensity of pejorative images, which corresponds to the loosening of the regime...

“The Marshall Plan for the Mind” Behind the Iron Curtain

Martin Nekola

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):321-327  

Alfred Alexander Reisch's Horké knihy ve studené válce: Program tajné distribuce knih ze Západu za železnou oponu financovaný CIA published by Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů - originally published in English as Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest, Central European University Press 2013) - is the subject of this review. Reisch is an American political scientist of Hungarian origin, and he is also one of the protagonists of the book. The classified project of distributing books, magazines and other publications to the Eastern Bloc countries, which developed under the...

An Empathic Portrait of Abbot Opasek and His “Good Work”

Marta Edith Holečková

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):328-333  

In his book Křesťanský zápas o českou věc: Působení opata Opaska a organizace Opus bonum v československém exilu v letech 1972-1989 [The Christian Struggle for the Czech Cause: The Work of Abbot Opasek and the Opus Bonum Association in Czechoslovak Exile, 1972-1989], Petr Placák, writer, historian and columnist, deals with the history of the Czechoslovak Christian association "Opus Bonum" in exile and its main representative, the abbot of the Břevnov monastery in Prague, Anastáz Jan Opasek (1913-1999). This lay Catholic association, founded by Opasek and the theologist Vladimír Neuwirth (1921-1998) in 1972, operated in Frankfurt am Main...

Institutions as Organizers of Social Life in the Moravian Countryside

Lucie Marková

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):334-339  

Babičky na bigbítu: Společenský život na moravském venkově pozdního socialismu [Grannies at a Big-Beat Party: Social Life in the Moravian Countryside in LateBabičky na bigbítu: Společenský život na moravském venkově pozdního socialismu [Grannies at a Big-Beat Party: Social Life in the Moravian Countryside in Late Socialism] by ethnologist Oto Polouček is a successful contribution to a better understanding of not only of the cultural and social life of the Moravian countryside, but also of the history of everyday life during the normalization era in Czechoslovakia. The central theme of the book are the social activities of the inhabitants of Dolní Kounice,...

American Saviours in the Shadow of Nicolas Winton

Radovan Lovčí

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):340-345  

The heroes of the book Vzdorovali nacistům: Sharpovi a jejich válka, originally published in English as Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War (Boston, Beacon Press 2016), are the Unitarian reverend Waitstill Sharp (1902-1985) and his wife, Martha Sharp (1905-1999) of Massachusetts. Both received outstanding credit for humanitarian missions commissioned by the American Unitarians to provide asylum, on the eve of and during the Second World War, to those at risk in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Vichy France. The author of the book is the American publicist and documentary filmmaker Artemis Jukowsky, the Sharps' grandson. In his biography he...

Looking Back by the First Bishop of Pilsen

Michal Sklenář

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):346-353  

The protagonist of the book V Boží režii: František Radkovský v rozhovoru s Tomášem Kutilem [In God's Direction: František Radkovský in conversation with Tomáš Kutil] is the Roman Catholic priest and the bishop František Radkovský (born 1939). From 1990 to 1993 he was the auxiliary bishop of Prague and then, until 2016, the first bishop of the newly established diocese of Pilsen. The reviewer first situates the publication in the context of other biographical interviews with contemporary Czech church figures and reflects on their significance for modern church history and for historiography in general. He finds it in the genre of testimony, not only...

Annotations

Jiří Křesťan, Oldřich Tůma, Pavel Kreisinger

Soudobé dějiny 2022, 29(1):357-363