“How a New Man Grows” / Miloš Jakeš as Regional Communist Official (1945–1952)

Matěj Bílý

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):15-67 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.010  

The article deals with the early phase of the political career of the leading communist functionary Miloš Jakeš (1922-2020), who later became a member of the new "normalization" leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ) after the suppression of the Prague Spring and served as its General Secretary from 1987 to 1989. This early era of his life is linked to his work in the Moravian region of Zlín (later renamed Gottwaldov). The author frames his study with Jakeš's entry into the KSČ in June 1945 and his departure for the Prague Party headquarters in autumn 1952. He first describes Jakeš's origins in...

Extending an Already Lost Game / Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Liquidation (1939–1941)

Daniel Putík

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):68-98 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2022.025  

The article focuses on the process of the liquidation of the Czechoslovak Foreign Service after the German occupation (15 March 1939) from the perspective of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Liquidation (Ministerstvo zahraničních věcí v likvidaci), which carried out its remaining agenda under the supervision of representatives of the Reich Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). The author focuses on the functioning of the liquidated ministry as a part of the Protectorate administration, on the personnel and financial aspects of the liquidation process, and on its culmination in the final dissolution of the ministry in January 1941, when only about three...

Nationalism as a Bridge to the Future / The Ideology of Slovenian Communists after Tito (1980–1986)

Michal Janíčko

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):99-136 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.004  

The study analyses the ideological orientations of the Slovenian communist establishment in the 1980s, their mutual intersections and their significance in political practice. The author identifies five simultaneously present orientations: Sloveneism (Slovenian nationalism); Yugoslavism (Yugoslav federalism); self-managed socialism as a specifically Yugoslav variant of Marxism-Leninism; political liberalization; and later affinity to the market economy. Slovenian nationalism had the strongest position in the actions of the communist elite (League of Communists of Slovenia, Zveza komunistov Slovenije - ZKS). It was particularly concerned with...

Daughter, Historian and “Spy” Sheila Fitzpatrick / Over the Memoirs of the “Other” Revisionist

Jan Adamec

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):137-166 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.014  

In the first part of his essay dedicated to the Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, a world-renowned expert in the field of Soviet studies, the author presents the beginnings of her academic career. He makes ample use of her self-reflections from several decades' distance in the form of autobiographical publications, particularly A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press 2013), which he supplements and contrasts with other secondary sources. What interests him most about Fitzpatrick's scholarly career is how she became an unorthodox and open-minded representative of the revisionist current...

A Personal Reflection on Some (Mis)Paths of Czech Historiography of the Last Thirty Years

Denisa Nečasová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):169-174 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.009  

In this discussion paper, presented at the Sixteenth Congress of the Slovak Historical Society (Slovenská historická spoločnosť) on 6 September 2022 in Banská Bystrica, Denisa Nečasová reflects on contemporary Czech historiography, especially contemporary history. She focuses on those trends that she considers problematic or negative. The first of these is the persistent positivist approach of many works that avoid historical interpretation and let the facts "speak for themselves". Paradoxically, however, implicit interpretations of the past sneak in, most often in the form of nationalist and anti-communist stereotypes. Politicization and ideologization,...

Czech Contemporary History – Reflections from Elsewhere / A Survey

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):175  

This year, the journal Soudobé dějiny / CJCH celebrates thirty years of its foundation. On this occasion, we reached out to selected foreign historians with a brief survey. Its purpose is to bring together diverse reflections on the current state of and trends in contemporary history in the Czech Republic. In the current issue, we offer the first set of responses to the following questions: 1. How do you think Czech contemporary history, as a discipline, is doing? How do you perceive the development of Czech contemporary history from the end of the communist regime to today? In your opinion, which topics and research perspectives remain "blind...

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Francesco Caccamo

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):176-178  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Maciej Górny

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):179-182  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Marcin Jarząbek

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):183-188  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Borut Klabjan

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):189-191  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Ines Koeltzsch

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):192-196  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Dušan Kováč

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):197-199  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Daniela Spenser

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):200-203  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Philipp Ther

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):204-211  

České soudobé dějiny - viděno odjinud

Martina Winklerová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):212-215  

A “Ragman” of Prague of the Twentieth Century? / Cultural History as a Postmodern Fresco

Veronika Košnarová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):223-233  

The book Praha, hlavní město dvacátého století: Surrealistická historie is a Czech translation of the original English edition Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton - Oxford, Princeton University Press 2013) by British-Canadian cultural historian Derek Sayer. It deals with a number of events, phenomena and figures from the artistic and cultural history of Prague and the Bohemian lands from the late nineteenth to the second half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on the interwar period. The reviewer is primarily concerned with the author's method. Sayer, she argues, takes inspiration from...

A Book Full of Empathy, But…

Dušan Kováč

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):234-240  

The well-known Czech writer and historical publicist Pavel Kosatík in the book entitled Slovenské století [The Slovak Century] has managed to describe Slovak history of the twentieth century as the story of the remarkable rise of the Slovaks from an almost anonymous ethnic group to a self-confident nation-state fully integrated into Euro-Atlantic structures, achieving this, as the reviewer argues, in an engaging and empathetic way accessible to a wider audience. The author examines Slovak history through the fates of leading political figures, and although some of his judgments are too sharp and clear-cut, the method chosen proves to be advantageous...

Between Repression and Progression / The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as a Laboratory of Social Policy

Martin Veselý

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):241-245  

Radka Šustrová's monograph Zastřené počátky sociálního státu: Nacionalismus a sociální politika v Protektorátu Čechy a Morava [The Veiled Origins of the Welfare State: Nationalism and Social Policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia] deals with a very complex and still largely neglected aspect of the history of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939-1945), its social policy. While taking into account the context of the previous formation of state social policy in both Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany, the author presents and explains the theoretical basis for the development and functioning of social protection institutions during...

A Rich Portrait of a Forgotten Revolutionary and Feminist

Jana Burešová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):246-252  

The politician and journalist Luisa Landová-Štychová was a lifelong feminist who, as a member of the Parliament of the First Czechoslovak Republic (in the years 1918-1923 and 1925-1929), entered the public consciousness mainly through her fight for the legalization of abortion. In addition to working for women's equality, she was involved in many other areas, including atheist associations, the anti-Austrian resistance during the First World War, organizing workers' aid, the anti-fascist movement, scouting, and the popularization of astronomy. Politically, she always stood on the left. She gradually moved from a social-democratic to an anarchist and...

Personal Recollections of Forgotten Women from the Pen of an Art Historian

Marta Edith Holečková

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):253-261  

In her book Ženy, které nechtěly mlčet: Tři československé příběhy [Women Who Would Not Be Silent: Three Czechoslovak Stories], the well-known art historian Milena Bartlová presents the fates of three women with whom she is connected by family ties and who are nowadays largely forgotten. All of them joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia due to their leftist beliefs and were later expelled from it. The author’s paternal grandmother, Vlasta Müllerová (1900–1983), from 1945 Mlynářová, worked in lower party positions after the war and later became director of a retirement home in Prague. Bartlová’s maternal grandmother,...

Communist “Cleansings” of Slovak Universities

Filip Pavčík

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):262-270  

In her monograph "Nespôsobilý na vysokoškolské štúdium": Previerky a vylučovanie študentov slovenských vysokých škôl v rokoch 1948-1960 ["Unfit for University Studies": Vetting and Exclusion of Slovak University Students, 1948-1960], the Slovak historian Marta Glossová is the first to systematically deal with the persecution of students in Slovak universities. Her examination spans from the onset of the communist regime to the end of the 1950s as well as discussing their later rehabilitation. According to the reviewer, Glossová has used the original archival sources to significantly expand on our existing knowledge of this persecution and has...

Student Protests in Slovakia in 1956

Marta Glossová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):271-280  

The Slovak historian and political scientist Juraj Marušiak's monograph Príliš skoré predjarie... Slovenskí študenti v roku 1956 [Too Early Spring... Slovak Students in 1956] is a pioneering effort to comprehensively treat the student events in Slovakia, or the so-called pyjama revolution, as the series of protests by Slovak university students in the spring of 1956 - the most famous of which was the Bratislava majáles May Day - is usually referred to. The reviewer appreciates Marušiak's thorough recounting of these events, as well as of the retaliatory persecutions not only in the context of the political and social conditions in Slovakia,...

The Day of Shame but also Defiance

Oldřich Tůma

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):281-285  

The collective volume Den hanby 1969: 21. srpen 1969 v ulicích českých a moravských měst [Day of Shame 1969: 21 August 1969 in the Streets of Czech and Moravian Towns] written by a team of authors led by Daniel Povolný depicts the mass protests of Czech citizens against the Soviet occupation of August 1968 and the quashing of the Prague Spring on its first anniversary. The reviewer compares this work with previous publications on the subject and notes that, in terms of interpretation, the conclusions do not differ in any significant way. However, thanks to the current greater availability of archival materials, it provides a more comprehensive...

The Politically Contradictory Legacy of Absolute Sacrifice

Kateřina Sixtová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):286-292  

The German historian Sabine Stach's monograph Politika odkazu: Jan Palach a Oskar Brüsewitz jako političtí mučedníci is a Czech translation of her published PhD thesis Vermächtnispolitik: Jan Palach und Oskar Brüsewitz als politische Märtyrer (Göttingen, Wallstein 2016) in which she examines, from the perspective of the culture and politics of memory, two cases of politically motivated suicides in socialist Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic: the self-immolation of the university student Jan Palach (1948-1969) on 16 January 1969 on Wenceslas Square in Prague; and the evangelical pastor Oskar Brüsewitz (1929-1976) on 18...

Adolf Eichmann, Executor of Orders?

Milan Mašát

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):293-298  

The book Adolf Eichmann - architekt holocaustu: Zločiny, dopadení a proces, který změnil dějiny [Adolf Eichmann - Architect of the Holocaust: Crimes, Capture and the Trial that Changed History] by the acclaimed non-fiction author Roman Cílek is intended for a wider audience with an interest in twentieth-century history, but this, the reviewer argues, does not diminish its scholarly integrity. Although it is not based on original research of previously unstudied archival sources, the reviewer believes that Cílek's book deserves attention for its engaging presentation, the appropriate and impressive use of various types of documents and its clear,...

Laudatio on the Ninetieth Birthday of Professor Vilém Prečan

Jiří Suk

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):301-305  

On 9 January 2023, Vilém Prečan, Czechoslovak and Czech historian, founder and first director of the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (from 1990 to 1998) celebrated his ninetieth birthday. On this day, at a festive gathering at the Institute, historian Jiří Suk delivered a congratulatory speech, which was again heard at a celebration held in Prečan's honour on 17 January at Villa Lanna in Prague, organized by the Anna and Jaroslav Krejčí Research Foundation together with the Václav Havel Library and the T. G. Masaryk Institute. The speaker stressed that Vilém Prečan was in fact the founder not only of the Institute,...

Karel Kaplan Has Died / August 28, 1928 (Horní Jelení) – March 12, 2023 (Prague)

Oldřich Tůma

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):306-310  

Oldřich Tůma in his obituary recalls the historian Karel Kaplan (1928-2023) as one of the founders, a central figure and a true father of the field of Czechoslovak and Czech contemporary history, not only locally, but also internationally. His life trajectory was symptomatic of a whole generation of Czech historians: he was not only a historian of post-war Czechoslovakia for the period from 1945 to 1968, but in many ways also an actor and co-creator of the era. Soon after the war, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ) and for the following sixteen years worked in various positions in its apparatus....

In Memoriam / “What Are You Working on Right Now”? To Karel Kaplan

Jaroslav Cuhra

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):311-313  

In a short personal reflection, Jaroslav Cuhra recalls his colleague from the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Aacademy of Sciences, the recently deceased leading historian of communist Czechoslovakia, Karel Kaplan (1928–2023). He points out that Kaplan is not an "outdated classic" of the field and that his research interests were not limited to political history. Kaplan was convinced that historians, regardless of rivalries, should work together to come as close as possible to a true understanding of history.

Anotace

Vojtěch Češík, Hana Bortlová-Vondráková, Jiří Křesťan

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(1):317-324