Did Chartist Environmentalism Exist? Charter 77 and Environmental ReflectionEssays and Articles

Kristina Andělová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):351-384 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.044  

The question of ecological critique is an important research area in the study of Czechoslovak dissent and Charter 77, yet it has not received any systematic research attention. Scholarly literature has privileged research on (semi)official ecological movements or expert forms of ecological criticism and reflection on the state of the environment in the so-called grey zone, which became increasingly visible in communist Czechoslovakia during the period of normalization. The author raises the question of how Charter 77 related to environmental issues, and shows that the primary emphasis on human and civil rights initially side-lined their reception...

Prague Conference on Identities in Former YugoslaviaChronicle

Ondřej Vojtěchovský

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):665-673  

The author reports on the international historical conference "Centralist Ambitions and Peripheral Realities in the Twentieth Century: Contested Identities in Yugoslavia", which took place on 14 May 2023 in Prague and was co-organized by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of World History of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast Europe Studies (Leibniz-Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung) in Regensburg and the Croatian Historical Institute (Hrvatski institut za povijest) in Zagreb. Researchers from the former Yugoslavia, Belgium and the Czech Republic participated...

Political Personalities of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and Their Family (Dis)Entanglements / A Colloquium ReportChronicle

Kristýna Bernardová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):661-664  

The colloquium entitled "Ancestors and Descendants of the State Socialism Elites: The Fates of Families in the Czech Lands in the Long Twentieth Century", which the author reports, was organized on February 15, 2023, in Prague by historians Stanislav Holubec and Vojtěch Čurda under the auspices of the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Its main goal, which was fulfilled, was to present selected leading figures of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from various periods of its existence in the broad context of intergenerational family ties during the twentieth century. The colloquium had a strong sociological overlap, as the speakers...

Milan Hauner, a One of a Kind Historian of International Relations (4. 3. 1940 – 26. 9. 2022)Chronicle

Vít Smetana

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):651-660  

The obituary commemorates the distinguished Czech historian of international relations Milan Hauner. He was born on 4 March 1940 in Gota, Thuringia, into a Czech-German family, but grew up in Prague. His grandfather and uncle, resistance fighters in the Second World War, fell victim to the Nazis, generating Hauner's professional interest. He studied history at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. After the Soviet invasion in 1968, however, he decided to emigrate. He was awarded a scholarship at St. John's College in the University of Cambridge where he also earned his doctorate in international relations in 1972. In the following decades he worked...

The Merciless Memories of President Beneš’s NephewBook Reviews

Radovan Lovčí

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):642-648  

Bohuš (Bohuslav) Beneš (1901–1977) was the nephew of the second Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš (1884–1948). He worked as a journalist and diplomat in the United States and Canada, and also wrote both non-fiction and fiction. The reviewer appreciates the publication of his memoirs Synovcem prezidenta [The President's Nephew], written in American exile and edited by historians Pavel Carbol and Martin Nekola. The memoirs are a unique source for better understanding of the fates of many members of Beneš' extended family and relatives, who played larger or smaller roles in Czechoslovak public life, including his uncle Edvard Beneš,...

With Humour on the Lips Across Contemporary HistoryBook Reviews

Pavel Mücke

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):632-641  

The subject of the review is the book "Stretnú sa v lietadle…" Politický vtip v druhej polovici 20. storočia a v súčasnosti ["Three Blokes Meet On a Plane..." Political Jokes in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century and Today] by Slovak ethnologist Eva Šipöczová. The reviewer first reminds us that folk humour has long been a privileged object of interest of folklore studies and ethnology and that historiography only recognized its research potential in connection with methodological innovations in the second half of the twentieth century. He points to the basic works on this topic produced in Czech history in recent decades, and then...

The Meaning of Life, Inner Exile, and Creative Activity / The Many Faces of the Folkloric Movement of the Second Half of the Twentieth CenturyBook Reviews

Oto Polouček

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):626-631  

The collective volume Tíha a beztíže folkloru: Folklorní hnutí druhé poloviny 20. století v českých zemích [The Gravity and Weightlessness of Folklore: The Folkloric Movement of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century in the Czech Lands] edited by the ethnochoreologist Daniela Stavělová, details the history of the folklore movement in the western part of Czechoslovakia in the second half of the last century. The reviewer reminds us that the phenomenon of representing stylized artistic creation inspired by traditional folk culture is an important and still understudied chapter of the cultural history of the Czech lands in the twentieth century....

Past Futures of Czechoslovak Economic TransformationBook Reviews

Matěj Moravanský

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):616-625  

In his monograph Trh bez přívlastků, nebo ekonomickou demokracii? Spory o podobu vlastnické transformace v porevolučním Československu [A Market without Attributes, or Economic Democracy? Disputes over the Form of Property Transformation in Post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia], the historian Václav Rameš deals with the discussions and conceptual disputes on the form of economic transformation in post-communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. In this, a group of liberal politicians and economists led by the then federal Finance Minister Václav Klaus came to the fore with a programme of rapid and massive expropriation of economic enterprises...

The Story of Lidice’s Last PastorBook Reviews

Marek Šmíd

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):611-615  

In his biography Nejvyšší oběť: Poslední lidický farář Josef Štemberka (1869–1942) [The Ultimate Sacrifice: The Last Parish Priest of Lidice, Josef Štemberka (1869–1942)], the church historian František Kolouch tells the life story of a Roman Catholic priest who was executed by the German occupiers on 10 June 1942, along with other male inhabitants of the destroyed Central Bohemian village of Lidice. The biography of the extraordinary personality of Josef Štemberka, who had served as a parish priest in the village since 1909, is intertwined with the political, economic and social history of the village of Lidice, the local region...

The Revived Fates of the Ravensbrück WomenBook Reviews

Monika Vrzgulová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):605-610  

In her monograph Zpřetrhané životy: Československé ženy v nacistickém koncentračním táboře Ravensbrück v letech 1939-1945 [Broken Lives: Czechoslovak Women in the Nazi Concentration Camp of Ravensbrück, 1939-1945], Pavla Plachá focuses on the fate of women imprisoned in this camp who were citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic before 1 October 1938. This framework allows her to comprehensively and at the same time diversely examine women from diverse ethnic, social, cultural and territorial backgrounds: from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from the Czech borderlands occupied by the Germans after the Munich dictatorship, from the wartime...

A Deep Insight into the Sad End of a Successful ManBook Reviews

Martin Franc

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):600-604  

In her book Soukromá válka Huga Vavrečky: Mikrohistorie z rozhraní soudobých dějin (1945-1952) [Hugo Vavrečka's Private War: A Microhistory from the Edge of Contemporary History, 1945-1952)], the historian Jana Wohlmuth Markupová presents the fate of journalist, economist, manager, diplomat and for a short time also politician Hugo Vavrečka (1880-1952). The first Czechoslovak ambassador to Hungary and then to Austria, in the interwar period Vavrečka was also commercial director of the Baťa Works and, in autumn 1938, at a critical time for Czechoslovakia, a government minister. He was also the grandfather of the playwright and president Václav Havel...

As Told by a DiplomatBook Reviews

Jan Koura

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):594-599  

Diplomat and author of numerous award-winning books George F. Kennan (1904-2005) became an influential figure in American foreign policy shortly after the Second World War. As chargé d'affaires to Moscow, in the so-called Long Telegram, he articulated the principles that became the basis of the strategy of containment between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1938–1939, he worked at the embassy in Prague and thirty years later published a selection of diplomatic reports on the situation in the Czechoslovak Second Republic and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which he sent from Prague (and later also from Berlin) to Washington....

The One-Who-Must-Not-Be-NamedBook Reviews

Jiří Křesťan

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):581-593  

Jan Chadima's book, simply entitled Rudolf Slánský, is a biography of one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in 1921, who eventually became a victim of the largest trial of "internal enemies of the party" in post-war Czechoslovakia. Between the wars, Slánský (1901-1952) served in various positions in the regional and central party apparatus, and by the 1930s he was already in the party leadership. He spent the war in exile in Moscow. In 1945 he became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KSČ, and as such he had the main organizational role in building the mass party that took power in Czechoslovakia...

Displaced Persons as a Stand-Alone Research Topic? On Current Issues and Trends in Displaced Persons ResearchDiscussion

Jana Kasíková

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):567-578 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.036  

Displaced persons as a result of the Second World War have been the subject of long-term research, which has gradually developed into a stand-alone discipline. The author reflects on its development, current trends and future prospects. Using the examples of several thematic conferences abroad and the panel discussion at the Congress of Czech Historians in Ústí nad Labem in September 2022, she illustrates the specific areas of interest, the proclaimed challenges of the field, and possible interconnections with other topics. She finds the publishing and popularization activities of scholars studying the issue of displaced persons to be abundant while...

České soudobé dějiny – viděno odjinud (II. díl)Discussion

Christiane Brenner, Chad Bryant, Peter Bugge, Adam Hudek, Mark Kramer, Piotr M. Majewski, Niklas Perzi

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):528-566  

Czech Contemporary History – Reflections from Elsewhere / A Survey (Part Two)Discussion

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):527  

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...

The Czechoslovak Consulate in Kyiv as an Object of NKVD Interest in 1936–1938Essays and Articles

Jan Dvořák - Anna Chlebina

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):493-524 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.033  

The article aims to map the counterintelligence activities of the authorities of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del - NKVD) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic against the Consulate General of the Czechoslovak Republic in Kyiv, which existed between June 1936 and April 1938. The authors make primary use of recently declassified documents from Ukrainian security archives and diplomatic reports of Consul General Rudolf Brabec (1884-1955). They first outline earlier Czechoslovak diplomatic representations in Soviet Ukraine and point out that their functioning was of particular importance for the...

Charter 77 in American “Translation” / The Image of Czechoslovak Dissent in the American Press in 1977Essays and Articles

Petra James

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):443-492 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.045  

The study traces how the American press covered Charter 77's appearances in the first year of its existence, a subject hitherto unstudied. Czechoslovak dissent attracted international attention after major Western newspapers published the constitutive "Charter 77 Declaration" of January 1, 1977. The subsequent prosecution of the Charter's spokespersons and other signatories sparked a wave of protest and support in the West. The interest of the Western media was crucial for the dissidents, as it was the main way to inform the international public about their activities, and often the only way to get some protection against domestic repression. The situation...

The Anatomy of Another Reticence / Charter 77 Documents on the Third WorldEssays and Articles

Marta Edith Holečková – Veronika Pehe

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):414-442 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.039  

Although Charter 77, as the most important Czechoslovak human rights initiative of the second half of the twentieth century, focused mainly on upholding human rights in Czechoslovakia, in its universalistic conception of human rights issues, the initiative was also interested in human rights abroad. The article examines the hitherto unexplored relationship of Charter 77 with the countries of the "Third World", thus pointing to its global dimension. It asks why Charter 77 expressed itself rather sporadically and reticently about events in these countries and why a number of contemporary international political events did not resonate at all within the...

Charter 77 “Workshop”Essays and Articles

Marek Suk

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2023, 30(2):385-413 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.040  

The subject of the article is the hitherto unexplored process of the creation and publication of the Charter 77 documents - documents that fundamentally presented the opinions and analyses of this most important dissident initiative in Czechoslovakia between 1977 and 1989. They covered the state of human and civil rights in the country, various other social and political issues, and the situation of dissent itself. The author refers to this process as a "workshop", which he understands figuratively as a thinking and creative environment in which ideas, proposals and suggestions are born and implemented. In order to analyse the functioning of the Chartist...

AnotaceAnotations

Vojtěch Češík, Hana Bortlová-Vondráková, Jiří Křesťan

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

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

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.

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

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....

Laudatio on the Ninetieth Birthday of Professor Vilém PrečanChronicle

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,...

Adolf Eichmann, Executor of Orders?Book Reviews

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,...

The Politically Contradictory Legacy of Absolute SacrificeBook Reviews

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...

The Day of Shame but also DefianceBook Reviews

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...

Student Protests in Slovakia in 1956Book Reviews

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,...

Communist “Cleansings” of Slovak UniversitiesBook Reviews

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...

Personal Recollections of Forgotten Women from the Pen of an Art HistorianBook Reviews

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,...