“I Have Never Had Any Doubts about Anything or Anyone, and Now I Have No Choice but to Say that I Have Been Wrong All My Life” / The So-called Kolder Commission and the Impact of Its Revelations on the Party Public

Jan Dobeš

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):15-62 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.006  

In September 1962, under the pressure of advancing Soviet destalinization and critical domestic voices, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia set up a commission to investigate the political trials conducted between 1949 and 1954 against former high-ranking party and/or state officials and to prepare the grounds for the rehabilitation of those unjustly convicted. It is often referred to as the Kolder Commission after its chairman, Drahomír Kolder (1925–1972), a member of the broader party leadership. This study provides a comprehensive account of the circumstances of its formation, composition, functioning,...

Justice Unfinished / The Role of the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters in the Rehabilitation Process in Czechoslovakia (1968–1970)

Klára Pinerová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):63-88 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.061  

From the mid-1960s, discussions about reforming Soviet-style socialism were taking place in Czechoslovakia. The culmination of all these efforts came in 1968, when censorship was abolished and the media began to perform the role of public oversight. The rehabilitation of the victims of the political trials after February 1948, when the Communist Party had taken power in the country, was one of the issues that dominated the public space. Two social organizations entered the rehabilitation process in a significant way. Their aim was not only to influence the future shape of the rehabilitation law, which had been intensively worked on since the spring...

A New Albania, or Just a Piece of the Socialist Orient? / Propaganda and the So-called Friends of Albania in the Context of Czechoslovak-Albanian Relations at the Turn of the 1950s and 1960s

Matěj Křepinský

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):89-137 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.004  

Using materials in Czech and Albanian archives, the study maps the relations between Czechoslovakia and Albania in the dynamic period of the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s. Although initially they had quite an intensive development in the economic, political, and cultural spheres, later, from 1960 onwards, they experienced a deep and long-term political decline as a result of the split between Moscow and Beijing. The author focuses in particular on Tirana's propaganda towards Czechoslovakia, its actors, and changing content and reception in Czechoslovak society and he asks whether elements of colonial discourse can be traced in the perception...

Věra Šťovíčková at the Microphone / Radio, Politics and Czechoslovak-African Relations in 1958–1968

Rosamund Johnston

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):138-165 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.063  

This study focuses on the journalist Věra Šťovíčková (later Heroldová-Šťovíčko­vá, 1930–2015), who gained a considerable reputation and popularity as a foreign corres­pondent for Czechoslovak Radio in Africa between 1958 and 1968. She became involved in the Prague Spring reform movement and was forced to end her journalistic career after its suppression. She then made a living as a translator. After signing Charter 77, her translations were published under pseudonyms until 1990. The author focuses on Šťovíčková's African years and, through her professional trajectory, explores several more general themes, such as the development of Czechoslovak-African...

Denunciation as a Social Action / The Case of the Innkeeper František Policar

Jaromír Mrňka

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):166-192 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.005  

The phenomenon of denunciation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia represented the core of the post-war "national cleansing" process, yet it is still insufficiently researched and also highly controversial. It was a product of both the Nazi occupation and of Czechoslovak retributive justice. The denunciations took many forms and had many individual motives, and their assessment by the extraordinary people's courts reflected a keen desire to separate collaborators from resistance fighters and loyal citizens. Thousands of people faced similar charges in the courts at the time, and hundreds were sentenced to long prison terms or to death by hanging....

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Daughter, Historian and “Spy” / On the Scholarly Work of the “Other” Revisionist and Its Czech Reception

Jan Adamec

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):193-241 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.047  

This text is directly related to Jan Adamec's essay Dcera, historička, "špionka" Sheila Fitzpatricková: Nad vzpomínkami "jiné" revizionistky [Daughter, Historian, "Spy" Sheila Fitzpatrick: On the Memoirs of an "Other" Revisionist] published in this journal in 2023 (Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 137-166). In this sequel, the author shifts away from recounting the life of Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick (born 1941), to focus on her scholarly work from the early 1970s, when she gradually became firmly established in the American academic milieu as a respected expert on the interwar history of the Soviet Union and Stalinism. Adamec guides the reader...

Michel Foucault versus the Socialist Man / Interdisciplinarity as a Mainstream of the Humanities?

Petr Andreas

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):245-254 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.007  

The author of this review article focuses primarily on the monograph by cultural historian Denisa Nečasová titled Nový socialistický člověk: Československo 1948-1956 [New Socialist Man: Czechoslovakia 1948-1956]. While paying particular attention to the methodological aspects of Nečasová's research approach, based on discourse analysis and inspired by Michel Foucault, he draws more general conclusions about the problematic adoption of fashionable trends in Czech academic mainstream. In his view, Nečasová presents extensive heuristics, drawn from non-fiction texts, which offer a solid picture of the construction of the ideal of the new socialist man...

A Few Comments on the Article by Marek Suk

Jaroslav Suk

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):255-256 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.015  

From the position of a contemporary witness, the author – linguist, translator, and former dissident – reacts to Marek Suk’s article "Dílna Charty 77" published in this journal (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2023, pp. 385–413) and corrects some of the documented circumstances of his involvement in the preparation of the Charter documents.

Czech post-1948 History without a Slovak Context? / On the New Volume of the Great History of the Czech Crown Lands by Jiří Pernes

Jan Rychlík

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):259-265 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.009  

In the seventeenth volume of the Velké dějiny zemí Koruny české [Great History of the Czech Crown Lands] series published by Paseka, the renowned historian Jiří Pernes elaborates on the period from 1948 to 1956, framed by the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and Khrushchev's secret speech on the "cult of personality" at the Twentieth Congress of Soviet Communists. According to the reviewer, the work displays thorough research in Czech and foreign archives, knowledge of the literature and great authorial experience. The reviewer respects the author's periodization of the examined era, which differs from the established periodization of Karel Kaplan,...

An Extraordinary Chronicler of Ordinary Life in the Era of Collectivization

Martin Tichý

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):266-271 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.010  

The author of the main text published in the volume Mladočovské Jericho: Kolektivizace jedné vesnice [The Mladočov Jericho: The Collectivization of a Village], Jan Boštík (1901-1983), was a small farmer who resided in the village of Mladočov near Litomyšl in East Bohemia, an amateur of regional history and archaeology, and a "folk" writer. Throughout the 1950s, he chronicled in diary entries the collisions between the traditional village community and the communist regime, which was forcibly imposing collectivization. In the 1970s, Boštík transformed his writings into a comprehensive and coherent regional chronicle of a revolutionary era, and stylized...

The Prague Spring as an Impulse and Inspiration

Vlastimil Hála

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):272-283 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.012  

The philosophical starting point of the collective work Pražské jaro: Logika nového světa. Od reforem k revoluci [Prague Spring: the Logic of the New World. From Reform to Revolution], edited by philosopher Michael Hauser, is, according to the reviewer, the conviction in the real potential for development of historical alternatives that did not materialize. It is through this lens that the five authors (three philosophers, a sociologist and a legal historian) view the phenomenon of the Prague Spring of 1968 and explore some of its aspects. In a way, they follow the debate between the writers Václav Havel and Milan Kundera from the late 1960s, the core...

From Distrust to Pragmatic Cooperation / A Comprehensive Picture of Czechoslovak-Yugoslav Relations during the Normalization Era

Tomáš Chrobák

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):284-290 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.013  

The joint monograph by Ondřej Vojtěchovský and Jan Pelikán, aptly titled V čase odkvétání: Československo a Jugoslávie v období pozdního socialismu, 1969-1989 [Blooming Away: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the Period of Late Socialism, 1969-1989], comprehensively captures the mutual relations in the two decades between the suppression of the Prague Spring and the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. According to the reviewer, it is ground-breaking because the topic has never been dealt with in detail before. In addition to the development of political relations and economic cooperation, the authors also trace cultural interactions and...

Serbia between Tito and Milošević

Jan Pelikán

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):291-297 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2023.052  

According to the reviewer, the monograph by the prominent Serbian historian Slobodan Selinić, entitled Srbija 1980-1986: Politička istorija od Tita do Miloševića [Serbia 1980-1986: Political History from Tito to Milošević], is a ground-breaking work which deals with many issues that historiography has not yet touched upon. The price for this virtue, however, is the fluctuating quality of interpretation and sometimes a lack of clarity. Among the best parts of the book are the description of the rise to power of Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006) and the portrayal of the relatively tolerant attitude of the Serbian political leadership towards domestic dissent...

Carnival Overtures of the Velvet Revolution

Filip Jiroušek

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):298-301 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.014  

The Society for a More Cheerful Present (Společnost za veselejší současnost) was an independent civic initiative that was founded in Czechoslovakia in May 1989 and stood out from the dissent thanks to its jocular character. It did not set itself any serious goals; it mainly wanted to entertain, to parody the absurdities of the declining communist regime and sometimes to lighten the tensions erupting in the opposition. To this end, the Society organized happenings with political connotations in public places in Prague. In his book Happeningem proti totalitě: Společnost za veselejší současnost v roce 1989 [Through Happenings against Totalitarianism:...

A Compendium of Places of Memory of the Communist Regime in the Czech Republic Today

Niklas Zimmermann

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):302-306 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.016  

Five scholars from the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Markéta Devátá, Oldřich Tůma, Barbora Čermáková, Michaela Tučková and David Weber) have compiled an extraordinarily comprehensive encyclopaedia, Pamětní místa na komunismus v České republice [Places of Memory of Communism in the Czech Republic]. In the form of individual entries with informative texts and photographs, it records 807 different memorials in the Czech Republic dedicated to people and events connected with the period of communist rule in Czechoslovakia (1948-1989), which were created during the following thirty years of democratic rule (1989-2019)....

Soviet Men out of Focus

Vjačeslav Glazov

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):307-311 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.011  

In his monograph Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties, the American historian Marko Dumančić enters the broad field of debates on the post-Stalinist period involving a number of new trends by viewing them through the category of masculinities. He is interested in the forms and reflections of masculinity in Soviet society between the Twentieth Congress of Soviet Communists in 1956 and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's ascension to the top party post in 1964. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as contemporary Soviet films and press, the author traces the relationships between fathers and sons, men and women, and various male...

Anotace

Jiří Křesťan, Martin Dolejský, Václav Chalupný, Hana Bortlová-Vondráková

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(1):315-324