AnotaceAnotations

Jiří Křesťan; Martin Dolejský; Pavel Kreisinger

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):635-641  

Historian Karel Durman Passed Away More Than a Year Ago / (13 June 1932, Bystřice pod Hostýnem – 14 April 2023, Uppsala)Chronicle

Matěj Bílý – Marek Jakoubek

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):628-632 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.047  

The obituary commemorates the Czech historian and distinguished scholar of Cold War history Karel Durman (1932-2023). Durman began his scholarly career in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, but after the defeat of the Prague Spring 1968 he was not allowed to practice his profession as a reformist communist. He emigrated to Sweden in the following year. He anchored at the Institute for East European Studies, University of Uppsala, where he gradually established himself as an internationally renowned historian of European history from the 1870s to the 1990s, and especially of East-West relations from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. He also...

Professor Robert Kvaček, Great Historian and Teacher / (5 July 1932, Dvorce u Jičína – 27 April 2024, Lomnice nad Popelkou)Chronicle

Jana Čechurová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):623-627 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.040  

The obituary commemorates the doyen and "guru" of modern Czech historiography, Professor Robert Kvaček, who was born on 5 July 1932 in Dvorce u Jičína and passed away on 27 April 2024 in Lomnice nad Popelkou. In the 1950s, he studied history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. In 1956 he joined the Department of Czechoslovak History and Archival Studies as an assistant and continued to teach there until late in life; from 1968 as an associate professor, from 1990 as a professor, and later as professor emeritus. He gained the reputation of a charismatic and highly regarded lecturer, attracting thousands of listeners from across various...

Pandemics, Crises and Infodemics at a Distance / Protohistorical Treatises on the COVID-19 EraBook Reviews

Pavel Mücke

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):609-619 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.033  

The reviewer reports on three publications on the Covid-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic. The first book, entitled simply Pandemie [Pandemic], and its loose sequel Pandemie: Anatomie krize [Pandemic: Anatomy of a Crisis], are the work of journalist and until recently Czech Television foreign correspondent Michal Kubal and media analyst Vojtěch Gibiš. The third publication, entitled Covid-19 infodemie [Covid-19 Infodemic], is the result of a collaboration between Václav Moravec, a journalist and well-known presenter on Czech Television, and a team of experts led by Ladislav Dušek, director of the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the...

The Ukrainian Twentieth Century as One Side of a CoinBook Reviews

Stanislav Tumis

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):597-608 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.035  

The reviewer offers commentary on the book by Ukrainian historian, civic activist, politician and, in recent months, soldier Volodymyr Mykhailovych Viatrovych entitled Ukrajinské 20. století: Utajované dějiny [Ukrainian Twentieth Century: The Secret History], which is a Czech translation of the original edition Ukraina: Istoriia z hryfom <> (Kyiv, Klub simeinoho dozvillia 2011). He regards it as a valuable, though highly unconventional contribution to the field of modern Ukrainian history. The book is essentially a popularization of historical material, compiled by the author on the basis of dozens of his journalistic columns. It presents a subjective...

The Contradictory Gorbachev / Taubman’s Biography Combines Consummate Erudition with EmpathyBook Reviews

Karel Svoboda

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):588-596 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.026  

The reviewed book Gorbačov: Život a doba by the renowned American political scientist and historian William Taubman is a Czech translation of the English original Gorbachev: His Life and Times (New York, W. W. Norton & Co. 2017). According to the reviewer, Taubman has made use of almost all the really important sources, including interviews he conducted with Gorbachev himself and his associates, and has drawn on his extensive experience as an author. The result is a wide-ranging, honest, comprehensive, detailed and reader-friendly biography. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1931-2022), General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...

Czechoslovak Publishing Houses in Exile between Cooperation and CompetitionBook Reviews

Marta Edith Holečková

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):583-587 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.025  

In his book entitled V různosti je síla: Exilová nakladatelství Sixty-Eight Publishers a Index nejen ve vzájemné korespondenci [Strength in Diversity: The Exile Publishing Houses "Sixty-Eight Publishers" and "Index" in Mutual Correspondence and Beyond], the Czech literary historian Michal Přibáň focuses on the two most important Czechoslovak publishing houses in exile during the Cold War. Both were founded in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the new wave of refugees arriving in the West. Sixty-Eight Publishers was founded in Toronto in 1971 and was run by writer Josef Škvorecký (1924-2012) and his wife, writer...

The Roots, Roles and Ambivalences of Czechoslovak Black Marketeering in Late SocialismBook Reviews

Ondřej Holub

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):578-582 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.023  

The book Marky, bony, digitálky: Veksláci a fenomén veksláctví v socialistickém Československu [Deutschmarks, Tuzex Vouchers, Digital Watches: Black Marketeering and Black Marketeers in Socialist Czechoslovakia] by Adam Havlík is the first monograph devoted to this specific topic, inherently linked to the functioning of the grey economy and urban life in socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and, especially, the 1980s. According to the reviewer, Havlík explores these in an unusual breadth, using various social science approaches and drawing on rich sources. He analyses the roots of blackmarketeering (veksláctví in Czech) in the socio-economic context...

The Story of Karel Gott as a Czechoslovak MoralityBook Reviews

Přemysl Houda

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):573-577 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.022  

Karel Gott (1939-2019) was the most popular Czechoslovak singer in the genre of pop music from the 1960s to the late 1980s and, for the more conservative Czech audience, remained so practically until the end of his life. He anchored himself in the so-called mainstream, and as a performer of hits with an extraordinary voice and supreme vocal expression, he had many fans in other socialist countries and also - and in particular - in West Germany. Many, however, perceived him as a kind of symbol of conformity with the communist regime during the period of Czechoslovak normalization. According to the reviewer, the biographical book Gott: Československý...

The Black and White World of the “Marxist Šalda” / Ladislav Štoll in the Cultural and Political Discourses of the Czechoslovak LeftBook Reviews

Jana Tůma Königsmarková

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):562-572 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.032  

The book by historian Vojtěch Čurda entitled Ladislav Štoll: Příběh komunistického ideologa a formování československé kultury ve 20. století [Ladislav Štoll: The Story of a Communist Ideologist and the Shaping of Czechoslovak Culture in the Twentieth Century] is the first critical biography of the Marxist-Leninist literary critic, cultural ideologist and politician Ladislav Štoll (1902-1981). He entered public life as a journalist in the 1930s as a defender of socialist realism and the ideological conception of literature in the disputes of Czechoslovak left-wing culture. According to the author, Štoll stubbornly adhered to his views throughout his...

From Semi-Detached Houses for Roma to a Romani Panel GhettoBook Reviews

Marie Černá

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):554-561 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.036  

In his book entitled Luník IX: Zrod rómskeho geta [Luník IX: The Birth of the Roma Ghetto], the Slovak historian Ondrej Ficeri reconstructs the history of the Luník IX prefabricated housing estate in the city of Košice, Eastern Slovakia, from the original plan in the early 1970s to build a new quarter of semi-detached houses for Roma, through the construction and operation of the prefabricated housing estate inhabited by both Roma and the majority population, to its degradation into a Romani ghetto in the late 1990s. The reviewer outlines the context of the development of state policy towards the Roma in socialist Czechoslovakia, which sought to integrate...

The Roma as “Bare Lives” / A Precise Analysis of the Borders of Citizenship in Interwar CzechoslovakiaBook Reviews

Jiří Smlsal

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):547-553 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.034  

The expression "scourge of the countryside" was a common epithet employed in the context of the so-called Gypsy question. It evoked the image of the Roma as a sinister group on the fringes of society that allegedly had a perverted value system, fed on crime, and ravaged the peaceful Czech countryside, akin to a natural disaster. In his monograph "Metla českého venkova!" Kriminalizace Romů od první republiky až po prvotní fázi protektorátu, 1918-1941 ["Scourge of the Czech Countryside!" The Criminalization of the Roma from the First Republic to the Initial Phase of the Protectorate, 1918-1941], Pavel Baloun employs this metaphor as the starting point...

Open Letter to “Soudobé dějiny / Czech Journal of Contemporary History”Discussion

Petr Zídek; Milan Drápala; Hana Bortlová-Vondráková; Vítězslav Sommer; Rosamund Johnston; Mikuláš Pešta

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):527-544 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.046  

In an open letter to the editors of Soudobé dějiny / Czech Journal of Contemporary History, the Czech historian Petr Zídek raises objections to the publication of Scottish historian Rosamund Johnston's article "Věra Štovíčková před mikrofonem: Rozhlas, politika a československo-africké vztahy v letech 1958-1968" [Věra Štovíčková at the Microphone: Radio, Politics and Czechoslovak-African Relations in 1958-1968] in the latest issue of the journal (No. 1/2024, pp. 138-165). He points out that in her text Johnston repeatedly refers to the book Czechoslovakia in Africa, 1945-1968 (New York - London, Palgrave Macmillan 2016) by the American historian Philip...

An Understanding Judge Who Doesn't Pass JudgmentDiscussion

Milena Bartlová

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):522-526 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.021  

The Czechoslovak communist politician and physician František Kriegel (1908-1979), to whom Martin Groman has dedicated the voluminous biography Kriegel: Voják a lékař komunismu [Kriegel: Soldier and Doctor of Communism], had an extraordinary career. He was born into a Jewish family in the town of Stanislavov in the Austrian part of Halych (today's Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). He studied medicine in Prague and joined the Communist Party. He led an international medical team in the Spanish Civil War and served in a similar capacity in China and Burma during the Second World War. On his return to Prague, he was involved in the Communist coup within the...

The Fourteen Lives of František KriegelDiscussion

Jiří Hoppe

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):514-521 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.024  

The Czechoslovak communist politician and physician František Kriegel (1908-1979), to whom Martin Groman has dedicated the voluminous biography Kriegel: Voják a lékař komunismu [Kriegel: Soldier and Doctor of Communism], had an extraordinary career. He was born into a Jewish family in the town of Stanislavov in the Austrian part of Halych (today's Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). He studied medicine in Prague and joined the Communist Party. He led an international medical team in the Spanish Civil War and served in a similar capacity in China and Burma during the Second World War. On his return to Prague, he was involved in the Communist coup within the...

A Communist with a Mind of His OwnDiscussion

Petr Zídek

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):507-513 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.020  

The Czechoslovak communist politician and physician František Kriegel (1908-1979), to whom Martin Groman has dedicated the voluminous biography Kriegel: Voják a lékař komunismu [Kriegel: Soldier and Doctor of Communism], had an extraordinary career. He was born into a Jewish family in the town of Stanislavov in the Austrian part of Halych (today's Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). He studied medicine in Prague and joined the Communist Party. He led an international medical team in the Spanish Civil War and served in a similar capacity in China and Burma during the Second World War. On his return to Prague, he was involved in the Communist coup within the...

Will Olomouc Fall Down? / The City Conservation Area in the Tangle of Local Politics of Late SocialismEssays and Articles

Adéla Rádková

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):468-502 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.039  

This study links the history of conservation and urban planning with the history of regional politics. The author focuses on the administration of the Olomouc City Conservation Area (Městská památková rezervace Olomouc) in the period of late socialism, with an emphasis on the 1980s. She describes the development of the conservation area in the capital of Central Moravia since the early 1950s, the progressive dilapidation of its buildings and the increasing housing problems of its inhabitants, as well as the regulated criticism of this situation in the regional press since the late 1960s. The collapse of part of an apartment building in the historic...

The Digital Reading Room of the Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic / Using Technology for Advanced Indexing of Historical DocumentsEssays and Articles

Marek Fišer – Tomáš Kykal

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):447-467 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.027  

Developments in information technology and artificial intelligence are providing tools that have considerable potential to facilitate and enrich research in the fields of history and related sciences. A prerequisite for their effective use, however, is the most perfect conversion of analogue historical sources into machine-readable form, so that the search, classification and extraction of the information contained in them is as efficient as in born-digital sources. In their study, Kykal and Fišer first provide an overview of the development of digital libraries and the making available of the results of digitization in the Czech Republic, taking into...

Contemporary Historical Sources / (Personal) Data Minimization, Storage Restrictions and (de)Anonymization in ArchivingEssays and Articles

Mikuláš Čtvrtník

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):421-446 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.045  

One of the primary objectives of archives and archiving in the public interest is not only the long-term preservation of archival material and its accessibility, but also the protection of the data that the archival material contains and, with it, the protection of the privacy and personal rights of the people referenced in such materials. Thus far, archival science and archival practice have demonstrated a tendency to overlook the potential risks associated with the misuse of personal and, especially, sensitive personal data contained in archival materials. One of the most effective tools for protecting data is destruction. Čtvrtník focuses his attention...

Dissent between the Politics of Memory and Digital History / On the Creation of the Online Database “Bibliography of Ecological and Environmental Issues in Czechoslovak Samizdat”Essays and Articles

Petra Loučová – Doubravka Olšáková

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):391-420 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.044  

This study focuses on the possibilities and limits of contemporary history research within the transformation of the humanities and social sciences influenced by new information technologies and the digital turn. The authors present the main trends of digitization policy in the Czech Republic in the context of the social debate on coming to terms with the communist past and in the context of professional discussions on the possibilities of the use of bibliographic datasets in the digital humanities. They focus on the role of digitization in the objectification of historical knowledge and its potential use as a tool for new interpretations of historical...

Digital History / Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Contemporary History 2.0 ResearchEssays and Articles

Jiří Hlaváček

Soudobé dějiny / CJCH 2024, 31(2):355-390 | DOI: 10.51134/sod.2024.043  

Contemporary history research in the digital age is increasingly dominated by digital sources. The study of these data requires not only different critical approaches for their examination, but also new competences on the part of historians of contemporary history, especially in terms of advanced user skills in the field of information technology. Since the end of the 1990s, this issue has been intensively addressed by the so-called digital history, which focuses on working with digitized or exclusively digital sources in hybrid research of the (not only recent) past. In his overview study, Hlaváček introduces digital history as a relatively young...

AnotaceAnotations

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

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

Soviet Men out of FocusBook Reviews

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...

A Compendium of Places of Memory of the Communist Regime in the Czech Republic TodayBook Reviews

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)....

Carnival Overtures of the Velvet RevolutionBook Reviews

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:...

Serbia between Tito and MiloševićBook Reviews

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...

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

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...

The Prague Spring as an Impulse and InspirationBook Reviews

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...

An Extraordinary Chronicler of Ordinary Life in the Era of CollectivizationBook Reviews

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...

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

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,...