Stanislav Budín - komunista bez legitimace
Stanislav Budín, a Non-card-carrying Communist

Summary/Abstract: The article seeks to present as complete a picture as possible of the little-known career of the journalist and writer Stanislav Budín (1903-1979). It does so by focusing on the development of his outlook and his peculiar relationship with Communism and the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) to which he remained inwardly devoted for years, even after having been expelled. It also seeks to determine possible motives for Budín's positions and decisions, particularly for his loyalty. Budín was born into the relatively well-off family of a Jewish merchant in Kamenec Podol'skij, the regional capital of the Podolia Guberniya, Galicia. He experienced first¬hand the political convulsions that affected the town beginning in 1917 - revolution, civil war, pogroms. In the early 1920s he left Galicia for Poland. From there, together with a wave of Russian émigrés, he went to Prague, where he soon took a degree at the Czech polytechnic (ČVUT) and participated in the left-wing youth movement. He tried both Anarchism and Zionism but abandoned them, and was at first inclined to the Socialists. Gradually, however, he came to identify with Communism, which he would remain loyal to for the rest of life. He joined the CPCz in the early 1930s, when it was led by the Stalinist group around Klement Gottwald. Budín was entrusted with jour¬nalistic and propaganda tasks. After the dismissal of Josef Guttmann, Editor-in-Chief of the Party paper Rudéprávo, Budín was named in his place in 1934 and was later put in charge of the leftwing newspaper Haló noviny. He held these jobs until early 1936, when he met with the same fate as Guttmann. For his allegedly accommodating atti¬tude towards the Socialist in the 'united front in the fight against Fascism' he was accused of 'opportunism' and 'Trotskyism', dismissed from the editorial board, and, together with his wife, thrown out of the CPCz. This experience shook him so much that he even considered suicide. In the summer of 1939 he escaped from the Protector- ate of Bohemian and Moravia and made his way to the United States, where he found a job as an editor of New YorskéListy, a newspaper of Czechoslovaks living in the USA. He took the Beneš line in the anti-German struggle, and even criticized the Commu¬nists, but, as the war was coming to a close, he again shifted to the left. In 1946 he returned to Czechoslovakia and once more entered the service of the CPCz, though no longer a Party member. He wrote for Kulturní politika and other periodicals, and on the authority of Václav Kopecký, the Minister of Information, he began to build up the Pragopress propaganda agency. After the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia in late February 1948 Budín's rather non-partisan book about the United States became the target of criticism, and he was again rebuked for alleged Trotskyism in connection with the investigation into a parody of a new collection of verse by the Czech Communist writer Vítězslav Nezval. He was prevented from publi

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