"Říše mimo svět". Zdeněk Nejedlý a Rusko
“An Empire outside the World”. Zdeněk Nejedlý and Russia

Summary/Abstract: Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878–1962) is an important character of modern Czech-Russian and Czech-Soviet relations. The Professor of Charles University in Prague and founder of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Zdeněk Nejedlý venerated classic Russian literature since his youth. Contrary to that, he did not admire Russian music. As Karel Havlíček Borovský and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk before him, also Nejedlý had a number of reservations about the Tsarist regime, criticized excessive bureaucratism and general moral decay in Russia. Zdeněk Nejedlý found interest in both Russian revolutions of 1917. He strived to achieve objective awareness of Soviet Russia. According to him, Bolshevism was apt to bring positive impulses to further development of the country. However, in the 1920s, he criticised Bolsheviks, for example, for trials conducted to brutally settle accounts with their opponents or for state censorship. He expressed his opinion that the Bolshevist dictatorship was going to develop towards the Western democracy. On March 2, 1925, an association known under its later name the Association for Economic and Cultural Relations with the USSR, was established. For the duration of this association’s existence, Zdeněk Nejedlý performed its chairman position. The importance of the association was not limited to establishment of cultural, scientific, economic, or sport contacts only. In the 1930s, several politicians close to Edvard Beneš (especially the journalist Hubert Ripka) who maintained unofficial relations with Soviet diplomats in Prague became members of the association’s leadership. From 1939 to 1945, Zdeněk Nejedlý stayed in exile in the Soviet Union. He gave lectures at the Moscow University and worked for the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He admired heroism of Soviet people, became the Deputy Chairman of the All-Slavic Committee, yet getting also aware of Stalin’s regime brutality at the same time. In 1941, during the so called affair of Professor Militsa Nechkina, he was accused of bourgeois nationalism and forced to deliver a self-critic speech. After WWII, Nejedlý occupied various positions in the Czechoslovak Government. In 1948, he was elected the Chairman of the Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship. His respect for the USSR seemed to be unshakable. However, only his family and closest friends knew how hard he fought Sovietisation of the Czechoslovak education system, which was accomplished by the school reform in 1953. In the early 1950s, Nejedlý feared that he could become a victim of politically motivated trials. Zdeněk Nejedlý’s life story shows a typical fate of a modern intellectual who succumbed to political temptations.

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