Nedožité devadesátiny Milana Otáhala
Milan Otáhal Dies before His Ninetieth Birthday

Summary/Abstract: Milan Otáhal (1928–2017) was a leading historian studying the contemporary history of Czechoslovakia. In the 1960s, he was the head of the Department of Modern History of the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; in the early 1970s, he lost his job at the institute and was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He was one of the first signatories of Charter 77 and was active in the historical samizdat as an independent historian. Since the 1990s, his scientific activity was connected with the newly established Institute for Contemporary History. His main focus was the history of the anti-regime opposition and of the society between 1969 and 1989, and the role of students and intelligentsia inthe change of the political situation in the end of the 1980s. He wrote a number of factographically rich and interpretationally distinctive publications on these topics. The author of the obituary mentions principal contributions of Milan Otáhal to the knowledge and understanding of Czechoslovakia’s most recent history, emphasizing that he was a historian who was not only intellectually reflecting the period he wasl iving in, but who was also intensively experiencing and co-creating it.

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