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This article focuses on the long-term trends in the development of social policy between the First World War and the mid-1950's. The author begins by summarizing the main ideas of his own previous articles and books. He emphasizes the continuity and discontinuity in the general conception of Czechoslovak social policy in this period. He also considers conceptual questions, particularly those that would help to explain how the basic terms are employed in historical analysis. The article moves between the two poles of the construction of causality – structural explanation and voluntaristic explanation. The content of the article can be aptly summed up in a neat metaphor: from Bismarck by way of Beveridge to Stalin. In personified form, this shortcut expresses the long-term development of Czechoslovak social policy: from an emphasis on principles of merit, characteristic of the traditional German and Austrian social insurance schemes, by way of a considerably more egalitarian national insurance from 1948 (strongly influenced by the British system), to the Soviet model of social security, which developed from 1951 to 1956. The article also considers important changes in social legislation in the Czechoslovak Republic in this period, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
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ALEXIJEVIČOVÁ, Světlana: Doba z druhé ruky: konec rudého člověka. Z ruštiny přeložila Pavla Bošková. 2. vydání. Příbram, Pistorius & Olšanská, 2017, 492 strany, ISBN 978-80-87855-89-8. Svetlana (Svyatlana) Alexievich (born in 1948), a writer with Byelorussian-Ukrainian roots who writes in Russian and sees her work mainly as a part of Russian literature, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015. The book SecondhandTime. The Last of the Soviets is the last part of the loose pentalogy “Voices of Utopia” (Golosy Utopii) on the late Soviet and post-Soviet (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) society, which was whose Czech translation was first published in 2015 (original Russian edition: Vremya sekond chend. Moscow, Vremya 2013). The reviewer describes her writing style bordering on both fiction and non-fiction, and Alexievich’s acceptance in Russia and in the West. The Secondhand Time is based on a number of interviews that Alexievich had with people with a diverse social status (mostly “ordinary people”) in Russia between 1991 and 2012, which the authoress amalgamated into an impressive work. The reviewer provides an insightin to life stories of the interviewees and their close relatives and friends, in which they return deep into the Soviet past, concluding that the book is a penetrating probe into forms of post-Soviet mentality.
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BALÍK, Stanislav – FASORA, Lukáš – HANUŠ, Jiří – VLHA, Marek: Český antiklerikalismus: Zdroje, témata a podoba českého antiklerikalismu v letech 1848–1938.(Historické myšlení, sv. 69.) Praha, Argo 2015, 500 stran, ISBN 978-80-257-1373-0. The authors view anti-clericalism as an important part of European modernization processes aimed at the church and its instituions. They monitor its character and transformations since the mid-1800s until the end of the first third of the 20th century in the Hapsburg Empire and the first Czechoslovak Republic, taking in to account differences and specific features in various social and ideological environments, in towns and in the country, and also in Czech compatriot communities in the United States. According to the reviewer, their monograph Czech Anti-Clericalism: Sources, Topics and Forms of Czech Anti-Clericalism from 1848 to 1938 permits perceiving the Czech anti-Catholic anti-clericalism in the European context as a multi-layer edphenomenon which had a significant impact on the society and politics of that period. Because of its comprehensive grasp of the topic, inspiring questions it asks, its broad selection of sources and publications it draws from, as well the compact explanations it provides, the book is definitely recommended to all who are interestedin the history of the Czech thinking and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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KOURA, Petr: Swingaři a potápky v protektorátní noci: Česká swingová mládež a její hořkej svět. (Šťastné zítřky, sv. 23.) Praha, Academia 2016, 922 strany, ISBN 978-80-200-2634-7. The reviewer presents the monograph Swing fans and zoot suiters in the Protectoratenight: Czech swing kids and their bitter world as the outcome of long-term,comprehensive, and almost exhaustive research of sources, impressive in both itscontent and its scope. The author concentrates on the Czech youth subculture associatedwith jazz (swing) music at the time of the Protectorate of Bohemia andMoravia (1939–1945), their lifestyle, habits, fashion, speech, and attitude to theoccupation regime, as well as the attitude of Nazi and Protectorate authoritiesto them and the music they professed. He sets the topic into a broad historical,social, political, and cultural context, for example when describing in an eruditeand gripping manner the evolution and propagation of jazz dances, formation andexistence of similar youth subcultures in Western Europe and United States, or thesurvival of jazz and its fans in the Nazi Third Reich. The author covers in depththe criticism aimed at jazz and its fans in the Protectorate and repressions againstthem, analyzes the relationship between jazz music and freedom in an inspiringmanner, and his interpretations and explanations abound with facts. The reviewerwould personally welcome only a better arrangement of some parts and more attentionpaid to jazz music as such.
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Wanatowiczová, Krystyna: Miloš Havel: Český filmový magnát. Prague: Knihovna Václava Havla, 2013 and 2017, 552 pp., ISBN 978-80-87490-75-4. Miloš Havel (1899–1968) was the most prominent fi lm industry entrepreneur of the inter-war Czechoslovakia, and the uncle of dissident-turned-President Václav Havel (1936–2011). The reviewed publication Miloš Havel: The Czech movie tycoon is his first biography, and the authoress intent was to depict his career and private life,particularly with a view to his status as a gay in the society at that time, relations and alleged collaboration with German authorities in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, of which he was accused after the war, and Havel’s life as an émigré in Munich after 1952. The publication aims at a broad audience, and this cannot be judged using criteria of film history; still, the reviewer regrets that the capture of the fate of the chief protagonist and other characters lacks a broader historical context. In his opinion, the amount of information the authoress collected in Czech and German archives, from other period sources, or from interviews with contemporaries is more admirable than the manner in which she treats it. It is true that she generally sticks to verified facts, but she prefers attractive episodes and colourful details to asking more poignant questions or undertaking a deeperanalysis. The reviewer also views the resulting portrayal of Miloš Havel as overly emphatic and not critical enough.
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In the beginning of his work, the author presents a brief list of publications on Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), one of the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which has hitherto been published in the Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), noting the politicized perception of this historical figure and mutually conflicting national narratives which his life story is set into. While Ukrainian view mostly adores Bandera as the founder of the Ukrainian statehood and national hero, the Polish and Russian (formerly Soviet) ones generally condemn him as a radical nationalist, fascist, and anti-Semite responsible for crimes perpetrated by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiya Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv – OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiya – UPA) in Western Ukraine in the 1940s. The author then proceeds to the publication of Polish-German historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe,Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide,and Cult (Stuttgart, Ibidem 2014), which is so far the first attempt at a scientific biography of Bandera. The author questions and argues against Rossoliński-Liebe’sapproach to the topic, which he claims to be conforming to many negative patterns in Bandera’s appraisals, failing to describe historical events without an a priori biasor presenting new views, although Rossoliński-Liebe used almost all published works on the topic, as well as a mass of archival sources and memoir testimonies. Rossoliński-Liebe equals Bandera with the Ukrainian nationalism, and regards the latter as a violent movement without setting it in a context. The author argues that ignoring the historical context, one-sided optics, and emotional judgments are significant weaknesses of the work, which thus fails to meet the demands placed upon a balanced scientific biography.
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The authoress comments on the three-volume publication "Czech Gipsy Rhapsody" of Jan Tesař from the perspective of the current state of knowledge of the Romany history in the territory of Czechoslovakia. She states it is an inspiring work, both thematically and factually and in terms of methodology and interpretation. She emphasizes the uniqueness of the narration of Josef Serinek (1900–1974), recorded by historian Jan Tesař in 1963 and 1964, as one of the oldest sources of Romany provenience on the history of the Romany nation in the Czech Lands in the first half of the 20th century, including their wartime genocide. She dwells for some time on several topics closely related to specific moments of Serinek’s narration, namely the involvement of Romanies in fights for the liberation of Czechoslovakia, evidence concerning the so-called gipsy camp in Lety u Písku, consequences of the First Republic’s law on “itinerant gipsies”, and Romani self-organization attempts in inter-war Europe. The strongest aspects of Tesař’s work are, in her opinion, Tesař’s interpretation of the holocaust of Romanies in the Protectorate, which caused significant damage to the whole Czechoslovak society, and the way in which Tesař sets Serinek, a Romany survivor and also a freedom fighter, into the narration about the genocide which the Czech population made a substantial contribution to. The authoress shows how fragile and unobvious is the Tesař’s picture of Serinek as a “Romany hero of the Czechoslovak fight for freedom” in the collective memory of the Czech society, including its Romany segment.
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Kertzer, David I.: Papež a Mussolini: Tajemství papeže Pia XI. a vzestup fašismu v Evropě. Translated from the English original by Radka Knotková. Brno: Jota, 2017, 534 pp. including annexes with illustrations, ISBN 978-80-7565-102-0. In his book titled "The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius IX and the Rise of Fascism in Europe" (original edition: New York and Oxford, Random House Publishing Group and Oxford University Press 2015), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the category of biographies and autobiographies in 2015, the American historian examines, in particular, diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Italian Fascist regime at the time of the pontificate of Pius IX (1922–1939). In the reviewer’s opinion, he follows their changes, from initial sympathies to disputes and a calculated compromise to cool mutual tolerance out of necessity after the outbreak of the war, against a wide backdrop of political and religious events in the inter-war world, making use of his rich historical erudition, readable style, and attention to attractive details to produce a plastic picture of the topic. At the same time, his work can be read as parallel biographies of Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and Pius XI (1857–1939), whom the author blames (in the reviewer’s opinion in a rather exaggerated manner) for co-responsibility for the rise of Fascism.
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Hinsey, Ellen and Tomas Venclova. Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova. Rochester (New York), University of Rochester Press, 2017, xvi + 405 pp., ISBN 9781580465861. The reviewer characterizes the publication as a book of confessions and recollections, in which Ellen Hinsey, an independent American researcher, questions Tomas Venclova, a writer, poet, translator, leading Lithuanian intellectual and Professor Emeritus of Slavic languages and literature at the Yale University. In his answers, Venclova summarizes and takes stock of his eighty-year life story, which was primarily associated with political events and the artistic, mainly dissident, community of the former Soviet state. However, the book of interviews also finds room for a more distant Lithuanian history with the country’s complex and equivocal political and ethnic situation, linguistic excursions into the nation’s past, or deliberations over phenomenon of exile. In the last part of the book, Venclova gets the reader acquainted with the life of the Lithuanian, Russian, and Ukrainian diaspore in the United States, and does not evade even controversial issues of the current Lithuanian politics.
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The author analyzes in detail the extensive biography of the Slovak Communist politician Gustáv Husák (1913–1991) who, ups and downs notwithstanding, ultimately became the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1969 and the President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic six years later. In doing so, he focuses mainly on chapters from the book "Gustáv Husák" by Michal Macháček (Prague: Vyšehrad, 2017) which deal with Husák’s activities in the Slovak Republic during the WWII, when he gradually joined the anti-fascist resistance and later participated in the Slovak National Uprising, and in post-war Czechoslovakia, when he, a top-ranking representative of the Slovak Communist Party, was actively participating in the struggle for power culminating in February 1948. He generally appreciates Michal Macháček’s extraordinarily extensive research of sources (including Russian archives) which the latter undertook, ample information on Husák’s political career and private life, convincing nature of most interpretations that Macháček presents, as well as accuracy and aptness of his characterizations. At the same time, though, he notes some factual errors and inaccuracies, provides missing historical contexts, and shows how the biographer – perhaps much too often – followed Husák’s self-styled renditions of various historical events and episodes.
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The edition brings a commented selection of texts from reportage publications and travelogues of four Czechoslovak writers, which reflect their experiences gathered during their trips to and stays in “exotic” non-European regions of the Soviet Union between the two world wars. They are: Julius Fučík (1903–1943), a journalist, literary critic and columnist, Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), a Czech-German journalist, reporter and writer from Prague, the Czech-German writer and diplomat Franz Carl Weiskopf (1900–1955), also born in Prague, and the Czech-Jewish writer, newsman and translator Jiří Weil (1900–1959). All of them were organized Communists (Weil was expelled from the Communist Party in 1935), travelling at an invitation of Soviet authorities, and their texts, which were published in Czechoslovakia and Germany between 1927 and 1937, presented a more or less idealized picture of the Soviet reality with a propagandistic air. The selected texts capture the authors’ impressions mainly from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, but also from other regions of Soviet Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Altai Mountains. Julius Fučík and Jiří Weil were specifically interested in the Czechoslovak cooperative of emigrant workers and farmers, Interhelpo, established in 1925 and operating until the late 1930s off the town of Frunze (now Bishkek).
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The extensive two-tome monograph titled "With the eagle and the lion", with subtitles "Stories of Czech military chaplains from the 17th century until the Great War" (Prague and Ústí nad Labem: Epocha and Univerzita J. E. Purkyně, 2018) and "Stories of Czech military chaplains during the dramatic 20th century" (Prague: Epocha and Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2019), deals with on a topic that has not been, until now, in the focus of attention of Czech historians, namely on transformations of the military spiritual service in the Czech Lands since the 17th until the mid-20th centuries. The author, Martin Flosman, concentrates on military chaplains in the Austrian, or Austro-Hungarian army, among Czechoslovak legionnaires, and also in the Czechoslovak Army in the period of the First Republic, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and first years of the post-war “people’s democracy” until the disbandment of the spiritual service in the army by the Communist regime in 1950. Although primarily interested in Roman Catholic chaplains, he does not leave aside Greek Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant priests, field rabbis, or imams, and analyzes their diverse duties. The reviewer appreciates the multitude of sources, whether published or not, the author’s comprehensive approach and coverage, and his perceptive description of the fate of military chaplains on battlefields, particularly during both world wars. The work allows to perceive the duty of military chaplains as a multifaceted phenomenon over three and a half centuries, and its gripping presentation, including many biographic medallions of priests, makes it open for a broad audience of readers.
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The case study describes dramatic lives of siblings Gerta (Gertruda) Freundová and Harry (Hermann) Freund in the context of the inter-war Communist movement. Born in 1908 (Harry) and 1909 (Gerta) into a middle-class, ethnically mixed (with German, Jewish and Czech identities) in Prague, they both were devoted under the influence of their mother, Terezie Freundová (1885–1982) to Communist ideals since their youth. Gerta was active in the Communist Student Fraction (Kostufra), became a dancer and ran a private dancing school in Prague. In 1932, she married Alexander Yakovlevich Arosev (1890–1938), a Soviet revolutionary, diplomat and writer, who was the Soviet Union’s plenipotentiary representative in Czechoslovakia (before diplomatic relations between the two countries were established). She then followed him to Moscow, where Arosev became the chairman of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (Vsesoyuznoe obshchestvo dlya kulturnoy svyazi s zagranitsey – VOKS), whose mission was to arrange trips and visits of Western intellectuals and artists to the USSR. However, Arosev fell into disfavor during the Great Terror and the couple was arrested in the summer of 1937. Gerta was accused of espionage, sentenced to death, and executed in December 1937, Arosev followed her in February 1938. Harry Freund soon started sympathizing with the so-called Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia for criticizing its bolshevized leadership. He founded a radical left opposition platform under the name “Leninist Opposition” strongly opposing the centralized Stalinistic course of the Communist movement, but also the alternative faction represented by Lev Davidovich Trotsky (1879–1940). After the demise of the First Republic in the autumn of 1938, Harry Freund with his group went underground, was arrested and imprisoned for several months. When released, he joined the resistance movement in the occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and perished in January 1944 while being arrested. Freund’s mother was the only survivor of the family the remaining members of which died in concentration camps. The author’s narration presents hitherto unknown biographic facts concerning the Freunds and also reveals a tragic link between their fates, showing that it was Harry’s opposition activities which provided alleged evidence on his sister’s espionage to Stalin’s repressive bodies. It also captures the place of Freund’s “Leninist Opposition” on the radical left-wing scene of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, and describes its political activities, opinion clashes and ideological dogmatism. It also shows how fatal the Trotskyist stigma was for non-conformist members of the Communist movement and how symptomatically the fate of both protagonists reflects the turbulent evolution of the domestic radical left-wing movement and Czechoslovak-Soviet relations during the inter-war period.
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Paul Robeson (1898–1976), an African American singer, athlete, actor, and Leftist political activist, visited Czechoslovakia in 1929, 1945, 1949, and 1959. He was in contact with official Czechoslovak structures, was writing about Czech music, and learning Czech. This article focuses especially on his 1949 and 1959 visits and Robeson’s economic and artistic relations to Czechoslovakia. It also explores the broader context of relations between Czechoslovakia and the Afro-American community against the backdrop of the early Cold War, decolonization processes, and the onset of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In doing so, it also looks at mechanism of cultural exchange within the Radical Leftist internationalist networks, including the dominant role Robeson played as the “introducer” of African American music and culture in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s, and also at views of Czechoslovak cultural intermediaries, such as writer Josef Škvorecký (1924–2012) or musicologist, journalist and music critic Lubomír Dorůžka (1924–2013), on jazz and African American spirituals, which contrasted with those of Robeson. In the Czech context, Robeson is mainly remembered through Škvorecký’s critical comments, labelling Robeson “Stalin’s Black Apostle”. US accounts of Robeson, on the other hand, have often, and until recently, presented a depoliticized version of Robeson, understating the importance of his international activities. A view of Robeson’s career based on Czech and US archival sources, as well as new studies on Robeson and the internationalist networks within which he was operating, cast doubts on both of these narratives and offer a chance to reconsider and re-evaluate this historical figure and the transnational dynamics that brought him to Czechoslovakia.
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Between 1918 and 1989, Bratislava witnessed at least four major political upheavals, formed part of different states, and its entire social, political and economic order fundamentally changed several times, as well as the position of the city – from the centre of part of Czechoslovakia to the capital of the formally independent state. The main aim of this study is to analyse the development, planning and construction of Bratislava throughout this entire turbulent period, while pointing mainly to the continuities and connections that go beyond these political upheavals. The study focuses on a largely Slovak epistemic community of architects and urban planners inspired by modernism, who were active in Bratislava or influenced its development during the researched period. The first generational cohort of these urban experts was formed by people who, since the 1920s, had drawn inspiration mainly from the environment of the Prague Czech Technical University, where they had the opportunity to become acquainted with modernism in architecture. After the Second World War, some of these figures created an important expert and academic background, from which, in the local context, emerged another extremely influential generation of architects and designers, which had a fundamental influence over the development of the city in the 1960s and 1970s. While some of them remained active well into the 1990s, it is possible to observe as early as in the normalization period (and this is the focus of the final parts of this study) how the approach towards the urban environment they represented was being gradually challenged and was becoming less important. The author analyses the relationship between the urban experts of several generations, as well as between the urban experts and other important actors who influenced the development of Bratislava. He shows how these experts built their positions and secured the continuity of their own approaches to the construction, or more generally, to the development and operation of the city. He also outlines how the ways they exercised their influence changed over the course of several decades and what factors – on the political, institutional and discursive level – strengthened or weakened this expert community.
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The review deals with an extensive book on the history of a quintessentially Czech leisure activity, the “tramping movement”, entitled "Putování za obzor: Tramping v české společnosti 1918–1989" [Wandering Beyond the Horizon: Tramping in the Czech Society, 1918–1989] (Praha, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny 2020) and written by five Czech historians (Jan Randák, Jan Krško, Jan Mareš, Jan Pohunek, Jan Špringl). The movement emerged in the early twentieth century and its popularity lasted throughout the whole of the century. In the book under review, five Czech cultural historians describe the history of the tramping movement in Czechoslovakia in admirable detail and also provide supplementary material and unique pictures. The reviewer welcomes the analysis of a highly interesting and academically overlooked phenomenon and recommends a shortened version for publication in English.
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The comprehensive publication "Čekisté: Orgány bezpečnosti v evropských zemích sovětského bloku" [The Chekists: Security Organs in the European Countries of the Soviet Bloc] by the editors Krzysztof Persak, Łukasz Kamiński, Pavel Žáček and Petr Blažek is the Czech edition of the work produced by an international team of historians, which emerged from a project run by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. The book was originally published in English in 2005 in Warsaw under the care of the two Polish editors with the title "A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944–1989". A German edition followed in 2009 in Göttingen, and finally, in 2010, the Polish translation "Czekiści: Organy bezpieczeństwa w europejskich krajach bloku sowieckiego 1944–1989", which forms the core of the Czech version. None of the editions, however, are a mere translation of the previous one. With each edition, new texts appear and existing ones are expanded and updated. The reviewer compares the different editions and presents the chapters which deal with the history of the communist secret services in the former Eastern Bloc countries (the Soviet Union, and more specifically in Estonia and Latvia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Romania), paying the closest attention to the Czechoslovak chapter, which is also the first synthetic treatment of the subject. Despite various partial shortcomings, including the lack of an attempt at a concluding summary, the reviewer believes that the volume as a whole provides informed readers with a generally clear, factually reliable and highly detailed picture of the origins, organization, development, multifaceted activities, crimes and victims of the secret services in the former communist European countries.
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