The study deals with political activities of the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia after the intervention on August 21, 1968, and its sympathizers from the ranks of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The authoress examines the topic in the early stage of the so-called normalization (until the spring of 1970), focusing on the local level; however, she sets her research into a broader period context and derives general conclusions from its results. Although the offi cial agreement on the temporary stay of Soviet troops in the territory of Czechoslovakia declared that the Soviet Army should not interfere with domestic affairs of the Czechoslovak state, the Soviet leadership kept devising plans how to make use of the presence of Soviet troops for political purposes. Soviet offi cers participated in the dissemination of Soviet propaganda, established contacts with local anti-reform party offi cials, spoke at their forums, complained about hostile attitudes of Czechoslovak political bodies, and thus kept pressing for a legitimization of the political arrangements. The authoress shows that local pro-Soviet activists, who had maintained contacts with the Soviet Army from the very beginning and been taking over its political agenda, were playing a crucial role in the success of these efforts. In line with Soviet intentions, they were implementing the normalization process ''from below'',initiating purges in various organs, demanding the dismissal of offi cials protesting against presence of the Soviet Army, participating in the subsequent political vetting. They were actively pushing through a change of the offi cial approach to the Soviet Army and helped break its boycott by the Czechoslovak society, which had initially been almost unanimous. In doing so, they were making use of their personal contacts to organize manifestation ''friendship'' meetings and visits of Soviet soldiers to Czechoslovak schools and factories. The authoress analyzes the reasons of the attitude of these activists, most of whom came from the ranks of ''old'' (pre-war) and ''distinguished'' members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and illustrates the development outlined above by specifi c examples. By way of conclusion, she notes that, although different forms of the CzechoslovakSoviet ''friendship'' since 1968 are often viewed as mere formalistic acts without any deeper meaning at the level of ''lived'' experience, they were, from the viewpoint of the Soviet policy, well thought-out and centrally planned propagandistic activities which contributed to the promotion of the Soviet interpretation of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion and discredited its opponents. and Přeložila Blanka Medková
This article considers the nature of Communist régimes, particularly in Czechoslovakia. The author searches for an answer to the question of whether the political and social system launched in Czechoslovakia in late February 1948 maintained its totalitarian nature throughout its existence, or whether, in its later phases, it had already become another type of totalitarianism, or had even developed into a quite different kind of undemocratic or authoritarian régime. The author develops the topic, which is still a matter of dispute, against the background of changing theoretical refl ections on Communist régimes. He fi rst recapitulates the main criticism of ''revisionist'' historiography regarding the lack of classic models of totalitarianism, and he comments on some of their competing interpretations, pointing out how later versions of the totalitarianism theory problematicized or weakened some of the ''revisionist'' criticisms, and also how they reacted to the changes that began after Stalin’s death in 1953. By comparing the two main approaches - one that declares that there is such a thing as totalitarianism, the other that rejects such a notion (or at least suggest its revision) -, the author traces the connections between the individual phases that the Communist dictatorship and society passed through in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989. He thus seeks to discover the extent to which the preserved structures and operations of the totalitarian way of ruling (dictatorship) changed or remained the same since the initial period (post-February 1948), and, at the same time, endeavours to discover how, over the decades, political ideas and value systems were preserved or, by contrast, changed in the consciousness of society. Conceptually, the author starts from the defi nitionof post-totalitarianism which appears in the later works of the political scientist Juan José Linz, and thus, after the end of Stalinist totalitarianism, he distinguishes in Czechoslovakia the period of early post-totalitarianism, the late 1960s attempt to reform the system, the Husák years of hard-line post-totalitarianism, and the posttotalitarianism of the late 1980s decline. In his opinion, the ''Normalization'' régime in Czechoslovakia, although weakened and increasingly dysfunctional, maintained many of the totalitarian structures (political, security, economic, social) and practices (of power, ideology, surveillance, and repression) until its collapse, unlike the régimes in Poland and Hungary, where totalitarianism was slowly eroded. and Překlad: Blanka Medková
The author fi rst summarizes the career of Jozef Tiso (1887-1947), a politician and a Roman Catholic priest. His entire political life was linked to Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party; he was always a representative of its moderate faction, and even represented it as a minister of the Czechoslovak government. In 1939, he became its chairman. In the First Czechoslovak Republic, he was a dyed-in-the-wool federalist; since the proclamation of the Slovak State in March 1939 until the end of his life,an advocate of Slovakia’s independence. As the president of the Slovak Republic between 1939 and 1945, he was responsible for Slovakia’s political regime, alliance with the Nazi Germany until the end of the war, and deportations of Slovak Jews. After the war, he was tried by the National Court of Justice, sentenced to death, and executed in 1947. The author analyzes in detail the accusations brought against Tito during the trial and Tiso’s defence, as the arguments presented by both parties were later used by Tiso’s adversaries and sympathizers. Czech politicians and general public after the war were united in their condemnation of Tiso; in their eyes, Tiso’s biggest crime was his share in the destruction of the common state. On the other hand, the Slovaks’ view on Tiso depended on their attitude toward the previous political regime in Slovakia. Furthermore, the author monitors how Tiso’s cult was formed in the separatist segment of the Slovak exile since the end of the war. It was spreading mainly in the United States, Canada, and Argentina, but the efforts aimed at Tiso’s moral purifi cation were unsuccessful. The article also pays special attention to Tiso’s refl ections in the Czech and Slovak dissent in the 1970s and 1980s. In the end, the author describes disputes over Tiso which broke up after 1989 in Slovakia and which were a part of the ''return of history'' to the public space. They were related to attempts for Tiso’s commemoration and historical rehabilitation, and found their way to the media, politics, and historiography. The essay is concluded by a statement that the Czech society is not interested in Tiso as a historical fi gure, but that Tiso still divides the Slovak one: a minority of the Slovak society sees Tiso as a hero and a martyr, while most Slovaks perceive him as an unsuccessful and discredited politician. and Přeložila Blanka Medková
Using the planning in Prague between the 1960s and 1980s as an example, the article deals with the transformation of the concept of a socialist city among urbanists and architects. The author describes how the generation of the inter-war modernist avant-garde inspired by works of Karel Teige (1900-1951) started reasserting itself again after Khrushchevʼs speech on architecture in 1954. Its infl uential member, Jiří Voženílek (1909-1986), became the Chief Architect of Prague. It was under his leadership that the General Plan of the Capital City of Prague was drafted at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. The author analyzes the plan as an example of the socialist modernism and urbanistic optimism of its creators who believed that, subject to a correct application of principles of inter-war avant-garde architecture, an urbanistic transformation might become the base of a social transformation of socialism. The plan envisaged sacrifi cing not only all residential quarters of Greater Prague built at the turn of the century, but also the very principle of a traditional city with a network of living streets which socialist urbanists saw as an incarnation of all evils that the development of towns and cities had thitherto been governed by: mixing of functions, too high density of population, lack of light and air. New housing projects comprising high-rise prefab residential buildings set in greenery were to become the opposite of traditional streets. The article explains how criticism of the housing schemes, the chief representative of which was urbanist Jiří Hrůza (1925-2012), had been growing stronger since as early as the mid-1960s. Infl uenced by works of US journalist and urbanistic activist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), he presented a comprehensive critique of socialist modernism and questioned they very principle of urban planning as a tool of social transformation. The intellectual skepticism was soon thereafter refl ected in urban planning practices in Prague; they abandoned the modernistic principle of zoning and acknowledged the value (fi rst urbanistic, later architectural) of traditional quarters. In the end of the article, the author analyzes how the urbanistic turning point was confronted with building industry practices and political preferences demanding rapid construction of fl ats and apartments. and Překlad: Blanka Medková
The article investigates how the Holocaust distorted and exploited in Cold War debates on the example of genesis and reception of the book Ghetto Warschau. Tagebücher aus dem Chaos [Warsaw Ghetto: Diaries from Chaos]. The book is a translation of the essay Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej [Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War], written by the Jewish historian and creator of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto Emanuel Ringelblum while hiding from the German Occupiers in Warsaw in 1944. Ringelblum addressed his essay to the Polish reader discussing the relation of Christian Poles and Polish Jews under German occupation based on his own experience and the material he had collected. It was originally published in several portions in the Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute, an early Holocaust Research Center based in Warsaw. The German translation was based on this publication and published in summer 1967 in a Stuttgart-based publishing house. However, the new title, introduced by its German editors, suggested it was Ringelblum’s diary. Above that the blurb and many footnotes highlighted the role of Poles as perpetrators in the Holocaust, while minimizing that of Germans. As the article shows, the book was prepared by the Göttinger Arbeitskreis ostdeutscher Wissenschaftler [Göttingen Working Group of Eastern German Scholars], a Think Tank with close ties to the German expellee community, campaigning for a revision of the Polish western border. Göttinger Arbeitskries used the book and earlier on excerpts of Ringelblum’s text for a smear-campaign in the West-German expellee press. Through the biased presentation and distorted context of the work these former Ostforschers sought to portrait Poles as eternal anti-Semites and the factual perpetrators of the mass murder of Polish and European Jews following their anti-Polish agenda. Polish nationalist within the ruling Polish United Workers Party in turn exploited the book and the campaign based on it, which coincided with the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland. Though the Institute was not involved in the publication of the German book, the Polish national communists accSome reform Communists who went into exile after the Soviet-led military intervention in Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, began to work in the Listy group led by Jiří Pelikán (1923-1999), a former Director of Czechoslovak Television, the publisher of the Rome-based exile bimonthly Listy, and, later, a Member of the European Parliament. In the search for political allies against Husák’s regime of ''normalization'' (the return to hard-line Communist rule), they tried to establish contact mainly with infl uential representatives of the West European Left. This article, however, examines an area of their involvement in exile, which has previously not received attention - namely, their efforts to develop contacts with Chinese Communists who in the period after August 1968 were vociferously speaking out at international forums and criticizing Soviet expansionism. The author demonstrates how the exiles tried to take advantage of this in order to strengthen their positions as members of the foreign socialist opposition to the normalization regime. When establishing these contacts, they could build particularly upon those that Pelikán had developed in China while working in the International Union of Students. In the second half of the 1970s his erstwhile Chinese colleagues, led by Hu Yaobang (1915-1989), rose to leading positions in the Party, thus creating considerable opportunities for the exiles to work with them. From China, they received continuous funding for their activities, while the Chinese were interested in the Czechoslovak attempt to reform state socialism in the late 1960s. The author acquaints the reader with visits by Listy ‘envoys’ to China, who acquainted their partners there with current developments in central Europe, including information about dissidents and the opposition movement. A special initiative as part of this collaboration was their attempt to get their own representatives involved in the Czech broadcasts of Radio Peking. Though they briefl y succeeded in this, their plan to infl uence the content of transmissions to Czechoslovakia, and thereby make it an information source for listeners which would provide an alternative to state-controlled Czechoslovak mass media, ultimately came to naught: members of the Listy group worked at Radio Peking only as language advisers for the Czech broadcasts. and Překlad: Blanka Medková