:<i>The Czech Manuscripts: Forgery, Translation, and National Myth</i>

The Journal of Modern History · 2025-08-27

České soudobé dějiny:viděno odjinud (II. díl)

2023-01-01

Undone from Within: The Downfall of Rudolf Slánský and Czechoslovak-Soviet Dynamics under Stalin

The Journal of Modern History · 2023-12-01 · 1 citations

In November 1952, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist Party leaders underwent a widely publicized political trial. Slánský featured as the alleged ringleader of a conspiracy of “Trotskyist-Titoist Zionists, bourgeois-nationalist traitors” working on behalf of “American imperialists.” Following the trial, eleven of the fourteen defendants, among them Slánský, were hanged and the ashes of their bodies strewn along a road leading out of Prague. The remaining three received life sentences. Eleven of the original fourteen defendants, the prosecutor declared, were “of Jewish origin.” Up to now, the surprisingly sparse scholarship on the Slánský trial has argued that Slánský’s November 1951 arrest, as well as the antisemitic tone of the trial, were engineered primarily by Soviet advisors and Joseph Stalin himself. This article, which draws upon previously ignored archival materials in the former Soviet Union and a fresh, post–Cold War reading of archival materials in today’s Czech Republic, argues instead that local dynamics within the Czechoslovak Communist Party were paramount. Specifically, it focuses on how and why Czechoslovak Communist members denounced one another to Soviet officials, and how these denunciations laid the groundwork for Slánský’s downfall while breaking the previous taboo within the party on antisemitic rhetoric. It thus reveals much about the nature of the Czechoslovak-Soviet relationship, as well as relationships between other countries of Communist Eastern Europe and Moscow, before Stalin’s death in 1953—relationships that were not as one-sided as many scholars and others beyond academia often assume.

Book Review: Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union

Journal of Planning History · 2023 · 1 citations

• Political Science
• Political Science
• History

Meaningful Encounters? Egon Erwin Kisch’s ‘Prague Forays’ and Our Post-COVID World

Green Letters · 2022 · 1 citations

• Sociology
• Art history
• History

In 1910, Egon Erwin Kisch published the first instalment of his ‘Prague Forays’ column for Bohemia, the city’s pre-eminent German-language newspaper. The column, which ran for more than a year, launched the young writer’s literary career. This essay argues that Kisch’s ‘Prague Forays’ feuilletons, which walked his middle-class readers to down-and-out places throughout the city, can inspire us to think differently about urban encounters then and now. It probes the meanings that Kisch, a German-speaking Jew who inhabited an increasingly ‘Czech’ city, derived from his forays. It also confronts his feuilletons’ more problematic aspects, asking to what extent Kisch’s encounters with difference were ‘meaningful’, defined by humanist geographer Gill Valentine as contact that changes values and engenders a greater respect for others. How can we know if an encounter has been ‘meaningful’, and can such encounters be ‘meaningful’ for everyone involved?

Prague

Harvard University Press eBooks · 2021-05-04

T<scp>homas</scp> L<scp>orman</scp>. <i>The Making of the Slovak People’s Party: Religion, Nationalism and the Culture War in Early 20th-Century Europe</i>.

The American Historical Review · 2021-02-26

A week after the Munich Agreement, leaders of the Slovak People’s Party seized control of the semi-autonomous government in Slovakia. Months later, on March 14, 1939, as Nazi troops prepared to invade the mostly Czech-inhabited regions of rump Czecho-Slovakia, the party’s leaders declared Slovak independence to the sound of ringing church bells across the country. Thomas Lorman’s impressive book begins and concludes with this moment, asking not about the compromises and horrors that followed but rather how the Slovak People’s Party came to be and how it eventually found itself in a position to wield such enormous power. The book is also, importantly, about the party’s surprisingly consistent ideology, which combined politicized Catholicism with autonomist nationalism. Lorman traces these stories back to the nineteenth century, when the Slovak highlands sat within the Hungarian half of the Habsburg dual monarchy. This long durée approach to the history of the Slovak People’s...

Prague: Belonging in the Modern City

2021 · 36 citations

• History
• Geography

A poignant reflection on alienation and belonging, told through the lives of five remarkable people who struggled against nationalism and intolerance in one of Europe's most stunning cities. What does it mean to belong somewhere? For many of Prague's inhabitants, belonging has been linked to the nation, embodied in the capital city. Grandiose medieval buildings and monuments to national heroes boast of a glorious, shared history. Past governments, democratic and Communist, layered the city with architecture that melded politics and nationhood. Not all inhabitants, however, felt included in these efforts to nurture national belonging. Socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans, and Vietnamese-all have been subject to hatred and political persecution in the city they called home. Chad Bryant tells the stories of five marginalized individuals who, over the last two centuries, forged their own notions of belonging in one of Europe's great cities. An aspiring guidebook writer, a German-speaking newspaperman, a Bolshevik carpenter, an actress of mixed heritage who came of age during the Communist terror, and a Czech-speaking Vietnamese blogger: none of them is famous, but their lives are revealing. They speak to tensions between exclusionary nationalism and on-the-ground diversity. In their struggles against alienation and dislocation, they forged alternative communities in cafes, workplaces, and online. While strolling park paths, joining political marches, or writing about their lives, these outsiders came to embody a city that, on its surface, was built for others. A powerful and creative meditation on place and nation, the individual and community, Prague envisions how cohesion and difference might coexist as it acknowledges a need common to all

<i>Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989: A Political and Social History</i>. By Kevin McDermott. European History in Perspective. Edited by Jeremy Black.London: Palgrave, 2015. Pp. xx+252. $91.50 (cloth); $33.50 (paper).<i>Václav Havel</i>. By Kieran Williams. Critical Lives.London: Reaktion Books, 2016. Pp. 238. $19.00; £11.99.

The Journal of Modern History · 2018-05-21

CCC volume 51 issue 1 Cover and Back matter

Central European History · 2018-03-01

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