Abstract: The article describes a less well-known chapter in the life of Karel Kreibich, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and a major figure of the Communist movement in Czechoslovakia. The author analyzes Kreibich’s criticism of Stalinism, addressed to the leading bodies of the Communist Party in the fifties and in the early sixties of the 20th century. The study maps out Kreibich’s conflict with the leaders of the party and introduces his unpublished texts arguing against official interpretations of the history of working class movement and criticizing the current policy of the KSČ and the condition of Czechoslovak society. The article aimes at analyzing the process of personal de-stalinization of a prominent Communist pointing out his personal dilemmas.

Abstract: The article describes the general context and current ideological tendencies which framed the celebration of the 520^th anniversary of the victory of the Hussites in the battle of Domažlice in August 1951. The celebration became an opportunity to further spread the Communist ideology and its political and historic message. The two most conspicuous tendencies were: creating a picture of the enemy of the Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia and the related effort to use the medieval Hussite movement as an ideological support for building up military power of the Stalinist Czechoslovakia. The anniversary needs to be interpreted bearing in mind its symbolic value for the Communist dictatorship.

Abstract: The process with the „anti-state conspiracy centre headed by Rudolf Slánský“ holds an exceptional place in the series of post-war political processes both in Czechoslovakia and in the other people’s democracies of the Soviet block. During the process in Prague the relations between Czechoslovakia and France were so badly damaged by a series of serious and less serious diplomatic affairs that the further attacks against France, its diplomats and intelligence services voiced during the process did not call for any official reaction. Nevertheless, the openly antisemitic character of the Prague process, awkwardly concealed under the label of antisionist campaign, attracted the attention of foreign media, including the French press. Three influential French newspapers – Le Monde, L?Humanité and Le Figaro – brought, virtually every day for a whole month, information on the process with Slánský and its political background. Besides the customary reports from the Court, the authors in the three papers discussed the overtly antisemitic meaning of the process, which also became the main topic of a heated debate not just in the French press. Among the democratic French public, antisemitism as a new phenomenon of the Soviet foreign policy caused disgust and concern about the lives of Jews living in the socialist countries. However, after the end of the process and the execution of the condemned the French media quickly lost interests in Czechoslovakia and focused on new topics, more important for France.

Abstract: The article deals with antisemitism in the Czechoslovak foreign army in the Middle East and in Great Britain during WWII. It focuses on concrete examples of antisemitic behaviour and attacks, including the reactions of the military commanders and political representatives to certain antisemitic incidents among soldiers. It also mentions the disagreement with Jewish soldiers joining the Czechoslovak foreign army expressed by Sionist organizations in Palestine (especially the Hitachdut Oley Czechoslovakia, which represented Sionist expatriates from Czechoslovakia). An account is given of the situation of Jewish soldiers and the crisis of the army in Great Britain in 1940, in particular the soldier revolt in the Cholmondeley camp, the reaction of the Jewish army officers and also the creation of the so-called commemorative letter for president Beneš, written by Jewish soldiers in an attempt to summarize antisemitic incidents in the Czechoslovak army. The article only deals with ground forces, leaving air forces aside.

Abstract: The study deals with the condition of Czech and Moravian Jews in the short period following the end of WWII. It focuses chiefly on the repatriation of various groups of Jews (returnees from concentration camps, Jews coming back from foreign armies and from emigration) and on the problems they faced in their adaptation to post-war Czechoslovak society. It describes the work of Czechoslovak repatriation bodies as well as of Jewish institutions from abroad who helped Jews return and become integrated in the society. The main focus of the study is to describe the conflicts arising between Jewish communities and Czech authorities during repatriation, concerning mostly restitution of former property and issues of social security. The author concentrates mainly on the Jews’ own perception of their return and confrontation with authorities.

Abstract: The collectivization of the Czechoslovak countryside in 1949–1960 was accompanied by an omnipresent Communist propaganda whose aim was to persuade farmers of the advantages of joining the United Agricultural Cooperatives (JZD) and to support the campaign against larger landowners, the so-called Kulaks. The effort deployed by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to organize various propaganda campaigns is well documented by sources preserved at the culture and propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (ÚV KSČ) and its subordinate departments of awareness and ideology, established at a lower level at Regional and District National Committees.

The study focuses on how collectivization was captured in party press, which along with radio broadcasting and the cinema was one of the most potent and widely used propaganda tools. Based on an analysis of the Zemědělské noviny (The Agriculture Newspaper), published countrywide, as well as of certain local newspapers, it outlines the negatives forms of propaganda attacking private farmers and exhorting to fierce class struggle in the country as well as the positive propaganda encouraging farmers to join the JZDs and pressing for an early harvest.

The study also describes how the contents and style of the individual newspapers reflected the different stages of collectivization, i.e. how the press reacted to a ferocious collectivization campaign in 1951–1953, briefly mentioning also the obstacles the Party met in its campaign for building up a socialist village.

Abstract: Since the 19^th century, the Slovak Carpathian region has witnessed a vast transformation of its landscape. Making the region more accessible by the State authorities, under the First Czechoslovak Republic, was achieved through building transport routes and infrastracture, setting up local administrations or modernizing agriculture. These changes, together with the industrialization promoted after 1945, had an impact on both the social and environmental aspects of the mountainous regions of the Carpathians, leading to changes in their cultural landscape. These changes can be compared with parallel tendencies in other mountainous regions, such as the Alps. Both regional specificities and a potential contrast between the centre and the region seen as periphery were at play here.

The article explains the particularities of the history of this part of Slovakia, analyzing mutually competing concepts on how to exploit the Carpathian regions. One of these particularities, besides the influence of Czecho-Slovak relations within Czechoslovakia, was the modernization of agriculture, strongly supported by the regime. However, from the sixties of the 20^th century, agriculture policy based on extensive planning and intensification started to hit up against its natural limits. At the same time, it clashed with long-established tradition and lifestyles of the local population. When, in the sixties of the 20^th century, plans on the exploitation of the Carpathian region faced a crisis, alternative suggestions were proposed whose aim was to focus more on nature conservation and tourism. The idea of a „socialist landscape“ – symbolized by urban landscape contrasting with a withering original cultural landscape seen as wilderness – eventually proved to be unworkable.

Abstract: In his study Revolution with a human face James Krapfl analyzed resolutions addressed to The Civic Forum and The Public against Violence during November and December 1989 in Czechoslovakia. The article contributes to the understanding of the revolutionary events of December and November 1989 through the prism of people who wrote the letters to the Coordinating center of the Civic Forum in Prague. It captures a segment of public opinion and sheds light on the bottom-up processes that were occurring in the revolutionary days. Three hundred letters were analyzed using thematic analysis, which generated three main themes: democracy, socialism, and nonviolence. The discussion on democracy revolved around calls for free elections and removing antidemocratic mechanisms. Socialism was the second most discussed theme. While the authors rejected socialism in the form in which it had been implemented so far, they were calling for its new, unspecified form, mostly labeled as democratic socialism. The fact that they were proud of 1968 Prague Spring and/or their involvement in it prevented them from condemning the entire 40 years of Communist rule. Contrary to them, those authors who backed their statements in traditions of the First Republic (1918–1938) called for condemning the regime’s whole era. The public was thus not fully against socialism in the first two months following the revolution. The third theme, that of nonviolence, was mentioned as a means to achieving democratic and humanistic society rather than as an end in itself. The themes are interpreted and discussed in the context of that time and compared and contrasted with Krapfl’s analysis.