Karel Kaplan - zakladatel studia poválečných československých dějin: glosy psané k jeho nedožitým devadesátým pátým narozeninám

• Authors: Jindřich Dejmek

Title variants

EN

Karel Kaplan - founder of the study of post-war Czechoslovak history: glosses written on his ninety-fifth birthday

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

Historian Karel Kaplan (1928–2023) was indisputably one of the most prominent figures in the Czech historiography of the communist era in former Czechoslovakia. Though he began as a regional propagandist for the regime in the CSR in the 1950s, his talents, industriousness, and access to a number of official (and top secret in those years) materials, made him a leading scholar of Czechoslovakia‘s post-war history in the latter half of the 1960s. He was able to use these documents in his first real scientific works as a research worker at the Historical Institute of Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. From the mid-1970s, he lived in West Germany, where he managed to export some of the documentation on microfilms. This also enabled him later, already in exile, to publish several books and studies on the communist coup in Czechoslovakia (1948) and about the early years of the „Stalinist“ regime in that state. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the regime, he returned to Prague and participated in the establishment of a new Institute for Contemporary History. In his work, he devoted himself both to various aspects of the creation of the communist regime and its international context, and to the repressive nature of the regime in the 1950s. An important part of his work included mapping the roots of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, which resulted in the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. He also analysed the careers and activities of a number of leading communist politicians, such as Gottwald, Slánský or Novotný. The multivolume Chronicle of Communist Czechoslovakia, in which he detailed the political and social development of the second half of the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, became a kind of culmination of his work.

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Moderní dějiny: sborník k dějinám 19. a 20. století (Modern History: Studies into 19th and 20th century history)
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 205-224
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Jindřich Dejmek

• Historický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i., Prosecká 809/76, 190 00 Praha 9, Czech Republic