POLITICAL AND CLASS RELIABILITY SCREENING 1957–1958 IN SLOVAKIA: AN ELEMENT OF FORCED SOCIAL MOBILITY

• Authors: Marušiak Juraj
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The 1958 political and class reliability screenings took place against the backdrop of the renewal of repressive policy pursued by the CPC leadership. Their course in Slovakia, so far not explored in detail, is studied mainly in the context of building new executive elites loyal to the post-1948 political regime. Based on the research into the CPC archival documents, we can surmise that, in addition to cases of espionage in state bodies revealed in 1957, the screenings were prompted by general distrust of members of the pre-1948 middle classes and executive elites or their descendants. This distrust grew following the suppression of attempts to liberalise the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and political unrest in Poland and Hungary in 1956, seen by the CP leadership as part of conspiracy by the regimes enemies. One of the reasons behind the purges was an effort of the so-called new intelligentsia, i.e. new executive elites recruited from the workers and peasants backgrounds after 1948 despite not meeting the relevant qualification criteria, to restore their power positions, which had been shaken by the liberalisation of cadre policy in the mid-1950s. These were primarily concerned with the pre-1948 activities of those under scrutiny and their class origin. In Slovakia, added to the above issues was the employees’ relationship to so-called Slovak bourgeois nationalism, the campaign against which was renewed in the autumn of 1956. The screenings were the last mass purge before the onset of ‘normalisation’ of 1969–1970; its impact on society was mitigated by the political liberalisation in Czechoslovakia after 1963.

Keywords

EN

SCREENINGS; COMMUNIST PARTY OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA; COMMUNIST PARTY OF SLOVAKIA; ELITE FORMATION; CONSPIRACY THEORIES

• Publisher: Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Historický časopis (Historical Journal)
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 72
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 771 - 809

Contributors

author

Marušiak Juraj

• Institute of Political Sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 841 04 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3972-8165

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/histcaso.2024.72.4.7