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Poznámky k českému polistopadovému antikomunismu

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Hrubý K.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2010
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issue 3
468-476
EN
In this article the author searches for an answer to the question that Jiří Suk asked in his paper at the conference ‘1989–2009: Society, History, Politics’, held in Liblice in September 2009 – namely, what was the origin of the strong wave of anti-Communism in Czech society after the Changes that began in November 1989, since, in the last free general elections in the country, in 1946, the Communist Party won and in 1968 most citizens of Czechoslovakia wanted socialism? (Suk’s paper, ‘Komunistická minulost jako politický problém: Nástin vývoje 1989–2009’, is published online in an volume of conference papers at http:/www.boell.cz/ navigation/19-856.html.) The author of the present article adds that most of society in 1946 did not choose a future under Communist leadership and in 1968 the non-Communist majority may have supported the reform movement, but was expecting it to bring about the end of the Party’s monopoly of power or, indeed, to bring about the outright restoration of democracy. Anti-Communism, which erupted in Czech society in 1990, was therefore nothing new; it was only a long hidden and suppressed expression of most Czechoslovak’s dislike of Communist rule. To gain a real understanding of the anti-Communism that emerged after late 1989 one must analyze its sources, that is, chiefly the thinking of wide strata of the population, which inwardly did not identify with the past régime, ranging from passive disagreement to active resistance. Amongst them were mainly those who from 1948 to 1989 were somehow discriminated against or harassed, and also most of their family members. It is here that one can fruitfully search for the hotbed of anti-Communism after the Changes of late 1989. The author also points to the necessity of clearly defining what is meant by anti-Communism in each concrete case, since the term can easily have a number of different meanings.
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Politické rozpravy intelektuálů za „pražského jara“

100%
Hrubý K.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2008
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vol. 15
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issue 3-4
545-574
EN
This article is an analysis of the development of the political thought of Czech and Slovak intellectuals involved in the attempt to reform the Socialist system during the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. The author focuses on the key concepts of the broad-based public discourse of the times (Socialism, democracy, freedom, power, pluralism, and opposition) and their relation to each other. He endeavours to defi ne the typical attitudes and to differentiate amongst the positions of the intellectuals and politicians on the one hand and the Communists and non-Communists on the other. (The essential contributions to the debate, in which not only intellectuals but also politicians and trade-union leaders took part, were published in Jaro 1968 , an anthology of articles from the contemporaneous daily press, which was published by Index, Cologne, in 1988. A rather different selection of discussion articles appears in Pražské jaro v médiích [Prague, 2004], compiled and edited by Jiří Hoppe of the Institute of Contemporary History.) After the lifting of censorship in early spring 1968, the debate, which had been brewing in previous years, was thrown wide open by Communist intellectuals (in particular the philosophers Karel Kosík, Robert Kalivoda, and Ivan Sviták, the novelists Ludvík Vaculík, Milan Kundera, and Jan Procházka, the Germanist and Chairman of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers Eduard Goldstücker, the poet and journalist Ladislav Novomeský, the journalist Antonín J. Liehm, the economist Ota Šik, and the historian Karel Kaplan). They criticized the Czechoslovak developments in the twenty years since the Communist takeover in 1948, which were marked by a number of systemic defects with grave consequences for the lives of individuals and society, and they demanded the far-reaching reform of politics, economics, and the arts. Many of them had, since the Communist takeover, been actively involved in the establishment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but their faith in Soviet-style Socialism was badly shaken in 1956. They sought a way out, which would return the humanist content to Marxist Socialism while maintaining the existing system of state Socialism in which the leading role was reserved to the Communist Party. And they saw it in the democratization of the system, in achieving freedom of speech, and greater participation in public affairs by non-Communist individuals and organizations. Though the reform politicians (Alexander Dubček, Josef Smrkovský, Zdeněk Mlynář, and others) largely shared these opinions, they tended to express themselves with reserve and felt a more pressing need to advocate the decisive role of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in leading society. By contrast, non-Communists (including the dramatist Václav Havel, the fi ction writer Alexandr Kliment, and the columnist Emanuel Mandler) expressed the critical attitude of a considerable part of the population towards the existing political system, and demanded an alternative that would do away with the privileges of the Communists and bring about a restoration of pluralist democracy, at least in the form it had once had in Czechoslovakia from mid-May 1945 to late February 1948. Whereas the Communist politicians and intellectuals remained within the bounds of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the opinions of the non- Communists were based on the idea of universal human rights.
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Rozpaky nad výkladem komunistické diktatury. Kritické poznámky k projektu „Socialismus jako myšlenkový svět“

100%
Hrubý K.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2014
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issue 3
382-404
EN
The author criticizes some of the theoretical starting points, published results, and ideas of the international research project called ‘Socialism as Sinnwelt’, as they were presented in several articles of the special issue of Soudobé dějiny, vol. 19 (2012), no. 2, and in a few other publications. The project was run by the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, with the participation of the Czech historians Pavel Kolář, Michal Kopeček, Michal Pullmann, and Matěj Spurný, together with scholars from other countries. The author briefly recapitulates the basic ideas with which the project participants approach the interpretation of the Communist or, to use their term, Socialist dictatorship; he lists criticism of the project, which has appeared both in specialist Czech periodicals and in the Press; and he puts this new view of recent history into the context of the development of Czech historiography since the Changes beginning in November 1989. He states that this attempt at an alternative interpretation of the Communist past is a reaction to the ‘traditional’ interpretations in earlier works by Czech historians, which had put the emphasis mainly on the institutions of power, the machinery of repression, and the use of force by the Communist rulers, or on resistance to them. This project, drawing inspiration particularly from approaches taken by German social scientists conducting research on everyday life, refuses, by contrast, to conceive of the Communist dictatorship as an allegedly omnipotent regime on the one hand with a powerless public on the other, and to understand its character the proponents of this project think it is essential to comprehend the wide range of relationships between the ruling and the ruled in their everyday dimensions, in all their confusion and equivocation; they seek the explanation for the duration and stability of the Communist dictatorship in forms of social consensus, the ways the public participated in the dictatorship, and in the ways its legitimacy was renewed. The historians who use these approaches are, according to author, revisionists, because they seek to provide new interpretations to substitute for, rather than only to add to or expand, earlier ones, for they argue that the earlier interpretations are burdened with the legacy of outmoded theories of totalitarianism.
4
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Kontinuita nestejného. Sporné závěry z nesporně dobrých analýz Matěje Spurného

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Hrubý K.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2013
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issue 4
628-640
EN
In this article, the author takes issue with some of the arguments in Matěj Spurny’s Nejsou jako my: Česka společnost a menšiny v pohraniči (1945–1960) (They’re not like us: Czech society and minorities in the borderlands) (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011). The core of the book, he argues, consists in well-documented analyses of the relations between Czechs, Germans, and other groups of the population in the Bohemian borderlands after the Second World War, that is, between the central authorities and society there. He considers less convincing, however, the generalizing conclusions that are conceptually based on the international project ‘Socialism as a Thought World’ (Sozialismus als Sinnwelt), of which Spurny was a participant. Nevertheless, according to Hruby, these conclusions do not follow from the analyses in Spurny’s book. According to Hruby, Spurny’s treatment of continuity is problematic when he claims that the mentality of society after the Communist takeover, in late February 1948, was a continuation of the thinking, attitudes, and behaviours of society, whereby the principle of the ‘purge’, the use of force, and the techniques of segregation were legitimized in the three years between the end of the war and the takeover. By contrast, Hruby points to important factors of discontinuity before and after February 1948 in a number of respects, including the different dominant ideologies and ideological enemies, the different political systems, the different means of using force, the different social bases of political and social practices of persecution, the different thinking of pre-February society in the borderlands and of post-February majority society. With these arguments, he casts doubt on Spurny’s basic premise that the processes that borderland society went through after the war are the key to understanding the processes that affected society in the interior after February 1948. Hruby’s fundamental reservation is, then, that the approach represented by Spurny diminishes the extent to which the Communist Party, its leaders, and its institutions of repression were responsible for the establishment of the dictatorship and subsequent acts of oppression, and, instead, shifts this responsibility to society and its mentality. In this way, according to Hruby, historians such as Spurny are guilty of the same one-sidedness as that which they accuse the proponents of the totalitarian model of when interpreting the Communist past.
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