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Mezi dvěma slunci. Československo ve střetu Moskvy a Pekingu o mezinárodní komunistické hnutí (1953–1962)

100%
Kolenovská D.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
|
2014
|
issue 4
531-558
EN
In this article, the author traces the changes in the Czechoslovak position in the international Communist movement after the Communist Party took power in Czechoslovakia. She concentrates on the Party’s relations with the Soviet and the Chinese Communists, which from the 1950s onwards represented two competing centres of power in world Communism. She argues that in Czechoslovak foreign policy the Communists subordinated the defence of State interests to the international solidarity of the workers, and, in keeping with that ideological guideline, the tasks of Czechoslovak foreign policy were set mainly according to the Soviet agenda and its vaguely defined aims for the international Communist movement. Prague became dependent on Moscow for personnel, information, and material, and lost the ability to act independently in international politics both outside and inside the Soviet bloc. Amongst Prague’s priorities were efforts to achieve the unity of the Soviet system of alliances and, beginning at the latest in 1956, it considered military intervention a suitable instrument in the event of a threat to that system. A comparative analysis of records for the ten years from 1953 to 1962, from the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and from the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, which are deposited in the National Archive, Prague, demonstrate that Czechoslovak foreign policy was actually formed by way of inter-Party contacts. The Soviet Communists were paramount in the hierarchy; in the eyes of the Czechoslovak Communists, the Soviet position remained unchallenged by any Chinese attempts to provide an alternative to Soviet methods and plans to develop the international Communist movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, at multilateral talks amongst dozens of Communist Parties in Moscow in November 1957 and in 1960, where Chinese objections were discussed, Czechoslovak Communists arrived after having been instructed by their Soviet comrades, and from this position they rejected all Chinese activities, despite Czechoslovak efforts to establish friendly and close ties with their Beijing comrades after 1948. As a result of this linking of Czechoslovak Party and State matters, Czechoslovak-Chinese collaboration ceased in the early 1960s, and the Soviet Union promised to compensate for any damages that thus accrued to the Czechoslovak economy.
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Návrat André Gida

100%
Kolenovská D.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
|
2009
|
issue 1
48-68
EN
The author begins by recalling the necessary conditions that enabled the spread of pro-Soviet sympathy amongst Western intellectuals in the 1930s. They include the dire consequences of the Great Depression, the growing Nazi threat, and the alluring ideals of social justice, in the light of which the Soviet Union appeared to many to be a radical, but attractive, social experiment. These attitudes from the end of the 1920s were supported by the organizational mechanisms and propaganda which Moscow employed to win support in Western intellectual circles. The author presents André Gide (1869–1951) as an engagé writer who did not hesitate to express his morally non-conformist and socially critical views, although without joining an organization or abandoning his individualism. None the less he was unable to resist his Communist friends’ urgings to participate in various cultural-political events organized by the French Communist Party. Moscow began to take an interest in Gide in connection with his efforts to get justice for the Bulgarian and German Communists on trial in Leipzig for having allegedly set fi re to the Reichstag in 1933. Like many other French writers, Gide had been persuaded to get involved by the writer Ilja Erenburg (1891–1967). In the summer of 1936 Gide accepted an invitation from the Soviet Writers’ Union to visit the U.S.S.R. The journey resulted in Gide’s famous volume of reporting, Retour de l’U.R.S.S . (1936) . In this work, he also describes in moderate terms his negative impressions of the journey, which he intended as friendly criticism. For the Soviets, however, that was unacceptable, and in late 1936 they launched a campaign against his alleged slander. Shortly afterwards, the French Communists joined in against Gide. The article also considers the heated debates amongst Czechoslovak artists. The extreme, Stalinist positions from these debates are represented by Anti-Gide neboli Optimismus bez pověr a iluzí (Anti-Gide: Optimism without superstition or illusion) by the writer Stanislav Kostka Neumann (1875–1947), and the balanced, detached view, for example, of the literary historian and critic Václav Černý (1905–1987). In reply to the Communist attacks, Gide published Retouches à mon Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (1937), in which he condemned the Moscow show trials, thus bringing his pro-Soviet episode to a close.
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