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The paper examines the operation of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia under the Communist regime, one of the most oppressive communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the choice of the Church to operate both officially and secretly. Based on the religious economy approach, it defines the conditions favoring diversified operation on both the legal market and the black market. Despite repression, the Church strived to maintain official operation in Czechoslovakia. Simultaneously, it developed an underground structure that allowed for uncompromised religious life. The case study confirms the theoretical predictions that severe repression favors underground operation without eliminating the need for the official presence of the Church. Beyond the religious economy approach, the paper points to the role of agency. The diversification strategy could only emerge and function due to the combination of externally imposed circumstances and individual initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces four papers addressing problems of higher education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Issues identified include overcoming the Communist heritage, the separation of teaching and research, low student numbers, appropriate diversification of higher education, increasing access, the role of the state, and higher education and the economy. (DB)

The energy policies of four emerging democratic governments in Eastern Europe are individually profiled with respect to the challenge of producing more electrical energy, while creating less pollution and cleaning up the existing environmental disorder. Highlighted is the possible change from the burning of lignite coal to use of nuclear reactors. (JJK)

This study focuses on May Day celebrations in communist Czechoslovakia in the Žďár nad Sázavou district of today's Czech Republic. The communist regime used these celebrations to symbolically communicate several ideological and political messages. By examining one of these messages, the importance of the relationship between the countryside and the city, we see how its presentation changed over time. The variability of this message was caused not only by the changes the communist regime and society underwent during the studied period but also by specific local conditions. This paper concentrates on actors from two villages and argues that celebrations of May Day, an ideological-political holiday, could have been appropriated by local inhabitants as a community event that helped express the unity of the rural community. Holding May Day celebrations that served largely as community events in some villages also interrupted the union of the village and the city in socialist society, one of the messages that was supposed to be communicated by May Day celebrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the general societal and political change in November 1989 in Czechoslovakia, the subject "History of Psychology" became the stable component of curriculum of studying psychology at the Department of Psychology of Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. The author of this paper has taught "History of Psychology" in Czech since 1998 for more than 20 years all students of psychology and he is teaching this subject the students of ERASMUS+ program from whole Europe, studying at Charles University in Prague, now. Indivisible part of the curriculum is represented by the history of Czechoslovak and Czech psychology. In References, the most important publications in the field of history of Czechoslovak and Czech psychology are presented., (© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

It is not well known that in the context of the unofficial artistic and philosophical scene of the ČSSR there was an aesthetically refined and theoretically differentiated reflection on the different degrees and limits of visibility as well as a rethinking of participation – be it aesthetic, epistemic or political. In this paper I first investigate the relation between history and (in)visibility in its broadest sense: questions such as 'whose history is present' and 'what visual memory building strategies are used' were highly controversial and deeply politicised. For many artists and philosophers such as Zorka Ságlová or Jan Patočka the very act of remembering and the active, critical engagement with (visual) culture and history thus became an act of resistance. I then explore how artists subtly intervened in and transformed the monitored public space, and often tried to undermine given regimes of visibility. I demonstrate that these manifold 'dissident' practices engendered new aesthetic experiences and fostered powerful counter-narratives that deconstructed the official propaganda discourse of the communist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the year 1948, a year of great significance marked by a number of changes pertaining to the status of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia. The paper aims to introduce and describe the measures used by the Communist Party with the purpose to subordinate the individual institutions within the Catholic Church that was at first perceived as a potential ally of the newly established regime. When the initial plan had not worked out, the Communist administration decided to adopt several laws, governmental regulations and norms intended to curtail the position of the Greek Catholic Church and its links to the Vatican. The paper examines selected facts and phenomena of the said historical period that can serve as a lesson from which we can learn so that we do not fall prey to any other modern system that might endanger our current society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary aim of this paper is to outline concisely the history of environmental journalism in Czechoslovakia and to compare it to the development of Radio Free Europe's environmental agenda. This comparison can help us better understand how important a role society -- and by extension social constructivism -- played in twentieth-century environmental history. An explanation for these discrepancies can, in my opinion, be found not only in the internal discussions at RFE and among dissidents but also in the international context. Upon greater scrutiny, the simple question of why and how RFE's environmental agenda emerged, and why certain environmental topics but not others were covered in RFE's broadcasts and reports, appears to be multi-layered, and, if we attempt to answer it, can reveal how and why environmental issues become socially and politically relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When faced with oppression from the state, some groups and individuals choose costly opposition rather than a compromise. This may be caused by the cost of compromise being higher than the cost of opposition. However, it is also possible that the persistent opposition is due to some past decisions. The paper proposes a model explaining persistent opposition as a result of group-specific investment in human capital that traps individuals in an opposition group even when she would be better off outside the group. The model is illustrated with the case of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, the largest group opposing the Communist regime. Within that context, the model contributes to the explanation of the persistence and growth of the underground church under Communist rule as well as the post-Communist religious revival. The same model may also be applied to malign opposition groups, such as terrorist and criminal organizations, and it provides clues about how to deal with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Years after February 1948 was a difficult period for the Czechoslovak Church. Although the ideologically divided church had a partially negative attitude towards the communist regime, another significant part of ordinary believers and priests (including church leadership) saw the communist state as an opportunity to fulfill the idea of Christian socialism. Czechoslovakia was to become a happy home for unbelievers and Christians alike. The paper is focused on the daily life of the religious communities of the Czechoslovak Church in Brno between 1948 and 1960. It seeks answers to the questions of how the vision of the coexistence of the communist state and the Czechoslovak Church was accepted among the believers themselves at the local level and how the relationship of believers to their new home developed during the dynamic 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Securitas Imperii is the property of Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After the Communists took power in 1948, the school system and education in Czechoslovakia were indoctrinated by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. A unified state system of education was created (Education Act No. 95/1948 and Higher Education Act No. 58/1950) with the aim of educating each young person as a "builder of Communism". The Church became the biggest internal enemy of the state, so-called church acts were passed, orders were abolished, and many bishops, monks, nuns and priests were sentenced to imprisonment. The government attempted to track and control representatives of the official Church. Therefore, in the period of political release in the 1960s (Prague Spring), when the first monks and priests were released from prison, the so -called Secret Church launched its activity in Slovakia. The paper is focused on an analysis of the model of work with university students which was historically the first form of spiritual and intellectual formation in the Secret Church in Slovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the period of so-called normalization in the former Czechoslovakia, the restrictive cultural policy ousted numerous oppositional artists, theoreticians, and writers from the public cultural sphere through bans on exhibitions and publications. As a consequence, the affected individuals developed their own means of enabling creative, scientific, and literary work beyond censorship. A key medium for the realization of officially banned texts, studies, and projects was illegal and clandestine self-publishing, also called "samizdat". This article discusses the phenomenon of samizdat using the example of the self-produced collections of the Surrealistická skupina v Československu. In the 1980s, the community created two (fictitious) exhibition catalogues, Sféra snu (1983) and Proměny humoru (1984), which presented the individual and collective surrealist activities with images, quotations, and written descriptions. However, the editions were not only a media of documentation to reconstruct surrealist practice. They were at the same time a creative way to exhibit their content in its own specific artistic forms and theories of art. In this paper, I explore the unacknowledged dual-function of the '70s and '80s Czech surrealist samizdat as both an archival technique and a work of art. I investigate the function of these volumes for group artistic praxis and how it reflects creative production under the social conditions of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Central European Journal for Contemporary Religion is the property of Charles University Prague, Karolinum Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper presents a chronological outline of the development of school legislation and the school system of the Czech Lands from 1918 to the present. Captured are changes after historical breaks, as well as efforts for gradual conceptual changes. The topics addressed are as follows: The development of the Czechoslovak education system after the establishment of an independent democratic state in 1918; its form during the Nazi occupation and during more than forty years of the communist government; and the way of searching for the form of Czech education after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces the papers published in the Summer 1990 issue of the 'Eastern European Economics' journal. Critique of Marxist economic thinking as practiced in Czechoslovakia; Foreign trade strategy needed to revive the Czechoslovak economy; Issue of the nature and timing of economic reform.

Copyright of Constantine's Letters / Konštantínove Listy is the property of Institute for Research of Constantine & Methodius's Cultural Heritage and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper is dedicated to the changes of media activities of the Catholic Church and also of its media image in the context of political development in former communist Czechoslovakia. That dynamics can be observed on the example of three intensively covered congresses of the so-called Catholic clergy movement in 1951, 1959 and 1966. The movement, originally existing under the name „Nationwide peace committee of the Catholic clergy”, and since 1966 known as „Peace movement of Catholic clergy” perished in 70´s and was replaced by the „Association of Catholic clergy Pacem in terrris”. The text gains from the Czech archives of the Archive of security sections of the Ministry of the Interior and from the National archive, and in own inquiry also analyses the forms of journalistic work in the historical press of that period - in the weekly Katolické noviny (Catholic newspaper) and daily Lidová demokracie (Folk democracy). In its conclusions the text brings together the examples of confusing the readers and using of methods, which were twisting the image of nationalism in favor of communist ideology, puts insist on the abuse of term „Catholicism” in that period, or on the hidden contradictions and conflicts existing in the centre of former so-called peace movement of catholic clergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexities of the ethics and truth in archival research are often unrecognised or invisible in educational research. This paper complicates the process of collecting data in the archives, as it problematises notions of ethics and truth in the archives. The archival research took place in the former Czechoslovakia and its turbulent political history influenced the way data were accessed and collected. The article analyses the productive power of archival institutions and their guardians, and examines the ethical dilemma of discovering sensitive information. Archival institutions hold the secrets that, once uncovered, can have powerful ramifications. It will be argued that the nature of truth in the archives is complex, and the author complicates and challenges the perception that archives are ethically neutral research spaces that do not need to consider approval from research ethics committees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the promotion of the Great Leap Forward in Czechoslovakia as an example of a socialist globalization, i.e. an attempt of the PRC to propagate in the socialist bloc the economic policy of the Great Leap Forward as an alternative path towards communism as opposed to the strategy of the Soviet five-year plans. The author deals with the presentation of the Great Leap Forwards in various works written in 1958 and 1959 by Michal Falťan, Slovak politician and economist, who visited the PRC in autumn 1958. Other means of promotion of the Great Leap Forward (e.g. Chinese exhibitions in Prague, newspaper articles about people's communes, special issue of the journal Světová literatúra with the translations of the Chinese folk poetry of this period) are also mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the scope and limits of Czechoslovak process of perestroika in the late 1980s. Firstly, the author describes historical condition and obstacles for launching reforms inspired by Gorbachev's 'reconstruction'. Subsequently, it summarises phases of the reform. The election of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, plenary session of the CPSU Central Committee in January 1987 and 19th All-Union Conference of the CPSU in 1988. All these events represent major milestones of Soviet perestroika and as well as they define qualitatively different phases of Czechoslovak reform process. While the period of 1985-1986 is characterized as a 'waiting game' and neutral attitude toward Gorbachev on the part of Husák's communist elite, during the second stage (1987-1989) the communist leadership admitted to start with modest reforms in the field of both the political system and economy. As a consequence of the reform process, differentiation and fractionalisation within the Czechoslovak communist leadership took place and resulted in personnel changes in Presidium of the KSC Central Committee and in the Czechoslovak government. For the assessment of the Czechoslovak perestroika, the author will analyse the programme of the Communist party, which was approved by members of Presidium of the KSC Central Committee on the 10th November 1989 - one week before the Velvet revolution. Not only the content of so far omitted document, but notably its genesis and internal debates will be analysed. The empirical basis of the paper is largely grounded in the study of archival sources stored at the National Archives in Prague. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an historical analysis of practices to conceptualize childhoods in Czechoslovakia during communist governance. Through the lens of the children's magazines and literature, it explores the microcosm of everyday governance against the backdrop of the political changes of the 1950s, and then the 1970s and 1980s. The production of political subjectivities occurred as early as kindergarten age, and children's literature and magazines were important carriers of these notions. This paper argues that the youngest children were productive powerful actors that shaped their own totalitarian childhoods, and not merely passive recipients of the strong, punitive, ideologically charged dogma of education. Through their use of literature, children in kindergartens are shown as agenting citizens, in totalitarian Czechoslovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general character of the memory of the contemporary witnesses and the fact that nearly no Christian samizdat of the 1960s has been preserved do not allow to offer a closer look to the topics discussed by the priests released from prison with their friends. We can only offer it through the witness of one of them, Antonín Mandl (1917-1972). His work from 1965 to 1967 is only a voice of an individual, but we can suppose that it echoes a broader debate, in which the experience of the earlier years has been confronted both with the contemporary form of the Czechoslovak society ruled by the Communist totalitarian regime and with the results of the Vatican Council II. The paper focuses on Mandl's answer to the following three questions: In the relation to the Communism, is it proper to choose opposition, or collaboration? How should the priesthood in the contemporary society look like? What are the major axioms of Christian life, pastoral work and evangelisation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable scholarly attention has been given to Charter ’77 as a site of dissent in the former Czechoslovakia. Yet there was a socially embedded site of resistance that was active long before the dissidents. We call this site the Czech woodcraft culture. With its mass popularity and its potent references to Native American anti-colonialism, the woodcraft culture has still barely registered among researchers. In this paper, we offer the first scholarly account of the origins of Czech woodcraft culture, starting in the early twentieth century. We argue that subsequent transformations of the woodcraft culture in the Czech landscape should be understood as popular, complex, and often ambiguous practices of resistance, from the internationalist inversions of a national bourgeois order in the inter-war period, to nostalgic and paradoxically nationalist subterfuges of the Soviet-imposed regime after 1968. We trace how, as a response to the state socialist regime’s cultural and political pressures, the activities of Czech woodcraft culture were “layered with memories and experiences rooted in the pre-communist period” (Bren, 2002: 124). The Czech woodcraft culture as a whole provided its adherents with an autonomous space that enabled new forms of sociality, immersions in the natural world, and a host of long-standing voluntary associative activities that preceded the emergence of localized environmental movements and other sites of dissent around the Czech lands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper analyzes the ways in which the state approach to homosexuality in Communist Czechoslovakia intersected with actually lived lives and experiences of ordinary non -heterosexual people who identified (mainly retroactively) as gays, lesbians or transsexuals. In the Czech context, this is the first research of its kind and combines oral history with a gender analysis of sexological literature from the communist period, to put together a complex mosaic of sexuality in recent past. This confrontation of methods exposes the processes by which gender and sexuality in this era worked as tools of regulation and control, and shows how non -heterosexual people responded to this pressure. The paper offers a multilayer reading and analysis of normality/deviance, public/private and submission/resistance in communist Czechoslovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the ideological dimension of the reception of John Steinbeck in three post-communist countries, namely Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Slovenia. It discusses the prevalent mode of the writer's interpretation in the Eastern bloc which was governed by the political doctrines of the time. It is therefore often Steinbeck's politics, in the narrow sense of the word, that is scrutinized in the prefaces, afterwords, and reviews of his writings. The literary values are either marginalized or wholly ignored. Consequently, Steinbeck's criticism is determined by political correctness. It fails to consider the complexities of his work and treats the writer as an expedient object employed in the ideological campaign on the literary front. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the problem of communist power in so called totalitarian regimes. Inspired by strategies of explanation in contemporary science studies and by the ethnomethodological conception of social order, we suggest that the power of communists is not to be taken as an unproblematic source of explanation; rather, we take this power as something that is itself in need of being explained. We study personal narratives on political screenings that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1970 and analyze how the power of communists obtained its strength from ordinary and “unremarkable” interactions between participants. The screenings are interpreted, in the terms of Bruno Latour, as “trials of strength.” We show that it was crucial for all the participants that associations, translations or mobilizations involved in making the regime real, remained partial and multiple, and not exclusive and “total” as is often assumed within dominant discourses on totalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with a brief overview Czech drug policy and drug-related issues. The second section concentrates on how that policy has evolved since the fall of communism, identifies the main players in these events, and provides some details about the legislative procedure that eventually led to the reintroduction of punishments for the possession of illegal drugs. The paper describes in broad terms a major scientific evaluation of the impacts of recent legislative changes and subsequent government reactions to that report. Recent developments in the Czech drug policy debate are addressed in the third section of the paper. This account focuses on the ongoing legislative debate over whether the possession of drugs for personal use should be a criminal offense (this issue has been contested for nearly 10 years). Finally, a controversial legislative proposal that was only recently issued by the Ministry of Justice will be described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolution of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (CPBM) with special attention given to its identity and programmatic and policy positions in the 1990s. It argues that the CPBM represents a special type of a post-communist "radical socialist" party with neo-communist leanings. It is neither a "social-democra-tized" ex-communist party, nor an ultra-orthodox communist or genuine neo-communist party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article will analyse the development of the Chilean cause in the politics of Eastern Europe countries since 1973, focusing on the Czechoslovak case. On the one hand, it will prove that during the communist government Czechoslovakia played an important role in the international campaign for the resistance against the dictatorship at a worldwide level. On the other hand, it posits that the propaganda aimed at Czechoslovakia, which sought to kindle society's belief in the revolutionary ideals strongly affected after the Soviet invasion in 1968, turned out to be much less effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Literatura: Teoría, Historia, Crítica is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the religious conditions in Post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia on the example of the Pentecostal movement. It enlarges the classical research scope done on a church-state axis by focusing on a minority religious group, which is not only oppressed by the system driven by atheistic imperatives but also must compete with the rival religious organization. By using the concept of the religious field, the study argues that the state socialist system was caught between two different roles. The state tried to diminish the belief in God, but also it was supposed to operate as a guarantor of religious life. The state division of roles enabled believers to take an active part in negotiating their religious independence and even when they failed, it shows that they were not passive objects controlled by the state, but active actors with an agency of their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 1968 Soviet invasion, the people of Czechoslovakia could not avoid the presence of Soviet culture, which was a symbolic manifestation of subordination to the Soviet hegemony. When researching the theatre culture of this era, one comes across a very specific tension between the state's cultural politics, the principles of theatres' repertoire-making and audience perceptions. As new Soviet musicals began to appear on Czechoslovak stages in the early 1970s, serving as obligatory Soviet titles, audiences were not very approving, even as the official discourse created a completely different image. The case study of the 1971 Prague production of the Soviet musical Nobody Is Happier Than Me by Andrei Eshpai shows the impact of cultural politics on the theatre industry, how the discourse balanced the unpopularity of the show and its political importance and how the production was perceived by various agents involved in it. Research on this previously untouched area can shed light on the cultural mechanisms of late communism in Czechoslovakia, the nature of popular culture in communist states and the relationship between the Soviet Union and its satellites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the continuities in the interpretation of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia from 1956 to the present. It first concentrates on the way the year 1956 (one that remained quiet in the country, as opposed to Poland and Hungary) has been treated in Czechoslovak historiography. It aims to show that an almost exclusive focus on political history has produced until today a misleading image of this apparent communist stability as based on repression rather than on a genuine basis of support for the communist rule. The German historiography of communism shows the usefulness of a socio-political approach that could serve as model. The article then further retraces the permanence of this misleading interpretation to the influence of a highly politicized narrative of the terror period inspired by the work of historian Karel Kaplan and other intellectuals of the Prague Spring era. For this it makes use of Kaplan's autobiography, which has only ever appeared in French. One particular point of interest is the historiographical treatment reserved to the Stalinist leader Klement Gottwald. The article suggests that this reform communist narrative, which blames the terror on the Soviets without questioning the responsibility of Czech society, has kept the history of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia from evolving at the same pace as the historiography of the post-1968 period. It therefore needs to be acknowledged and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What challenges have we met while writing the history of communist countries before and after 1989? This article introduces a special section devoted to the historiography of the recent past in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It shows that many of the methodological choices made after 1989 eschewed any critical examination and replicated or denied choices made before 1989 without reflecting on them. The section also reflects upon personal continuities. And it finally shows that history writing has been instrumentalized for political purposes after 1989 just as it had been before 1989. In other words, it acutely raises the question of continuities in historical practices despite the 1989 political rupture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić simultaneously in several countries published a collection of essays titled A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism. The collection consists of eight stories narrated by animals: a mole, a mouse, a dog, a cat, a raven, a parrot, a pig and a bear. The animals talk about neuralgic issues of Communism in former Eastern European countries (Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, Albania, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria). The genre differentiation is based on determining postmodern variations of basic genre conventions in the process of creating a piece of literature. Fable variations are determined by analyzing the relationship between a fable and other genre forms, such as, an essay, a novella, a legend, a myth. Next to genre differentiation of a literary structure, one can also observe the differentiation of its role that has been conditioned by today's cultural memory. In that manner, mythologized persons, objects and features of Communism are analyzed as universal symbols of a message, as well as elements of a satiric play. This paper will determine in which ways the above mentioned variations enrich the existent genre forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Fotocinema is the property of Revista Fotocinema and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite the context of contemporary post-heroic indifference, our intention is to re-analyze the concept of heroism, not in the modernist (totalizing and iconic), or in the post-modernist (de-heroizing and ironic) way, but in the optics of hermeneutic re-reading of the specific teachers' stories from the Stalinist years of the totalitarian regime. In the contribution we bring a conceptual identification of features of the ethical-characterial understanding of "hero without a halo", by which we want to break the simplistic dichotomy between heroic and everyday - we introduce a third concept - "a hero of everyday life". We point out how the mythical-idealistic idea of heroism perverted to a collective ideology and how the reality of the communist totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia demanded heroes - heroes of everyday life. The aim of the research is to find the occurrence of the identifying features of the "everyday hero" in particular stories of three teachers from the times of socialist Czechoslovakia, with the help of narrative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with a dissent discourse against celebrations of October 28th in the era of the First Czechoslovak republic found in court records. Primarily, is researched a discourse of members of the German and Polish community in the Czech lands. Besides ways of shaping a negative image of the celebrations there are researched also attempts to create alternative festivities which could connect the citizens with certain political movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The survey shows the results of post-war historiography focused on social problems. Having overcome the dogmatic Marxism era, the historical science of the 1960s noted the expansion of objective and non-ideologized efforts to research social classes and strata including their standard of life. Features of that effort and important papers and works are mentioned herein. The text presented touches briefly a new wave of interest in knowing the so-called "state socialism" social face. At the end, the authors draw attention to new works on social history of the post-Communist time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines alleged Czechoslovak assistance to the Italian extreme-left terrorist organisation, the Red Brigades, and how the case has been investigated in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. The authors present the sources of information on the issue and analyse the course of the investigation undertaken by the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. In the absence of a complete archival record, given that important documents were shredded, the full truth about the fact and nature of any Czechoslovak assistance may never be known. Yet there are some grounds for speculation that assistance was granted by elements within the Czechoslovak secret services, and that these elements failed to inform the Communist Party leadership about their actions. However, it is not possible to confirm this on the basis of available documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Generation '68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective). 1968 is universally considered as the year that Marxism and socialism achieved significant political legitimacy amongst the younger generation. This is only partly true for Czechoslovakia, where the younger generations—students in their early twenties, but also young intellectuals, artists, and political activists entering their professional careers—brought about the emancipation of non-Marxist political thinking in public discourse. In this article, I demonstrate the intellectual clash of the generations of 1968: the older generation that represented Dubček's famous "socialism with a human face" and that made the Prague Spring liberalization possible by introducing a set of reforms, and new political generations—of students and young intellectuals who rejected the idea of Reform Communism as insufficient for real democratic order. Examining each generation's understanding of key political concepts such as "opposition" or "political pluralism" reveals that the younger generations had vastly different expectations of "socialism with a human face." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to analyse the international scientific policy of the countries of the Socialist Bloc in relation to the establishment of the International Biological Program. It focuses mainly on Czechoslovakia as one of the main active members of the IBP and as a close ally of the USSR when it entered the realm of international science policy after years of targeted isolation forced upon it during Stalinism. The study examines Soviet international science policy strategy and coordination from the reinstatement of Central and Eastern European countries as members of UNESCO and the ICSU to the occupation of the highest positions within IUBS and the contribution to establishing the definitive shape of the International Biological Program. The influence that socialist countries gained thanks to their international coordination efforts allowed them to modify the focus of the IBP to best meet their interests. As a result, they also ended up influencing the development and direction of the biological sciences in the 1970s and 1980s. From the perspective of institutional history, the specific infrastructure of the IBP led to the creation of not just new types of research groups and institutes but also scientific committees, which, thanks to their official status and inclusion in the IBP, and later MaB, gained political clout. New ecological paradigms and the open dialogue between scientists across the Iron Curtain within the IBP was the first serious crack in the monolithic approach of the Socialist Bloc towards the environment, through which the road to environmental initiatives - which were very frequently linked to anti-regime attitudes - led. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]