Tomas Sniegon

Následující text pojednává o vývoji kultu spojeného s osobností Felixe Edmundoviče Dzeržinského, revolucionáře a zakladatele politické policie v Sovětském svazu, a jeho významových proměnách v různých etapách historie Sovětského svazu i postsovětského Ruska. Dzeržinskij stál v čele sovětské státní bezpečnosti v prvních dvou obdobích její existence, bezprostředně poté co se sovětské Rusko a SSSR staly prvním státem uplatňujícím "diktaturu proletariátu", tedy státní teror pod vedením jediné politické strany. V tu dobu nesla Dzeržinského organizace názvy VČK ("Čeka"), GPU a OGPU. 1 Vydatně tak napomohl nejprve ke konstituování sovětského komunistického systému za éry Vladimira Iljiče Lenina a později, po Leninově skonu v roce 1924, i transferu této moci do rukou Josifa Vissarionoviče Stalina.

This text deals with the analysis of the removal of the monument to Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev from the Prague 6 district, an important part of the capital of the Czech Republic. The given monument was built during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1980 and removed in 2020. The primary reason for the removal was the dissatisfaction of the political representation of Prague 6 and the leadership of the capital city with Russia's policy towards Ukraine after 2014, but this-for another part of Czech society very controversial-step was mainly explained by other, vicarious reasons. Given that the fate of the statue was decided mainly by the representatives of a single district in the Czech capital, special attention here is given to the relationship between local, urban and national decision-making. Additionally, the focus includes the relationship between this object and the history of the capital, the current Czech Republic, and the former Czechoslovakia, i.e. a multinational state in which Konev was initially revered and posthumously honoured. The role of new historical facts is also of interest-those which were revealed only after the narrow, Communist interpretation of history loosened its grip, as well as the final decisions, and to what extent the historical consciousness of those who made the final decision was influenced by the motives of predecessors from the postwar period. Last but not least, conditions unique to the context of the Czech Republic are discussed in terms of their potential application in assessing issues related to sites of memory in the postwar and Communist period.

This text discusses the transformations of the Katyn memorial site near Smolensk in western Russia, where, in 1940, the mass murder of more than 4,000 Polish military officers who were prisoners of war occurred. After the Soviet Union’s admission of guilt in 1990, it seemed for two decades that Katyn could also serve as a place for mutual
reconciliation between post-communist Poland and post-Soviet Russia. However, in the period of increasing tension between Russia and Poland after 2010, the monument in Katyn became an object of Russian–Polish confrontation. The author concludes that the Katyn memorial complex today illustrates the tendency to patriotize and detraumatize Soviet crimes, whereby the positive events of the Soviet era – especially the victory
over Germany in World War II – are ‘Russified’ and newly politically traumatized in parallel with the trivialization and marginalization of murder and crimes against human rights. The new form of memory in Katyn reflects an increasingly firmly dictated line from above that combines Russian nationalism, Orthodox faith, and a sentimental view of the period of Communist rule.

The study discusses the cult associated with the personality of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), a revolutionary and the founder of the political police in the Soviet Union, and the changing meanings of this cult in various stages of the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. " anks to Dzerzhinsky, as the head of the most signi) cant repressive component, Soviet state terror acquired a very specific institutionalized form. The image of Dzerzhinsky as the basis for the mythologizing of the Soviet political police became very useful in all stages of the development of the Soviet system, most signicantly for the development of the cult being the period after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union in 1956. Even later, despite many revelations of the crimes of communism, the glorification of Felix Dzerzhinsky and the trivialization of the terror he introduced has not completely disappeared. " e myth about the founder of the “Cheka” remained very similar or even identical in its main features in all these periods, but its functions varied in time. State security o* cials in Russia still call themselves “Chekists” in reference to Dzerzhinsky’s VChK/Cheka. The author therefore concludes that his cult has become more useful for state power in the Kremlin in the long run than the cults of other Soviet-era leaders, including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

The main question of this text is how interpretations and representations of the Holocaust have been related to concerns of national and other kinds of identity among Czechoslovaks and, after the so-called Velvet Divorce of 1993, among Czechs and Slovaks.

The main focus of this study is the place of the Holocaust in the Czech and Slovak historical cultures during ”the long 1990s”, i.e. between the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia at the end of 1989 and the entry of both the Czech and Slovak Republics into the European Union in 2004. When morality and conscience have been placed in the centre of new European politics instead of ideology in the 1990s, the Holocaust has obtained a great political-symbolic importance. In Czechoslovakia, the Holocaust was more or less completely ignored before 1989. As this study shows, its ”return” into the post-Communist historical cultures of Czechoslovakia’s descendent states was far from self-evident. The central theoretical concepts of this analysis are historical consciousness, historical culture and use of history. The Czech and Slovak historical cultures and the place that they give to the Holocaust are analysed through four dominant Czechoslovak/Czech and Slovak historical narrativ...

History Reborn inFree Competition: The Czech and Slovak Post-communist Transitions and Their Dominant Historical Narratives Two of the four historical narratives presented here, the Czech national-liberal narrative and the Slovak national-European narrative, imbue Czech and Slovak history with national and democratic meaning, by using history to legitimize future aims in these areas. The two remaining historical narratives, the Communist and the Slovak national-Catholic, with their way of using history, take an expressly confrontational stance on values called ‘politically liberal’, though in their renewed versions from the 1990s they no longer call outright for totalitarian power. All four narratives, however, work with their own nations and histories as monolithic categories, and consequently have problems answering questions that do not fit into their conceptions of the search for their own meanings of Czech or Slovak history. In their endeavours to define new post-Communist valu...

Гареева Гульфира Нигаматовна Проблематика башкирских романов 1950-1960-х годов В статье предпринята попытка раскрытия особенностей развития башкирской прозы 1950-1960-х годов на фоне социально-исторических перемен в период "оттепели", усиления внимания к человеку как к личности. Посредством анализа принципов реалистического отображения действительности, изучения жанрово-стилевой специфики, определения круга тем и осмысления проблематики больших эпических форм автор выявляет тенденцию постепенного перехода башкирской романистики от социологического исследования к психологически достоверному изображению духовного мира современников. Адрес статьи: www.gramota.net/materials/2/2020/2/11.html

Lubyanka- IIIrd Floor. Memoirs of the KGB-chairman Vladimir Semichastny This book (published in Czech language in 1998) gives the reader a chance to follow the development of those times as seen by one of the most powerful men of his days - the highest predecessor of the Commitee for State Security at the Council of Ministers of the USSR (better known under the abbreviation KGB). Considering his position, Semichastny was young when he took up his position: only 37 years old. As the man who enjoyed the support of the then highest Soviet leader, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, he was to continue the de-Stalinisation process in the Soviet security system and to start a new process of working. On the third floor of the Lubyanka - the KGB's vast building in Dzerzhinski Square not far from Kremlin, Semichastny took up his post only two months after the building of the concrete wall which was to separate east from west in Berlin. In the highest spheres of decision making within Soviet po...

In Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin's Russia scholars scrutinise developments in official symbolical, cultural and social policies as well as the contradictory trajectories of important cultural, social and intellectual trends in Russian society after the year 2000. Engaging experts on Russia from several academic fields, the book offers case studies on the vicissitudes of cultural policies, political ideologies and imperial visions, on memory politics on the grassroot as well as official levels, and on the links between political and national imaginaries and popular culture in fields as diverse as fashion design and pro-natalist advertising.

In the wake of the deterioration of relations between modern Russia and Poland, the Katyn memorial has become a scene for the contestation of historical memory. In order to play down the 1940 executions of Polish military officers in Katyn, the Russian government has granted belated official recognition to 8,000 victims of Stalinism in the Smolensk region. After being brushed under the carpet in the Soviet Union and for nearly the first three decades in post-Soviet Russia, their suffering has now been instrumentalized in the memory war between Russia and Poland.

This chapter presents an analysis of four unusual Czech sites of memory that are immanently connected with violent Czech–German relations from the first post-war months of 1945. In 1945, all these places became sites of Czech revenge against the ‘Sudeten German’ population, i.e. the Czech German ethnic group that had been collectively punished for the crimes of the Third Reich during the Second World War and for its prevailing
sympathies with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. These places are: Pohořelice (Pohrlitz), Teplice nad Metují (Weckelsdorf), Ústí and Labem (Aussig) and Postoloprty (Postelberg). Between 1945 and the late 1980s, the memory of the local massacres of
the Sudeten Germans that took place there was hidden behind the curtain of officially enforced silence. After 1989, Pohořelice, Teplice nad Metují, Ústí nad Labem and Postoloprty became the first Czech cities and towns where massacres of the Sudeten Germans became officially commemorated through memorials. In all these cases, the memorials were not only individual acts of commemoration but also acts initiated and/or approved
by local Czech politicians. This makes these officials unique in the Czech post-communist context, where many other decision makers hesitated or directly refused to make such decisions. Acts of this kind are still unpopular among the Czech general public. Therefore, the study focuses on the main Czech actors who during the first two post-communist decades stood behind decisions to commemorate the killings of the Sudeten Germans in the four places in question. Why did they decide to act in the way they did? Why did they attempt to change the earlier political and ideological attitudes that were uncompromisingly
hostile to the victims of the Czech violence? Did they try to construct a new historical narrative and thus make new sense of the traumatic Czech–German past?

The article focuses on two post-Communist Central European countries – Slovakia and the Czech Republic – and some important issues about the place of the memory of World War I in their historical cultures. The main questions are: how difficult is it to
incorporate the memory of World War I into Communist, liberal-democratic and nationalist historical narratives in these two post-Communist countries at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century? And, why is it necessary for those people who experienced two brutal dictatorships during the last century – under the Nazis and Communists – only gaining their freedom after the end of the Cold War, to commemorate World War I at all?
The author shows that, at least during the last half-century, both the Czech and Slovak historical cultures have almost completely ignored the memory of World War I. In addition, this war, described as the ‘Great War’ in a number of Western countries, was never seen as a crucial trauma in Czechoslovakia and its successor states. This fact becomes especially evident if Czech and Slovak memories of World War I are compared with memories of
the same conflict in Western Europe, or with Czech and Slovak memories of World War II.

Dva ze čtveřice výše uvedených historických příběhů - český národně-liberální a slovenský národně-evropský - dávají české, resp. slovenské historii národní a demokratický smysl a používají historii k legitimizaci budoucích cílů právě v tomto směru. Dva zbývající historické příběhy – komunistický a slovenský
národně-katolický – se svým způsobem používání historie k hodnotám označovaným jako politicky liberální staví vysloveně konfrontačně, třebaže ve svých úpravách z 90. let již přímo nevolají po totalitní moci. Všechny čtyři příběhy však s vlastním národem a jeho historií pracují jako s jednolitou kategorií, a proto mají v menší či větší míře problém zvládnout otázky, které do jejich
koncepce hledání vlastního smyslu české či slovenské historie nezapadají. Ani v jednom případě se při snaze o vytýčení nových postkomunistických hodnot hlavním aktérům nepodařilo etnicky podmíněný národní rámec opustit nebo dokonce zpochybnit.

Tento text je zaměřen na proces evropeizace paměti holocaustu
a s ním spojený vývoj české historické kultury (i české národní identity) v transformačním období od pádu komunismu v roce 1989 a rozdělení Československa na konci roku 1992 do vstupu samostatné České republiky do Evropské unie v roce 2004.
Toto období poskytlo české společnosti novou, po řadu
předcházejících desetiletí nemyslitelnou možnost opětovně
defi novat a rozvíjet svou národní identitu v otevřené debatě
v demokratických podmínkách. Svobodná konstrukce
postkomunistické a postčeskoslovenské defi nice češství
však probíhala paralelně s pokusem o vytvoření společné
evropské identity, založené na „evropském“ respektu
k demokratickým hodnotám a lidským právům, který
byl často stavěn do protikladu k hodnotám „národním“.
Paměť holocaustu, nejprůmyslovější genocidy v lidských
dějinách, provedené za druhé světové války nacistickým
Německem a jeho spojenci a zaměřené na úplnou likvidaci židů
a některých dalších skupin, sehrála v tomto procesu zásadní úlohu.

This chapter contains an analysis of two similar attempts to institutionalise 'national memory' in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the fall of Communism and dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The study focuses on two documents that create a legal basis for such institutionalisation and on the main actors who initiated the decisions to create these institutes. It is argued that although the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, the institutes became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of the collective 'national' memory.

In 2002 and 2007, two similar institutes were established in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Czech capital Prague. The first one was named Ústav pamäti národa (UPN, The Nation's Memory Institute), the second one Ústav pro Studium totalitních re^mü (USTR, The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). According to their founders, both these institutes were supposed to bring their societies moral satisfaction for struggling in the past, by disclosing unlawful practices of oppressive forces from two of the most brutal dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, they were supposed to produce new scholarly works about these two regimes and contribute to the democratic education of new generations of young Czechs and Slovaks.

Both Institutes were supposed to deal with the period that began in the late 1930s and ended in the late 1980s when, with the exception of 1939 to 1945, Czechs and Slovaks were living in a common state with their lives heavily affected initially by the German occupation and the Second World War, and later by Soviet dominance and the Cold War. The key moments that the impact these two periods had on the life of the Czechs and Slovaks under Nazism and Communism became what the German historian Jörn Rüsen calls 'borderline events' (Rüsen 2001, 232-253). Due to the traumatic nature of these events for the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the fact that these changes could not be explained within already existing and previously dominating historical narratives, it is possible to classify them as 'catastrophic events' that made searching for a new sense of history and creating new historical narratives inevitable (Rüsen 2004, 46; Cavalli 2008, 169-182). Even though the vast majority of the Czechoslovak society saw the change from Communism to a pluralistic system as positive, the process of creating new post-Communist narratives was far from easy (Kopecek 2008, 232-264; Koláf and Kopecek 2007, 173-248). Public debates surrounding the Slovak UPN and Czech USTR clearly illustrated these problems.

This shared history has made the UPN and the USTR special in the post-Communist part of Europe. Institutes of National Memory were also established in some other countries of the former Soviet Bloc, such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. None of these, however, were as closely connected by the shared past they were about to study as the Czech and the Slovak institutes.

Similar subjects of study and similar characteristics of work do not necessarily mean that UPN and USTR became mirror images of each other. Different perceptions of traumatic history in the Czech and Slovak republics and different development in these two successor states of the former Czechoslovakia turned these seemingly very similar institutes into two institutions with different priorities and even with partly different functions in their societies. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that while the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firsdy as moral and scientific, UPN and USTR became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of collective 'national' memory. …

This chapter contains an analysis of two similar attempts to institu-tionalise 'national memory' in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the fall of Communism and dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The study focuses on two documents that create a legal basis for such institutionalisation and on the main actors who initiated the decisions to create these institutes. It is argued that although the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, the institutes became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of the collective 'national' memory. In 2002 and 2007, two similar institutes were established in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Czech capital Prague. The first one was named Ústav pamäti národa (ÚPN, The Nation's Memory Institute), the second one Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů (ÚSTR, The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). According to their founders, both these institutes were supposed to bring their societies moral satisfaction for struggling in the past, by disclosing unlawful practices of oppressive forces from two of the most brutal dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, they were supposed to produce new scholarly works about these two regimes and contribute to the democratic education of new generations of young Czechs and Slo-vaks.

This chapter contains an analysis of two similar attempts to institu-tionalise 'national memory' in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the fall of Communism and dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The study focuses on two documents that create a legal basis for such institutionalisation and on the main actors who initiated the decisions to create these institutes. It is argued that although the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, the institutes became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of the collective 'national' memory. In 2002 and 2007, two similar institutes were established in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Czech capital Prague. The first one was named Ústav pamäti národa (ÚPN, The Nation's Memory Institute), the second one Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů (ÚSTR, The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). According to their founders, both these institutes were supposed to bring their societies moral satisfaction for struggling in the past, by disclosing unlawful practices of oppressive forces from two of the most brutal dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, they were supposed to produce new scholarly works about these two regimes and contribute to the democratic education of new generations of young Czechs and Slo-vaks.

Lubyanka- IIIrd Floor. Memoirs of the KGB-chairman Vladimir Semichastny
This book (published in Czech language in 1998) gives the reader a chance to follow the development of those times as seen by one of the most powerful men of his days - the highest predecessor of the Commitee for State Security at the Council of Ministers of the USSR (better known under the abbreviation KGB). Considering his position, Semichastny was young when he took up his position: only 37 years old. As the man who enjoyed the support of the then highest Soviet leader, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, he was to continue the de-Stalinisation process in the Soviet security system and to start a new process of working. On the third floor of the Lubyanka - the KGB's vast building in Dzerzhinski Square not far from Kremlin, Semichastny took up his post only two months after the building of the concrete wall which was to separate east from west in Berlin.

In the highest spheres of decision making within Soviet politics, he would experience the crisis of divided Berlin as well as the Cuba Crisis of 1962. In his authorized memoirs, based on interviews with Tomas Sniegon, Semichastny also speaks about the situation within the KGB at the time of the murder of President Kennedy and about Lee Harvey Oswald's stay in the USSR. He supervised the process of Oswald's return to the U. S. A. Some very interesting mysteries are still surrounding Mr. Jurij Nosenko's emigration only several weeks after the assassination, in early 1964, too.

In 1963 Semichastny witnessed the Russians' most useful man in the west Kim Philby's emigration to the USSR. (It was also during his time that the Soviet spy George Blake managed to escape from a prison sentence of 42 years and to go to Moscow).

Of course the circumstances of the removal of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 are dealt with. Semichastny participated actively in the removal in spite of the fact that he was one of Khrushchev's favourites since his party political work in Ukraine. Semichastny tells how the conflict developed, how he, before the removal of Khrushchev, had been asked by Brezhnev if it was possible to poison Khrushchev or in some way to bump him off as an accident. He describes in great detail the discussion of this topic and also the process to win the Minister of Defence Marshal Malinovsky and the Minister of Foreign Affaires Andrei Gromyko over to the opposition side against Khrushchev, as well as the technical side of removing Khrushchev from power. We are also informed about Brezhnev's relationship with the KGB and about the changes at the top of the Party.

Other interesting items include international politics in the 60's which play an important part in the book, the break between the Soviet Union and China, the conflict in Yugoslavia and the description of the Soviet global military strategy and the military plans in Western Europe. A great deal will also be said about the KGB's part in the satellite countries and about the KGB's struggle with other intelligence services, above all of course with western intelligence services headed by the CIA.

Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitler’s Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however, remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps.

About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.