Poznámky k perzekuci a represi komunistického režimu
Some Comments on Persecution and Repression Practised by the Communist Régime

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses some of the usual ways of perceiving political repression and persecution in Communist Czechoslovakia, including the implicit identification of these phenomena with violence carried out by the State Security Forces (Státní bezpečnost – StB) and in show trials. The author advocates dealing with these phenomena complexly, in their various forms, in their ways of being expressed, their contexts and aims, by means of the stories of victims and perpetrators, in reflections, and in the consequences for the behaviour of Czech and Slovak society. He points out the often over-simplified use of statistics about the number of people sentenced for political crimes, which has created an exaggerated picture of acts of political repression in the 1950s, compared to which the 1960s are almost too easily perceived as a period of political liberalization, a judgement that is, from the perspective of political repression by means of the courts at least to the mid- 1960s, unwarranted.

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