Konec mýtu o provokaci StB v Babicích
The End of the Myth of Secret-Police Provocation in Babice

Summary/Abstract: Stehlík, Michal. Babické vraždy 1951 (Edice 1938–1953, vol. 1). Prague: Academia, 2016, 255 pp., ISBN 978-80-200-2593-7.The publication under review seeks to reconstruct the best-known case of politically motivated violence against representatives of the Czechoslovak Communist regime in the 1950s and its consequences. On 2 July 1951, in an attack by an armed group in the village of Babice in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, three officials of the local National Committee were shot dead. In the following months, in a series of show trials, more than a hundred people were tried and sentenced, eleven of whom were sentenced to death. In addition, a number of locals were forced to leave the village. The reviewer appreciates that the author has worked thoroughly with the facts of these events, while bearing in mind the contexts, and convincingly rebutting the traditional speculations about the armed attack having in fact been a provocation by the Communist secret police (StB), which sought to use a police crackdown to crush the local resistance to the Communist regime. Nevertheless, the book suffers, according to the reviewer, from the author’s having failed to take into account the broader context of the case, not interpreting events, and ignoring much of the literature on the topic.

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