Historie ve službách příběhu
Author(s): Petr Mareš / Language(s): Czech
/ Issue: 3-4/2015
Keywords: review;critical analysis
Lukeš, Igor. Československo nad propastí: Selhání amerických diplomatů a tajných
služeb v Praze 1945–1948. Trans. from the English by Jan Jirák and Ladislav Köppl.
Prague: Prostor, 2014, 383 pp., ISBN 978-80-7260-292-6.
The book under review is a Czech translation of Igor Lukeš’s On the Edge of the Cold
War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), whose Czech title translates as ‘Czechoslovakia on the edge
of the abyss: The failure of US diplomats and secret services in Prague, 1945–48’.
The first of the three reviews, published here as part of the section ‘Three Readings
of One Book’, is conceived on the broader plan of an analysis of US-Czechoslovak
relations in the years immediately after the Second World War. The book, according
to the reviewer, is the result of extensive research in all of the important American
and Czech archives. Moreover, it is to the author’s great credit that he conducted
numerous interviews with people involved in the described events and has made
use of the unpublished manuscripts they provided him with. He offers a highly
attractive, indeed gripping, account, thanks to which the reader gets a very good
idea of what it was that led to the Communist takeover in late February 1948.
But this picture is neither complete nor balanced. In this work about the failure
of US diplomats and the US secret services in Prague, its greatest strength, according
to the reviewer, is, somewhat paradoxically, the revealing passages about the
activities of the Czechoslovak intelligence services against the US Embassy and its
representatives in Czechoslovakia. What is problematic, however, is the interpretations
based on insuffi cient sources, factual imprecision, and careless interpretation
or even intentional shifts, which the reviewer exposes by analysing the withdrawal
of the US Army from Czechoslovakia, the role of Czechoslovakia in post-war US
policy, and the character of the US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Laurence A.
Steinhardt (1892–1950). Lukeš, according to the reviewer, too readily accepts the
idea that Czechoslovakia was of great importance as an American ‘testing ground’ to
determine the possibilities of maintaining friendly relations with the Soviet Union,
while he fails to take into account essential shifts in developments. Above all, however,
he presents a contrived portrait of Steinhardt as an originally capable and
responsible diplomat who, in consequence of professional failures in his Prague
mission, ceased to take an interest in Prague events, paying more attention to his
private affairs than his ambassadorial duties.
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