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Aleksander Smoliński reviewed a four-volume publication: Tadeusz Dubicki, Andrzej Suchcitz, Intelligence officers of the Polish Army and the Polish Armed Forces in the years 1939–1945. Biographical dictionary, vol. 1–4 (Łomianki: Wyd. LTW, 2009–2019).
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The uniform of the Hungarian Crown Field Mace Infantry Banner in the years 1752–1768 has not been the subject of research so far. The author of this text presents the evolution of the uniform, equipment and partly armaments of the unit on a rich source basis from the resources of the National Archives in Krakow. The banner had a red-sapphire uniform with traditional Hungarian accents (e.g. long trousers, a zupanik instead of a vest, a Hungarian yarn belt, a saber tie, etc.), also observed in the Austrian army in Hungarian regiments.
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This text is a critical edition of a fragment of a document concerning the military aspects of the Vietnam War that was taking place at that time. It is not onlyan attempt to present a Polish People's propaganda way of seeing the VietnamWar, but it also reveals the existence of communist manipulation and the processbehind the creation of an ahistorical image of the Vietnamese struggle.
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The article discusses the numbers and functioning of the wojsko kwarciane (Quartered Army) in the turbulent third interregnum and in the first year of the reign of Sigismund III. Thanks to the access to the previously unused fiscal and military materials, it was possible to determine the size of this army in individual quarters of the period of interest and the names of the captains. No less important aspect is the political context of the use of wojsko kwarciane in a situation of the election parliament being split and attempts made to weaken the position of the Grand Hetman of the Crown, Jan Zamoyski, and the subjecting of his prerogatives to a nationwide discussion.
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The article presents the size and composition of the Polish forces near Zbaraż,with a breakdown into individual regiments and banners, at the beginning of thefights that began on 10 July 1649. In addition to repeating and arranging what wasalready known, many new findings have been introduced and errors contained inolder literature have been corrected.
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Relatively little is known about Carl von Clausewitz’s involvement in the November Uprising as the Chief of Staff for the Prussian Army of Observation. This articleargues that in Prussia’s strategy of no direct involvement in the Polish-Russian conflict, Clausewitz’s formidable skills as a military planner played an integral role. Thetightened control over the borders deprived the Polish army of critical manpower andresources, while not giving Great Powers sympathetic to the Polish independence likeFrance a clear cause for intervention. Additionally, Clausewitz’s visceral opposition tothe November Uprising stemmed from his fears about Prussia’s strategic vulnerabilities.
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Among the Russian military units assembled for the suppression of the Polish November Uprising was also the Finnish Sharp-Shooter Battalion. The war inPoland was the first combat experience of Finnish soldiers in Russian service. Theservice of the unit was hailed as a testimony of Finnish loyalty towards the Empire,but it left a mixed legacy. This article discusses the complicated place of the PolishUprising and Finnish sharp-shooters in Finnish historical memory during the 19thcentury
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The article presents the current state of research on a fragment of the history of the Polish military – the history of the army, i.e. land forces of the Polish Armed Forces existing in the years 1940–1947 and subordinated to the legal authorities of the Republic of Poland in London, as well as prospects for the development of this research. The author focused primarily on non-serial publications which have appeared since 1945 until today. Discussing the state of research, he presented the achievements of both emigration and national historiography. In the latter, he distinguished two periods: before and after 1990. He also discussed the achievements of Western historiography in this field. The author concentrated on the most important trends in historiography so far and on the predominant trends in editing sources, memoirs, biographies and monographs, which he grouped thematically. As far as scientific journals are concerned, the author just mentioned a few of the most important ones published in exile and two leading historical-military ones published in Poland. He also pointed to the most important Polish and foreign archives, which contain sources necessary for the reconstruction of the history of the Polish Armed Forces. The author also characterized briefly the potential of the particular scientific circles that conduct professional research on the history of the Polish Armed Forces. Discussing the prospects for the development of this research, he pointed out the suggested directions and topics that remain undiscovered. He stressed that there are still many areas awaiting scientific exploration. Casting light on the results of the investigations, including new findings, opens up the possibility of writing many articles, including source papers, because many aspects of the functioning of the Polish Armed Forces are still unexplored. It is also a field for many monographs and syntheses. The author concluded his deliberations with a short summary referring to the challenges and opportunities as well as possible risks and threats to future research.
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Several scientific and popular publications have been devoted to the Polish military effort in the Napoleonic era. However, there is too little information about Poles who participated in Napoleonic wars under non-national banners, but also fought alongside Napoleon. Large units composed of Poles have their monographs, but there are no similar studies on the service in the French army of at least hundreds of Poles, scattered over many regiments. Indirectly, Poles from other than Polish formations of the Napoleonic army were mentioned by Stanisław Kirkor in his study of the fates of Poles in British captivity, but these are very short extracts from English sources. Thanks to a preliminary query in French materials, it was possible to determine that many citizens from the pre-partition Polish territory joined the ranks of the French army without serving in the army of the Duchy of Warsaw or in units composed primarily of Poles. Among them were volunteers, deserters from the armies of the partitioning powers, prisoners of war, and seemingly also conscripts. One of the most interesting units among the many different regiments of the Napoleonic army was the Irish Regiment, also known as the Irish Legion. It was in this regiment that many Poles served. They were mainly privates and non-commissioned officers, but there were also cases of Polish officers serving in this formation. During the investigation, at least 11 officers of Polish origin or from the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were identified and their service in the Irish Regiment was described. There were also individual cases of formal assignment of Polish officers to the Irish formation, but in practice these officers often did not take up service and were transferred to Polish units. This paper is an attempt to draw attention to the problem of the service of Poles in the units of the Great Army.
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The presented biographical collective study concerns the officers of the Historical Bureau/Military Historical Bureau (BH/WBH). It contains biographical notes on officers serving in BH/WBH in 1922–1939, preceded by a preliminary collective portrait of the officers. The biographical notes were prepared taking into account especially their age, civil education, knowledge of foreign languages, the course of military service, work in headquarters or such entities as military museums or educational institutions. The author’s intention was to concisely present both the dynamic development of the office and the professional level of officers assigned to it.
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Jan Chadima’s book, simply entitled "Rudolf Slánský", is a biography of one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in 1921, who eventually became a victim of the largest trial of “internal enemies of the party” in post-war Czechoslovakia. Between the wars, Slánský (1901–1952) served in various positions in the regional and central party apparatus, and by the 1930s he was already in the party leadership. He spent the war in exile in Moscow. In 1945 he became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KSČ, and as such he had the main organizational role in building the mass party that took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. He participated in the political repressions, yet in connection with the search for “internal enemies” in the party he himself was first politically degraded (in September 1951), then arrested (in November) and, as the alleged head of a conspiracy, he was accused of the most serious anti-state and anti-party crimes. In a show trial in November 1952 he was sentenced to death and executed a month later. In the 1960s, he was gradually rehabilitated, but under normalization his fate was a taboo subject once again. The reviewer appreciates the fact that while other historians have so far concentrated mainly on the circumstances of Slánský’s trial, Chadima has attempted to give us a comprehensive biography. Against the chronological background of Slánský’s career, the reviewer highlights interesting moments in the book, and positively assesses the breadth of the heuristic scope, the factual and analytical interpretation, and the overall level and value of the biography. Chadima’s book is primarily a political biography and, although he does not dwell much on Slánský’s personal and family history, he paints a fuller portrait than previous authors, who mainly saw him as a ruthless bureaucrat longing for power.
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Diplomat and author of numerous award-winning books George F. Kennan (1904–2005) became an influential figure in American foreign policy shortly after the Second World War. As chargé d’affaires to Moscow, in the so-called Long Telegram, hearticulated the principles that became the basis of the strategy of containment between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1938–1939, he worked at the embassy in Prague and thirty years later published a selection of diplomatic reports on the situation in the Czechoslovak Second Republic and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which he sent from Prague (and later also from Berlin) to Washington. The book "From Prague after Munich: Diplomatic Papers 1938–1940" (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1968) has now been published in Czech translation under the title "Z Prahy po Mnichovu: Diplomatické zprávy 1938–1940", with an introductory study by historians Vít Smetana and Jiří Ellinger and in Smetana’s careful edition. The reviewer introduces the career of George F. Kennan, describes the circumstances of the creation of this volume, and analyses its contents. In his view, although highly authentic, Kennan’s analyses also reveal an occasional ignorance of local historical realities and they reproduce some of the diplomat’s ethno-cultural prejudices. It is evident that Kennan applied the principles of realpolitik and observed the Central European region through the lens of a great power.
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In his monograph "Trh bez přívlastků, nebo ekonomickou demokracii? Spory o podobu vlastnické transformace v porevolučním Československu" [A Market without Attributes, or Economic Democracy? Disputes over the Form of Property Transformation in Post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia], the historian Václav Rameš deals with the discussions and conceptual disputes on the form of economic transformation in post-communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. In this, a group of liberal politicians and economists led by the then federal Finance Minister Václav Klaus came to the fore with a programme of rapid and massive expropriation of economic enterprises in the form of voucher privatisation (kuponová privatizace). The reviewer highlights the fact that the author, as a historian, and unlike the actors, witnesses and majority of discussants of the period, approaches the topic with a perspective unburdened by the subjective comparisons of the reality of the time with the optimal state. Instead, in a matter-of-fact way, he reconstructs the competing ideas of transformation during the dynamic post-revolutionary events and analyses the domestic and external reasons for their success or failure. He also traces the continuity and rapid demise of contemporary ideas of economic democracy that were to be fulfilled through corporate self-management. Rameš knowledgeably relates the Czechoslovak case to the parallel developments in other postcommunist countries and to the global context of the rise of economic neoliberalism. He works with the concept of “past futures”, in reference to the German historian of ideas Reinhart Koselleck, to portray possible but not realized trajectories of development in the past, thus acknowledging that the shape of the transformation was not predetermined and could have evolved differently.
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Bohuš (Bohuslav) Beneš (1901–1977) was the nephew of the second Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš (1884–1948). He worked as a journalist and diplomat in the United States and Canada, and also wrote both non-fiction and fiction. The reviewer appreciates the publication of his memoirs "Synovcem prezidenta" [The President’s Nephew], written in American exile and edited by historians Pavel Carbol and Martin Nekola. The memoirs are a unique source for better understanding of the fates of many members of Beneš’ extended family and relatives, who played larger or smaller roles in Czechoslovak public life, including his uncle Edvard Beneš, whose biography should now be corrected or supplemented in some places. In his memoirs, the author is very critical and even harsh towards people close to him: here lentlessly depicts their weaknesses or problematic features, with the exception of Edvard and his wife Hana Benešová (1885–1974), to whom he is, on the contrary, particularly indulgent.
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The colloquium entitled “Ancestors and Descendants of the State Socialism Elites: The Fates of Families in the Czech Lands in the Long Twentieth Century”, which the author reports, was organized on February 15, 2023, in Prague by historians Stanislav Holubec and Vojtěch Čurda under the auspices of the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Its main goal, which was fulfilled, was to present selected leading figures of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from various periods of its existence in the broad context of intergenerational family ties during the twentieth century. The colloquium had a strong sociological overlap, as the speakers also traced transfers of social capital within families or changes in the economic and social status of their members. Along with historians, often authors of biographies of communist politicians, the colloquium also featured descendants and relatives of the discussed personalities. According to the author, the event demonstrated promising perspectives of the genre of historical biography in such a broader conception.
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This article aims to present how the personal dictatorship regime of King Charles II of Romania established and subordinated to the single party an intelligence service, through which it carried out political police actions against its citizens. As is shown by the information contained in the archival documents, which are kept at the territorial services of the National Archives of Romania, the agents of the propaganda department of the National Guards of the National Revival Front/Party of the Nation carried out counter-intelligence operations in sensitive regions of Romania and duplicated the tasks of similar structures within the police, gendarmerie and army. The Lower Danube County was a prosperous region of the Romanian monarchy, bordering the Soviet Union, and was dominated by ethnic and foreign citizens. The King’s agents’ briefing notes reveal a world of intelligence willing to serve its homeland but also agents resentful of some of their countrymen. Very often, the leaks touched on personal and trivial subjects, which they considered of interest to the sovereign’s ears.
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Review of: Indo-Pacific Empire: China, America and the Contest for the World’s Pivotal Region Rory Medcalf. Manchester University Press, 2020. Unmapping the 21st Century: Between Networks and the State Nicholas Michelsen and Neville Bolt. Bristol University Press, 2022.
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Nowadays history plays a significant role in the social and political life of the nation state. Since it aims to legitimize political institutions and rationalize official policies, it has basically become an integral part of it. Consequently, historiography sometimes formulates pseudoscientific ideological products justified by the political needs of society. Following these considerations, this paper offers a self-critical reflection on the approaches of Ukrainian legal history and non-specialized historiography to the study of a memorable legal document of supreme importance – the Treaties and Covenants between Hetman Pylyp Orlyk and the Zaporozhian Host of 1710, also known as the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk of 1710. The article offers a critical review of the major existing hypotheses of Ukrainian legal history and non-specialized historiography which are based on research carried out at different periods of Ukrainian political reality (the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet eras). It applies a critical approach in analyzing attempts to consider this document of feudal law within the paradigm of contemporary constitutionalism, evaluating their adequacy and correctness in terms of historical and legal scholarship. It also highlights alternative approaches in historical and historical and legal historiography to the political and legal assessment of the Treaties and Covenants of 1710.
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This paper contains following book reviews: 1. Hanna Rajfura – Patrycja Szwedo – Barbara Świadek – Marek Walczak – Piotr Węcowski (edd.), Śmierć, pogrzeb i upamiętnienie władców w dawnej Polsce, Warszawa, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2020, 282 s., ISBN 978-83-235-4366-4. 2. Friedrich Polleross, Die Repräsentation der Habsburger (1493-1806), Petersberg, Michael Imhof Verlag 2023, 592 s., ISBN 978-3-7319-1229-3. 3. José Cáceres Mardones, Bestialische Praktiken. Tiere, Sexualität und Justiz im frühneuzeitlichen Zürich, Wien- -Köln, Böhlau Verlag 2022 (= Tiere in der Geschichte 1), 343 s., ISBN 978-3-412- 52490-6. 4. Joachim Bahlcke – Jiří Just – Martin Rothkegel (edd.), Konfessionelle Geschichtsschreibung im Umfeld der Böhmischen Brüder (1500-1800). Tradition – Akteure – Praktiken, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag 2022 (= Jabloniana. Quellen und Forschungen zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit 11), 668 s., ISBN 978-3-447-11709-8. 5. Jiří Just – Eliška Baťová, In monte Oliveti. Litomyšl a knižní kultura jednoty bratrské v 16. století, Praha, Historický ústav 2022 (= Práce Historického ústavu AV ČR, řada A – Monographia), 200 s., ISBN 978-80-7286-401-0. 6. Keith Pluymers , No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 2021, 307 s., ISBN 978-0-8122-5307-8. 7. Marion Romberg (ed.), Empresses and Queens in the Courtly Public Sphere from the 17th to the 20th Century, Leiden-Boston, Brill 2021, 336 s., ISBN 978-90-04-35499-9. 8. Georg B. Michels, The Habsburg Empire under Siege. Ottoman Expansion and Hungarian Revolt in the Age of Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü (1661- 76), Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021, 608 s., ISBN 978-0-2280-0575-9. 9. Věra Slováková, Dětství a dospívání poddaných na Moravě ve druhé polovině 18. století na příkladu slavkovského panství, Brno, Matice moravská 2022 (= Knižnice Matice moravské 49), 289 s., ISBN 978-80-87709-30-6. 10. Martin Nodl – Vladimír Urb ánek (edd.), Josef Válka a myšlení o dějinách, Praha, Argo 2022, 200 s., ISBN 978-80- 257-3912-9.
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This article investigates the contribution of Spinoza and authors of his circle (Antistius Constans, Van den Enden and Koerbagh) on the modern conception of tolerance. In his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza launches the libertas philosophandi-question integrating two kinds of freedom between which there is a tension: freedom of thought and speech and freedom of religious conscience. As freedom means living and acting in society in light of one’s own interests, tolerance becomes a political issue that depends from political perspectives and priorities. This insight leads Spinoza to bringing together the control of political authority on religious affairs and a political regime of religious plurality and toleration. These ideas seem to be reminiscent of texts published in his immediate circle: the anonymus De jure ecclesiasticorum (1665); the political pamphlets Kort verhael (1662) and Vrye Politijke Stellingen (1665) of his teacher Van den Enden; the subversive dictionary Een Bloemhof (1668) and the systematic philosophical Een Ligt (1668) of Koerbagh. In these texts the question of religion and religious authority shifts to the question of the nature and origin of political authority. The authors all criticize the abuse of power in light of the idea that there is no freedom without equality and no equality without freedom. Together with Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus (1677), they thereby form an anomaly within the anomaly of the Calvinist Low Countries that regards specifically this radical democratic view. They are not so much talking about tolerance but about everyone’s active participation in political life which is necessary for the rescue of the republic.
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