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František Bartík. Vzpomínky chovance Jaroslava Vojtěcha a historie táborů nucené práce. Prague: Academia, 2014, 254 pp., ISBN 978-80-200-2328-5; Staša Fleischmannová. Vrstvami. Prague: Torst, 2014, 220 pp., ISBN 970-80-7215-471-5; Martin Flosman. Padre a Rebe: Vojenští duchovní československé zahraniční armády u Tobruku a Dunkerque. (Traumata války, vol. 4.) Prague: Epocha, 2015, 290 pp., ISBN 978-80-7425-260-0; Jiří Kocian, Vít Smetana and others. Květnové volby 1946 – volby osudové? Československo před bouří. (Prostopravdy, vol. 4.) Prague: Euroslavica, 2014, 244 pp., ISBN 978-80-87825-09-9; Gerhard Scholten. Mezi všemi tábory: Život v době, která zešílela. Prague: Argo and Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2015, 265 pp., ISBN 978-80257-1708-0 and 978-50-87912-40-9
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This article focuses on the long-term trends in the development of social policy between the First World War and the mid-1950's. The author begins by summarizing the main ideas of his own previous articles and books. He emphasizes the continuity and discontinuity in the general conception of Czechoslovak social policy in this period. He also considers conceptual questions, particularly those that would help to explain how the basic terms are employed in historical analysis. The article moves between the two poles of the construction of causality – structural explanation and voluntaristic explanation. The content of the article can be aptly summed up in a neat metaphor: from Bismarck by way of Beveridge to Stalin. In personified form, this shortcut expresses the long-term development of Czechoslovak social policy: from an emphasis on principles of merit, characteristic of the traditional German and Austrian social insurance schemes, by way of a considerably more egalitarian national insurance from 1948 (strongly influenced by the British system), to the Soviet model of social security, which developed from 1951 to 1956. The article also considers important changes in social legislation in the Czechoslovak Republic in this period, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
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ALEXIJEVIČOVÁ, Světlana: Doba z druhé ruky: konec rudého člověka. Z ruštiny přeložila Pavla Bošková. 2. vydání. Příbram, Pistorius & Olšanská, 2017, 492 strany, ISBN 978-80-87855-89-8. Svetlana (Svyatlana) Alexievich (born in 1948), a writer with Byelorussian-Ukrainian roots who writes in Russian and sees her work mainly as a part of Russian literature, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015. The book SecondhandTime. The Last of the Soviets is the last part of the loose pentalogy “Voices of Utopia” (Golosy Utopii) on the late Soviet and post-Soviet (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) society, which was whose Czech translation was first published in 2015 (original Russian edition: Vremya sekond chend. Moscow, Vremya 2013). The reviewer describes her writing style bordering on both fiction and non-fiction, and Alexievich’s acceptance in Russia and in the West. The Secondhand Time is based on a number of interviews that Alexievich had with people with a diverse social status (mostly “ordinary people”) in Russia between 1991 and 2012, which the authoress amalgamated into an impressive work. The reviewer provides an insightin to life stories of the interviewees and their close relatives and friends, in which they return deep into the Soviet past, concluding that the book is a penetrating probe into forms of post-Soviet mentality.
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Glassheim, Eagle: Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 288 pp., ISBN 978-80-8229-6426-1. The author focuses on three areas of issues. The first of them is the post-war cleansing of the Czechoslovak borderlands, related to the unfulfilled efforts of Czechoslovak authorities for an ethnic homogenization of the regions. The second one comprises changes of the borderlands and their use as a “laboratory of state socialism” in the process of modernization transformations. The third area concerns memories of home and the formation of a new identity of expelled Germans and new settlers arriving to the border regions. In the reviewer’s opinion, the uniqueness of the book stems from conceptual and methodological approaches by means of which Glassheim describes the development of the Czechoslovak borderlands and living conditions of local people from a viewpoint of an environmental historian rather than in the topic of the publication. He emphasizes the role of economic and social factors related to the economic policy of the state, since the end of the war oriented mainly on the exploitation of mineral resources and heavy industry as tools used to promote the technocratic, production-driven vision of modernity. However, its implementation not only resulted in the devastation of the borderlands and their environment, but also had an adverse effect on the local population, particularly on their social relations and health.
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The study attempts to capture, in a comprehensive manner, various aspects associated with the presence of the Soviet military garrison in the Central Bohemian municipality of Milovice between 1968 and 1991. In doing so, it relies, to a considerable extent, on local, archival, and other sources. The author first briefly introduces the history of Milovice. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the town and its surroundings were substantially influenced by a unique military training facility in the quarter of Mladá, which was first used by the Austro-Hungarian and then successively by the Czechoslovak, German, again Czechoslovak, and finally Soviet armies. Milovice therefore constitute a unique environment which is presently undergoing a transformation from an area burdened with decrepit military buildings and environmental contamination into a dynamically developing small town. A particularly interesting chapter in its history started after August 21, 1968, when the Soviet intervention army took over the local military training area and established not only a numerous garrison, but also the Headquarters of the Central Group of Forces there. Milovice thus became not just an exclusive and strictly guarded zone, but also a political symbol of the Soviet military presence in Czechoslovakia. The author focuses mainly on the evolution of relations between local inhabitants and members of the Soviet garrison (which included not only soldiers, but also families of officers and civilian workers), as well as on changes of the local environment and everyday life and consequences of the Soviet presence during the period mentioned above. He follows protests of locals against the Soviet invasion, their resentful reactions to the establishment of the Soviet garrison, and then the progress of the so-called normalization in the region of Milovice and in the district of Nymburk, characterized by changes of attitudes of local political bodies, party vetting, establishment of contacts with the Soviet Army, and manifestation visits of state and party officials. He describes in detail the problematic security situation in Milovice, with a lot of minor criminal offences and stricter police checks, serious environmental damage, in particular water and soil contamination by oil hydrocarbons, problems of local people with the supply of drinking water, food, and hard goods (but also popular shopping sprees of locals in better-than-average stocked Soviet shops), traffic difficulties, devastation of residential and public buildings and areas often caused by disrespect of regulations and rules of coexistence on the part of Soviet citizens. However, he also describes informal contacts of locals with the Soviet garrison, frequently for the purpose of illegal barter trade in goods in short supply, taking place in parallel to official manifestations of the Czechoslovak-Soviet “friendship”. Complaints of local people about a variety of problems were a permanent phenomenon accompanying the Soviet presence; however, the powers-that-be dealt with them only formally, or not at all, and all efforts to seek remedy were useless.
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Yurchak, Alexei: Bylo to na věčné časy, dokud to neskončilo: Poslední sovětská generace. Translated from the English original by Přemysl Houda and Veronika Bránišová.(Edition Politeia.) Prague: Univerzita Karlova and Karolinum, 2018, 388 pp., ISBN978-80-246-3662-7. In the reviewer’s opinion, the book Everything was forever, until it was no more: The last Soviet generation by Alexei Yurchak (original edition: Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press 2005) strives to provide a plastic and accurate picture of the period reality and mentality as they appeared to Soviet citizens in the last decades before the fall of the Communist regime. The author wrote it in the United States, obviously reacting to simplified, binary interpretations of the late Soviet Communismin the West. The author presents his arguments in an extremely inventive manner, precisely employing his methodological principles when analysing specific social phenomena. In doing so, he builds his analyses around a central principle of validity of the authoritative (Marxist-Leninist) discourse in the Soviet Union, which,however, permitted various interpretations for the purpose of fulfilling individual interests and goals and whose decomposition at the time of Gorbachev’s perestroika led to the collapse of the whole system. However, the reviewer argues that the above principle has a much lower interpretation weight and that the author generalises selective social experience of Komsomol functionaries when attempting to prove that, rather than opposing the system, Soviet people were creating their own living space outside it. The reviewer contemplates the nature and limits of political resistance in a Communist system and, in the end, takes note of problematic attempts of some Czech historians to apply Yurchak’s propositions to interpret the situation in Czechoslovakia.
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Pinerová, Klára: Do konce života: Političtí vězni padesátých let – trauma, adaptace, identita. (Edition Po válce.) Prague: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů and Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2017, 403 pp., ISBN 978-80-87912-87-4 and 978-80-7422-590-1. In her work titled "Until the end of life: Political prisoners of the 1950s – trauma, adaptation, identity", the authoress attempted to capture the prison experience of Czechoslovak male and female political prisoners of the 1950s as a complex sociopsychological phenomenon, from their arrest through their detention and interrogation, sentencing and subsequent internment until their release and long-term consequences the ex-prisoners had to put up with. According to the reviewer’s opinion, however, she has fulfilled her goal only partly. The reviewer admits that the authoress has long been interested in transformations of prison systems in many countries, that she is able to undertake thorough heuristics, and that she invested a lot of personal effort into interviews with contemporary witnesses, trying to mediate their tragic experience to others. In order to capture the social dynamism ingroups of prisoners, she describes in detail their relations and day-to-day culture, forms of adaptation to the prison environment, mechanisms of power, order and resistance, space and time behind bars, and also the gender aspect. The reviewer, however, brings into attention limitations of approaches taken over from individual and social psychology, which the authoress seems to prefer, questions the relevance of some comparative examples taken over from foreign research projects, the authoress’s intuitive use of historical terms, as well as some of her interpretations
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Zarecorová, Kimberly Elman. Utváření socialistické modernity: Bydlení v Československu v letech 1945–1960. (Šťastné zítřky, Vol. 16.) Translated from the English original by Alena Všetečková. Prague: Academia, 2015, 419 pp., ISBN 978-80-200-2308-7. In the reviewer’s opinion, even the first edition of the book "Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960" (Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh University Press 2011) had an initiation effect, as its authoress, the American art and architecture historian Kimberly Elman Zarecor, contributed to redefining the discourse and field of research of Czech historians of Czechoslovakia’s post-war architecture, who generally did not view the socialist housing, and particularly prefab, architecture as a relevant professional topic, in it. The authoress based her work on three pillars; hitherto unknown sources in state archives, which unveil mechanisms of the connection between architecture and politics; using these sources, she shows how problematic is to perceive the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as a monolithic structure; and she focuses on typical processes of the socialist housing construction rather than on exceptional esthetic projects and realizations. Zarecor successfully described the transformation of the practicing of architecture between 1948 and 1960, voicing doubts that it had been forcefully shaped by the political power against the will of the architects themselves. She showed that, as early as between the wars, Czechoslovak architects had been thinking about collective work, most of them later welcoming an opportunity to work in state studios where they were given all-society tasks, in particular the pressing issue of collective housing. In addition, the authoress included biographies of many members of the pre-war avant-garde, particularly Jiří Kroha (1893–1974).
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The review was initially published in "The American Historical Review", Vol. 125, No. 1 (February 2020), p. 332 n. According to the reviewer’s opinion, the book "The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia" (NY: CUP, 2017) written by the British historian Celia Donert should be read by all who are interested in policies implemented toward the Roma in Europe in the 20th century and in the complex issue of the approach of Communists to social and ethnic questions. The authoress shows an excellent grasp of continuous efforts to improve the situation of the Roma on the one hand, and to control them on the other hand, in various political situations, before and after the war, at the time of and after the Communist rule, both in Czechoslovakia and in a broader European context. In doing so, she offers evidence of failures of the human rights agenda in different political contexts, including that of the European Union’s Roma policy, until the present day, and clearly shows that policies and measures implemented vis-à-vis the Roma are not a marginal topic, but an area which demonstrates essential limits of the concept of citizenship in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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The edition brings a commented selection of texts from reportage publications and travelogues of four Czechoslovak writers, which reflect their experiences gathered during their trips to and stays in “exotic” non-European regions of the Soviet Union between the two world wars. They are: Julius Fučík (1903–1943), a journalist, literary critic and columnist, Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), a Czech-German journalist, reporter and writer from Prague, the Czech-German writer and diplomat Franz Carl Weiskopf (1900–1955), also born in Prague, and the Czech-Jewish writer, newsman and translator Jiří Weil (1900–1959). All of them were organized Communists (Weil was expelled from the Communist Party in 1935), travelling at an invitation of Soviet authorities, and their texts, which were published in Czechoslovakia and Germany between 1927 and 1937, presented a more or less idealized picture of the Soviet reality with a propagandistic air. The selected texts capture the authors’ impressions mainly from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, but also from other regions of Soviet Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Altai Mountains. Julius Fučík and Jiří Weil were specifically interested in the Czechoslovak cooperative of emigrant workers and farmers, Interhelpo, established in 1925 and operating until the late 1930s off the town of Frunze (now Bishkek).
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The extensive two-tome monograph titled "With the eagle and the lion", with subtitles "Stories of Czech military chaplains from the 17th century until the Great War" (Prague and Ústí nad Labem: Epocha and Univerzita J. E. Purkyně, 2018) and "Stories of Czech military chaplains during the dramatic 20th century" (Prague: Epocha and Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2019), deals with on a topic that has not been, until now, in the focus of attention of Czech historians, namely on transformations of the military spiritual service in the Czech Lands since the 17th until the mid-20th centuries. The author, Martin Flosman, concentrates on military chaplains in the Austrian, or Austro-Hungarian army, among Czechoslovak legionnaires, and also in the Czechoslovak Army in the period of the First Republic, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and first years of the post-war “people’s democracy” until the disbandment of the spiritual service in the army by the Communist regime in 1950. Although primarily interested in Roman Catholic chaplains, he does not leave aside Greek Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant priests, field rabbis, or imams, and analyzes their diverse duties. The reviewer appreciates the multitude of sources, whether published or not, the author’s comprehensive approach and coverage, and his perceptive description of the fate of military chaplains on battlefields, particularly during both world wars. The work allows to perceive the duty of military chaplains as a multifaceted phenomenon over three and a half centuries, and its gripping presentation, including many biographic medallions of priests, makes it open for a broad audience of readers.
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Petra Schindler-Wisten's monograph titled "About holiday homes and people: Holiday homes in the Czech Lands in the period of so-called normalization and transformation" (Prague: Univerzita Karlova and Karolinum, 2017) maps the phenomenon of holiday cottages in the Czech Lands since its very beginnings in the 19th century almost until today. In this respect, she focuses on the post-war period of the Communist regime, in particular the 1970s and 1980s, the years of the so-called normalization, when this type of spending one’s free time, and partly also a lifestyle consisting in spending weekends and holidays in own houses and cottages, indeed became a mass phenomenon in Czechoslovakia. Using results of oral history research, she is looking for reasons why the so-called “second housing” became so popular among various groups of the Czech society, social and economic differences notwithstanding. The reviewer appreciates the publication as the first attempt to deal with the topic in question in a clear and comprehensive manner and from a historical point of view rather than from sociological or socio-geographic ones, which represents a significant factual enrichment of the current state of knowledge. However, she also formulates some methodological reservations with respect to the research project whose results are presented in reviewed work, claiming that not enough clear reasons have been given to justify its starting points and outlining untapped opportunities in this respect.
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In the reviewer’s opinion, Marcela Linková and Naďa Straková, the editors of the publication titled "Revolution begins at home: The women of the Czech dissent" (Prague: Academia and Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i., 2017), offer, through interviews with twenty-one women of the Charter 77, an unconventional look behind the well-known image of the dissident initiative which was, through the substance of what it was doing, i.e. struggle for the observance of human and civil rights in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s, linked to what is known as Big History, and therefore perceived as a domain of men by most people. The collection of stories of female dissidents disproves the simple dichotomy of the public “male” and “female” spheres, as homes of dissidents were places where personal and private matters merged with the public and political ones, and shows the irreplaceable role of these women in the operation of the “world of dissent”. The final interpretation study makes a substantial contribution to the comprehensive nature of this treatise on activities of women within the Charter 77 initiative and on the Czechoslovak dissent in general. The reviewer examines the interviews in greater detail; in her opinion, the absence of any methodological guidance that would indicate how the interviews were conducted and edited is a serious shortcoming of the publication.
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The review compares two collective monographs published simultaneously, which examine one of the key trends in Czechoslovakia’s history since the mid-1950s: expert thinking, management and ruling, technocracy, and the social role of experts from various segments of the society. The publication "Architekti dlouhé změny: Expertní kořeny postsocialismu v Československu" [Architects of the Long Change: Expert Roots of Post-Socialism in Czechoslovakia] (Prague: Argo, Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) was written by a team of authors under the leadership of the book’s editor Michal Kopeček, the book "Řídit socialismus jako firmu: Technokratické vládnutí v Československu, 1956–1989" [Running Socialism Like a Company: Technocratic Governance in Czechoslovakia,1956–1989] (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) is a product of trio of authors led by Vítězslav Sommer. While Sommer’s project captures, in a comprehensive manner, the evolution of expert approaches in relation to the management of the economy, society, and state and to the scientific-technological revolution at the time of post-Stalinism and the so-called normalizationin Czechoslovakia, Michal Kopeček and his collaborators made several probes into specific fields of expertise (law, management, psychotherapy, sociology, ecology, urbanism) during the period of normalization and in the early 1990s. The entire publication is permeated by a proposition claiming that a number of essential aspects of the post-socialist rule in the country had their roots in the political and economic thinking, mental patterns, and social and cultural practices of the 1980s, and thus were not just imports of Western neo-liberalism. In the reviewer’s opinion, both monographs help understand the relative stability of the state socialism in Czechoslovakia by showing how much efforts aimed at scientific management of the society were contributing to it; at the same time, however, they also identify the subversive potential of these efforts, as expert criticism of the system’s dysfunctions at the time of the so-called perestroika (přestavba) was undermining the system’s legitimacy. The reviewer also appreciates that both publications emphasize longterm historical continuity, have a trans-national dimension, and dispute the alleged impermeability of state socialism.
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The review analyzes contact areas and divergences of two publications with a similar topic: "Řídit socialismus jako firmu: Technokratické vládnutí v Československu,1956–1989" [Running Socialism Like a Company: Technocratic Governance in Czechoslovakia, 1956–1989] (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) by Vítězslav Sommer and his two co-authors, and "Architekti dlouhé změny: Expertní kořeny postsocialismu v Československu" [Architects of the Long Change: Expert Roots of Post-Socialism in Czechoslovakia] (Prague: Argo, Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) by a team of six authors led by Michal Kopeček, who is also the book’s editor. The reviewer sees both collective monographs as the Czech historiographic feats of 2019, particularly from a methodological viewpoint. In his opinion, their key common feature is an emphasis on historical continuity, where by they question the traditionally perceived periodization of Czechoslovakia’s socialist and post-socialist history in the Central European context and also show how it was contributing to maintaining the power’s legitimacy. Sommer’s project also uses the continuity as a tool of comparison of different (socialist and capitalist) political regimes from the viewpoint of governance expertization, while Kopeček’s project permits advancing beyond the historical milestone of 1989 and finding sources of acceptance of the “liberal consensus” after the restoration of capitalism in the previous period of Czechoslovakia’s existence. The reviewer illustrates the above approach using selected studies from the latter publication, which deal with different spheres in which experts were active: legal science (with Kopeček’s provocative proposition of a “socialist legal state” – socialistický právní stát), psychotherapy, urbanism and ecology. He opines that both publications deal with contemporary history and the formation of capitalist systems in Czechoslovakia and Central Eastern Europe rather than the history of the previous regime. At the same time, they also present the history of the formation of languages of criticism of the restored capitalism, which the reviewer sees as their greatest contribution.
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The third reflection of two collective monographs dealing with similar topics – "Řídit socialismus jako firmu: Technokratické vládnutí v Československu, 1956–1989 [Running Socialism Like a Company: Technocratic Governance in Czechoslovakia,1956–1989] (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) by Vítězslav Sommer and his two co-authors, and "Architekti dlouhé změny: Expertní kořeny postsocialismu v Československu [Architects of the Long Change: Expert Roots of Post-Socialism in Czechoslovakia] (Prague: Argo, Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, and Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i., 2019) written by a team of authors under the leadership of the book’s editor, Michal Kopeček – starts with the reviewer’s sigh reflecting his difficult task, as he has no other option but to praise both books, which do not contain any factual errors. In his opinion, the publication "Running Socialism Like a Company", which focuses mainly on the evolution of technocracy in socialist Czechoslovakia is more compact and somewhat more gripping. He highly appreciates the authors’ effort to link technocratic thinking of the second half of the 1950s to remarkable and not much explored technocratic reflections dating back to the pre-war republic, as well as their convincing interpretations of the transformation of visions of expert management of the 1960s to practical applications of so-called social planning, a tool to rule the depoliticized society, and concepts of “socialist enterprise” in the next two decades of the normalization. The authors’ warning against technocratic populism, which highlights successful businessmen as experts who can manage public matters better than democratic politicians is very topical in today’s context. The "Architects of the Long Change" team is probing an even less explored field, pursuing the topic of experts in selected areas of their social activities during the transition from the Czechoslovak normalization period to the 1990s. The reviewer was particularly captured by case histories from specific fields of expertise, such as psychotherapy, sociology, urbanism, and ecology. In the reviewer’s opinion, both books are excellent proof positive that the Czech historiography of contemporary history can produce superb works bearing international comparison.
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The review deals with an extensive book on the history of a quintessentially Czech leisure activity, the “tramping movement”, entitled "Putování za obzor: Tramping v české společnosti 1918–1989" [Wandering Beyond the Horizon: Tramping in the Czech Society, 1918–1989] (Praha, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny 2020) and written by five Czech historians (Jan Randák, Jan Krško, Jan Mareš, Jan Pohunek, Jan Špringl). The movement emerged in the early twentieth century and its popularity lasted throughout the whole of the century. In the book under review, five Czech cultural historians describe the history of the tramping movement in Czechoslovakia in admirable detail and also provide supplementary material and unique pictures. The reviewer welcomes the analysis of a highly interesting and academically overlooked phenomenon and recommends a shortened version for publication in English.
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The study focuses on the hitherto neglected issue of complaints that citizens of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic made to their President and his Office between 1970 and 1989. The author describes the activities of the Complaints Department of the Presidential Office and how the complainants’ agenda evolved both quantitatively and qualitatively during the period of normalization. He presents the social, ethnic, regional and gender profile of the authors of the complaints, their motivation, common themes and the typical linguistic means the writers used. Using archival sources, he then analyses the five most numerous and important problem areas of the registered complaints, which concerned: housing and housing policy, social security, labour relations, travel abroad, education and study. He uses specific cases to illustrate the flow of communication between the complainants, the President’s Office and other bodies that commented on the issues. Additionally, he highlights the chronic social problems that were mirrored in the complaints and which the authorities of the normalization era regime failed to address effectively. Between 1970 and 1989, more than 323,000 complainants, mostly pensioners and workers, wrote to Presidents Ludvík Svoboda (1895–1979, in office 1968–1975) and Gustáv Husák (1913–1991, in office 1975–1989) asking for help in matters relating to poor housing conditions and their futile wait for an apartment, low wages or pension assessments, difficulties with an employer, discrimination in permitting travel abroad and resettlement, or the non-admission of children to secondary or higher education. Most of the writers asserted their personal interest and commented on the societal issues only if it was related to it or they could benefit from them. The President’s Office paid close attention to citizen complaints and in many cases its intervention did indeed help to bring about a redress. In the author’s view, it certainly made sense to write to the President in this regard, even though many requests went unheeded and, in particular, complaints with political overtones remained unanswered.
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"Babičky na bigbítu: Společenský život na moravském venkově pozdního socialismu" [Grannies at a Big-Beat Party: Social Life in the Moravian Countryside in Late Socialism] by ethnologist Oto Polouček is a successful contribution to a better understanding not only of the cultural and social life of the Moravian countryside, but also of the history of everyday life during the normalization era in Czechoslovakia. The central theme of the book are the social activities of the inhabitants of Dolní Kounice, Rokytná and Petrovice in South Moravia in the 1970s and the 1980s. The reviewer particularly appreciates the oral history research, which has brought to prominence some hitherto neglected perspectives. The chapters on dance parties are especially important as they show a key phenomenon of the rural environment, including the depiction of their organization and the perspective of the organizers. The chapter describing the perception of the underground community in a smalltown is also note worthy as is the relationships of the members of this community with their peers and with the older generations. However, the lack of definitions of some of the key terms and concepts is a shortcoming of the book.
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