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Pamětní místa na komunismus v České republice

Author(s): Oldřich Tůma / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3-4/2015

The author recapitulates the documentary results of the grant-funded project ‘Stories of Places: A Topography of the Memory of the Nation’, carried out at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and he outlines their interpretation with regard to memory studies as a discipline of historical research in its own right. The project entailed research on commemorative events, their actors and victims, from the period of the Communist régime, from 1948 to 1989, in what is today the Czech Republic. This project was inspired by the large German project ‘Places of Memory of the Communist Dictatorships’ (Erinnerungsorte an die kommunistischen Diktaturen) organized by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur). As part of the project, places that have been considered sites of memory are defi ned as those that have been created with the aim of public commemoration, most often as artistic installations with a historical message (such as commemorative plaques, sculptures, monuments, crosses, and inscriptions), and also places that use historical artefacts as a means of education (such as museums and education paths or heritage trails). The places of memory that have been identifi ed and documented are presented to the public in two ways: by means of a regularly updated database called ‘Places of Memory of the Communist Dictatorship’ (Pamětní místa na komunistický režim; at, so far only in Czech, www.pametnimista.usd.cas.cz), and by means of a specially designed map called ‘Shifts in Memory: A Topography of the Contemporary Memory of the Nation and Refl ections on It’ (Posuny paměti: Topografi e soudobé paměti národa a její refl exe’; for the texts, so far only in Czech, see www.usd.cas. cz/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/mapa_Posuny_pameti_data.pdf; for the illustrations, see www.usd.cas.cz/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/mapa_Posuny_pameti. pdf). This web database comprises more than 600 places of memory, organized from three different perspectives – according to region, theme, and time –, which are discussed in some detail in the article. The author, with some scepticism, comments on the current boom in concepts and publications about historical memory in the Czech social sciences, and he states that it is not the ambition of this project to include itself in this intensive discourse. None the less, the documentation that has been collected may well be a natural source of contemplating collective memory related to the Communist period of Czech history. From the database it follows that the vast majority of the preserved places of memory have come into being after the Changes beginning in mid-November 1989, and that, in comparison with other periods, what they commemorate is mostly the Communist repression of the 1950s and its victims. In the Czech Republic, however, there are practically no particular regions of the memory of Communism; the means of recalling the Communist past in the individual regions is highly similar from one place to the next, though the actual themes of the places of memory are different. A distinct feature of these places of memory is their spontaneous emergence, usually at a local initiative, and their unusualness in their efforts to achieve the political shaping of the memory of Communism ‘from above’. The author then considers in detail how the Prague Spring of 1968 has been reflected in places of memory.

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Okupace, přátelská pomoc, devastace

Author(s): Marie Černá / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3-4/2015

In this article, the author raises the question of what now, more than twenty years later, the ‘stay’ (pobyt, as it was offi cially called), of the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia means to the inhabitants of the country. How, she asks, is it recalled in the public space and the mass media, and what images are most frequently evoked in this connection? Whereas the Soviet-led intervention by troops of the Warsaw Pact countries in August 1968 holds a lasting place in Czech memory and historiography, the subsequent stay of Soviet troops in the country has far fuzzier contours. Though in this connection the term ‘occupation’ (okupace) is regularly used today, there is no simple agreement about its political meaning. In the article, the author seeks to indentify the changes in the communicated meanings of the occupation, when the original nation-wide consensus of its rejection was squeezed out by the reality of offi cially imposed friendship and the ‘twinning’ (družba) of Czechoslovak and Soviet towns. Under its façade, by contrast, people developed variously accented and motivated attitudes, such as keeping their distance or being accommodating, the plurality of which has largely survived in the collective memory unchallenged to this day. The author, however, points mainly to the fundamental shift in the perception of the stay of the Soviet Army, which took place after the Changes beginning in mid-November 1989, when, the degradation of the buildings occupied by the Soviets and the land that they stand on, and the gradual rectifi cation of this, have become the main topics, rather than related aspects of political power.

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(Dokumentární příloha) O některých chybách v činnosti Komunistické strany Československa

Author(s): / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1-2/2016

The whole article is a translation from Russian of a top secret reoprt, which has been sent to M. A. Suslov. M. A. Suslov was a soviet politican of the late stalinistic and Brezhnev era.

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Čeští komunističtí intelektuálové a „národní cesta k socialismu"

Author(s): Michal Kopeček / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1-2/2016

In this article the author starts from the notion of ‘national roads to Socialism’ in its two fundamental meanings – the political-tactical and the theoretical. He seeks to demonstrate, using the Czech example, the complicated dynamic development of the central themes of the ‘ideological whirlwinds’ of the twentieth century which are concentrated in the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘national emancipation’. To this end he focuses on two important Czech Communist political thinkers and activists – the historian, musicologist, and minister in post-war Czechoslovak governments, Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878–1962), and the philosopher and essayist Karel Kosík (1926–2003) – each of whom, with regard to their generations and their lives in general, represents a different Czech radical left-wing intellectual approach to the challenges of his times. Each man, in his own distinctive way, sought to formulate the prerequisites and conceptual framework of the Czechoslovak, or Czech, ‘national road’ to Socialism, but also to warn about pitfalls. With his early post-Second World War conception of Czechoslovak Communists as the heirs of progressive national traditions, Nejedlý sought to show how the legacy of the Hussite Revolution of the fi fteenth century and the National Awakening of the nineteenth century was currently relevant to Communist policy. Indeed, on the whole he succeeded in linking it with Communist Party efforts to achieve the historical legitimation of their government and thus create the offi cial framework of the interpretation of Czech history which remained authoritatively valid throughout the 1950s. Kosík, by contrast, fi rst attempted, from radically left-wing positions, to work out alternative, implicitly polemical conceptions of national revolutionary continuity, which sought inspiration amongst Czech radical democrats and their revolutionary expression in 1848, and he thus became, from the late 1950s, one of the chief representatives of Marxist revisionism in Czechoslovakia, a philosopher-critic of Stalinism and the dehumanization of modern man and woman under the pressure of abstract ideologies and the apparatus of power and the bureaucracy, eventually earning the reputation of the philosopher of the Prague Spring of 1968. The author does not seek to portray these two fi gures exhaustively; instead, his aim is to provide the basic contours of how each tried to solve the dilemma between the nationally particular and the revolutionarily universal, which all Communist and radical Socialists thinkers of their time faced and somehow had to come to terms with. The author sets the intellectual and creative development of these two fi gures into the wider political context from the end of the Second World War to the Prague Spring.

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Kolik totality zůstalo v „normalizaci“?

Author(s): Karel Hrubý / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1-2/2016

This article is the third, and last, in a loosely conceived series by the same author, and printed in Soudobé dějiny, which consider the nature of Communist régimes, particularly in Czechoslovakia. (See Karel Hrubý, ‘Kontinuita nestejného: Sporné závěry z nesporně dobrých analýz Matěje Spurného’ [Continuity between Unlikes: The Doubtful Conclusions of Matěj Spurný’s Undoubtedly Good Analyses], Soudobé dějiny, vol. 20 (2013), no. 4, pp. 628–40, and ibid., ‘Rozpaky nad výkladem komunistické diktatury: Kritické poznámky k projektu “Socialismus jako myšlenkový svět”’ [Baffl ed by an Interpretation of the Communist Dictatorship: Critical Remarks on the ‘Socialism as Sinnwelt’ Project], Soudobé dějiny, vol. 21 (2014), no. 3, pp. 382–404. The author searches for an answer to the question of whether the political and social system launched in Czechoslovakia in late February 1948 maintained its totalitarian nature throughout its existence, or whether, in its later phases, it had already become another type of totalitarianism, or had even developed into a quite different kind of undemocratic or authoritarian régime. The author develops the topic, which is still a matter of dispute, against the background of changing theoretical refl ections on Communist régimes. He fi rst recapitulates the main criticism of ‘revisionist’ historiography regarding the lack of classic models of totalitarianism, and he comments on some of their competing interpretations, pointing out how later versions of the totalitarianism theory problematicized or weakened some of the ‘revisionist’ criticisms, and also how they reacted to the changes that began after Stalin’s death in 1953. By comparing the two main approaches – one that declares that there is such a thing as totalitarianism, the other that rejects such a notion (or at least suggest its revision) –, the author traces the connections between the individual phases that the Communist dictatorship and society passed through in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989. He thus seeks to discover the extent to which the preserved structures and operations of the totalitarian way of ruling (dictatorship) changed or remained the same since the initial period (post-February 1948), and, at the same time, endeavours to discover how, over the decades, political ideas and value systems were preserved or, by contrast, changed in the consciousness of society. Conceptually, the author starts from the defi nition of post-totalitarianism which appears in the later works of the political scientist Juan José Linz, and thus, after the end of Stalinist totalitarianism, he distinguishes in Czechoslovakia the period of early post-totalitarianism, the late 1960s attempt to reform the system, the Husák years of hard-line post-totalitarianism, and the post-totalitarianism of the late 1980s decline. In his opinion, the ‘Normalization’ régime in Czechoslovakia, although weakened and increasingly dysfunctional, maintained many of the totalitarian structures (political, security, economic, social) and practices (of power, ideology, surveillance, and repression) until its collapse, unlike the régimes in Poland and Hungary, where totalitarianism was slowly eroded.

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Zusammenarbeit tschechoslowakischer und kubanischer Geheimdienste: der geheime Aufenthalt von Ernesto Che Guevara

Author(s): Michal Zourek / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2018

The text analyzes Ernesto Che Guevara’s classified stay in Czechoslovakia between March and July 1966. The emphasis is placed on the cooperation that existed between the Czechoslovak and Cuban secret services. Through published studies, memoirs, interviews and Che Guevara’s files, the article provides valuable insights and dispels some of the myths surrounding a mostly unknown period in the life of the famous Argentinean revolutionary. Attention is also paid to a theoretical document which Che Guevara created during his stay in Czechoslovakia. His remarks criticizing the Soviet “road to socialism” represent the biggest legacy of Che Guevara’s stay in Czechoslovakia.

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The “Prague Spring” in the Documents of the Hungarian Radio

Author(s): Irén Simándi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

It was fifty years ago, in 1968 that the “Prague spring”, an experiment to create “Socialism with a human face” was born in Czechoslovakia. Through the documents of Hungarian radio broadcasts, this study will trace the most significant events of the reform movement led by Alexander Dubček. The broadcast information, in its various programs, was almost invariably based on the reports of TASS, the Soviet Telegraph Agency and MTI, the Hungarian News Agency. However, the news actually aired was often re-shaped and augmented by the editors. The radio broadcasts were careful in dealing with the role of party leaders, such as of Janos Kadar. The Czechoslovakian situation remained the principle topic of the Hungarian political and public life for several months, especially in connection with the introduction of the “new economic reform” in Hungary. In the radio, the editors kept avoiding any reference to any similarity between the “Prague Spring” and the new Hungarian economic reform. The goal of the silence was to protect the Hungarian reform from interference from Moscow.

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Jakobsonova první poválečná návštěva Československa roku 1957 ve světle archivů STB

Author(s): Robert Dittmann / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2017

The contribution focuses on Roman Jakobson’s first post-World War II visit to Czechoslovakia he luckily left in April 1939. The regime changed from the Nazi Protectorate to the Communist dictatorship. The article describes how he was closely followed by the Czechoslovak security services and suspected of being an agent of the intelligence service of the USA. The extensive materials gathered by the Czechoslovak authorities have been stored in the Archives of Security Services in Prague, Czech Republic.

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Czechs Give Asylum to US Family. A “Different” Jazz Ambassador Herbert Ward through the Lenses of FBI Reports

Author(s): Petr Vidomus / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2018

Czechoslovakia of the mid-1950s was a culturally isolated country where the Western gains were regarded suspiciously, to say the least. The regime’s attitude toward jazz was softening very slowly, and many jazz activities bordered on illegality. In this situation, Herbert Ward came to Prague (1954), one of a few American Communists, who asked for political asylum in Czechoslovakia and became involved in the local music scene. Although an almost unknown jazz bassist to the general public (though he played with Sidney Bechet, Willie “Lion” Smith, Bud Freeman, etc.), in the late 1950s, however, he contributed signifi cantly to the rehabilitation of jazz in communist Czechoslovakia. Ward became an invaluable asset for Czech jazz fans, and one of their tools in negotiating the position of their favourite genre with respect to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. Herbert Ward was not a part of the well-known cultural diplomacy projects arranged by the US Department of State (described by Von Eschen, 2004). His political activities were monitored by the FBI and, as a political refugee, he naturally took part in Czechoslovakia’s communist propaganda. As a “jazz curiosity,” however, he became part of the 1960s popular culture and the living myth of Czech jazz fans and musicians. Reconstructed from previously unknown archival records (FBI, State Security Archives), my paper portrays Ward’s political activities and his ambiguous identity of a jazz musician and a young American communist.

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With Chinese Communists against the Czechoslovak “Normalization” Regime

Author(s): Petr Orság / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2018

Some reform Communists who went into exile after the Soviet-led military intervention in Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, began to work in the Listy group led by Jiří Pelikán (1923–1999), a former Director of Czechoslovak Television, the publisher of the Rome-based exile bimonthly Listy, and, later, a Member of the European Parliament. In the search for political allies against Husák’s regime of ‘normalization’ (the return to hard-line Communist rule), they tried to establish contact mainly with infl uential representatives of the West European Left. This article, however, examines an area of their involvement in exile, which has previously not received attention – namely, their efforts to develop contacts with Chinese Communists who in the period after August 1968 were vociferously speaking out at international forums and criticizing Soviet expansionism. The author demonstrates how the exiles tried to take advantage of this in order to strengthen their positions as members of the foreign socialist opposition to the normalization regime. When establishing these contacts, they could build particularly upon those that Pelikán had developed in China while working in the International Union of Students. In the second half of the 1970s his erstwhile Chinese colleagues, led by Hu Yaobang (1915–1989), rose to leading positions in the Party, thus creating considerable opportunities for the exiles to work with them. From China, they received continuous funding for their activities, while the Chinese were interested in the Czechoslovak attempt to reform state socialism in the late 1960s. The author acquaints the reader with visits by Listy ‘envoys’ to China, who acquainted their partners there with current developments in central Europe, including information about dissidents and the opposition movement. A special initiative as part of this collaboration was their attempt to get their own representatives involved in the Czech broadcasts of Radio Peking. Though they briefl y succeeded in this, their plan to infl uence the content of transmissions to Czechoslovakia, and thereby make it an information source for listeners which would provide an alternative to state-controlled Czechoslovak mass media, ultimately came to naught: members of the Listy group worked at Radio Peking only as language advisers for the Czech broadcasts.

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“He Who Leads – Controls!”

Author(s): Tomáš Vilímek / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2018

The study deals with issues of corporate management and pitfalls of the “socialist supervision” in Czechoslovak enterprises in the period of late socialism. Using documents of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the State Security, period texts and specialized publications, it shows how party organs and state authorities were unsuccessfully trying to make supervisory mechanisms and audits a functional tool of the implementation of the ruling party´s economic policy. The author analyzes the supervisory and audit mechanisms that were used, and outlines basic reasons of the almost fatal failure of supervisory activities of the system which was, in a way, obsessed with supervision and control. He explains the systemic 216 Czech Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. VI conditionality of the supervisory system which socialist managers often and in many respects bent to suit the needs of the enterprises they were in charge of; such situation naturally did not match the needs of the society as a whole. Using many specifi c cases as an example, the study graphically shows that members of the Czechoslovak corporate management community in the 1980s were fully aware of systemic, political and social limitations of the supervisory system which they managed to modify, fairly successfully, to suit intra-corporate conditions. The result was a situation in which the party leadership was reacting to increasingly obvious symptoms of the “agony of the centrally planned economy” by adopting various directives and guidelines to make the supervisory process more effective and to consistently promote the “whoever manages – supervises” principle. However, the anticipated effect did not materialize and, at the end of the day, the non-functional supervisory mechanisms made a substantial contribution to the collapse of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

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Terror, Failure, Resistance: Conflicting Memory of Armed Acts of Anti-Communist Resistance in Czechoslovakia

Author(s): Markéta Devátá / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2017

This article is concerned with the memory and commemoration of acts of armed force which were committed as part of the civilian resistance to the Communist régime in its ‘founding period’ after February 1948. It focuses on how memory is constituted around this minority form of anti-Communist resistance, particularly by means of memorial sites in the process of their formation in the period before the Changes that began in mid-November 1989 and also afterwards. In the fi rst part of the article, the author looks at armed confl icts at the edge of the Iron Curtain, that is, on the western borders of Communist Czechoslovakia. She seeks to demonstrate that the way of looking at border crossings by people fl eeing to the West is still considerably infl uenced by the memory and commemorative activities of veterans of the former border guards, amongst whom dominates the image of these refugees as internal enemies of the State. The second part of the article is devoted to instances of so-called ‘political murder’, that is, acts of violence against Communist politicians, which are connected particularly with villages. Most of these stories are gradually being forgotten; society does not want to recall them. An exception, however, is the memory of the sad events in the village of Babice, in the Bohemian-Moravian uplands, in 1951, which has repeatedly been used by politicians. In the third part of the article, the author considers the social discourse about the ethical dimension of armed anti-Communist resistance, which is almost exclusively focused on the atypical case of the group led by the Mašín brothers, and the process of forming the memory of the three resistances (the fi rst, against Austria-Hungary during the Great War; the second, against the German occupying forces during the Second World War; and the third, against the Communist régime during the Cold War). She describes the commemorative activities of the Confederation of Political Prisoners as part of the strategy to bolster the social standing of the third, anti-Communist resistance, and she points to certain analogies between the unchallenged memories of political prisoners and the memories of the former border guards in contemporary historiography.

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How Much Totalitarianism Remained in the “Normalization” Era?

Author(s): Karel Hrubý / Language(s): English Issue: 5/2017

This article considers the nature of Communist régimes, particularly in Czechoslovakia. The author searches for an answer to the question of whether the political and social system launched in Czechoslovakia in late February 1948 maintained its totalitarian nature throughout its existence, or whether, in its later phases, it had already become another type of totalitarianism, or had even developed into a quite different kind of undemocratic or authoritarian régime. The author develops the topic, which is still a matter of dispute, against the background of changing theoretical refl ections on Communist régimes. He first recapitulates the main criticism of ‘revisionist’ historiography regarding the lack of classic models of totalitarianism, and he comments on some of their competing interpretations, pointing out how later versions of the totalitarianism theory problematicized or weakened some of the ‘revisionist’ criticisms, and also how they reacted to the changes that began after Stalin’s death in 1953. By comparing the two main approaches – one that declares that there is such a thing as totalitarianism, the other that rejects such a notion (or at least suggest its revision) –, the author traces the connections between the individual phases that the Communist dictatorship and society passed through in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989. He thus seeks to discover the extent to which the preserved structures and operations of the totalitarian way of ruling (dictatorship) changed or remained the same since the initial period (post-February 1948), and, at the same time, endeavours to discover how, over the decades, political ideas and value systems were preserved or, by contrast, changed in the consciousness of society. Conceptually, the author starts from the defi nition of post-totalitarianism which appears in the later works of the political scientist Juan José Linz, and thus, after the end of Stalinist totalitarianism, he distinguishes in Czechoslovakia the period of early post-totalitarianism, the late 1960s attempt to reform the system, the Husák years of hard-line post-totalitarianism, and the posttotalitarianism of the late 1980s decline. In his opinion, the ‘Normalization’ régime in Czechoslovakia, although weakened and increasingly dysfunctional, maintained many of the totalitarian structures (political, security, economic, social) and practices (of power, ideology, surveillance, and repression) until its collapse, unlike the régimes in Poland and Hungary, where totalitarianism was slowly eroded.

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Ne československý Rajk, ale Berija

Author(s): Marián Lóži / Language(s): Czech Issue: 03/2022

Dva roky po skončení Slánského procesu muselo vedení KSČ pod tlakem událostí v Sovětském svazu a dalších zemích východního bloku přistoupit k zásadnímu přehodnocení dosavadního líčení popraveného generálního tajemníka jakožto „zrádce“ a „nepřítele“. Přišlo s unikátním vysvětlením, které Slánského nezbavovalo viny, ale pojímalo ji odlišně. Nestalo se tak proti vůli členské stranické základny, nýbrž v souladu s přesvědčením většiny komunistů.

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StB – akce!

Author(s): Petr Kopal / Language(s): Czech Issue: 03/2022

Nepůjde zde o vylíčení veškerých aspektů vytčeného přirovnání/vztahu, tím méně o úplné postižení četných složitostí a zákrut, které v letech 1948–1989 obnášela spolupráce mezi Státní bezpečností (StB) a Československým státním filmem, počínaje oficiálními ideologicko-propagandistickými aktivitami příslušných oddělení a pracovníků ministerstva vnitra na poli filmové či televizní tvorby (např. „číhošťský“ inscenovaný dokument Běda tomu, skrze něhož přichází pohoršení z roku 1950, nasazený do kin v rekordním počtu kopií)1 a konče třeba druhou kariérou bývalých estébáků ve strukturách tuzemské kinematografie.2 Smyslem tohoto textu nebude podat vyčerpávající přehled českých (československých) hraných filmů se státobezpečnostní tematikou, tedy s postavou/ postavami pracovníka/pracovníků StB, nýbrž postihnout významné charakteristiky a trendy, které (pokud) se v dotyčných filmových reprezentacích vyskytují.

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Lessons on Communism: Party Schools in Italy in the 20th Century

Author(s): Anna Tonelli / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2021

The Italian Communist Party created the most effective political school—and the only one in Italy—aimed at creating cadre leaders. The first schools were in Rome and Milan, and over the following decades the school system spread throughout the country, eventually counting about a hundred schools active throughout Italy until 1989. The school in Rome, which was the only one to remain open for a further four years, was the main model for the others. Called the Frattocchie School, it was a residential school in the hills of Rome and was in operation from 1944 to 1993. The students attended classes from six months to a year; they studied historical materialism and the history of Bolshevism but also experienced collective life, group identity, and the theoretical and practical values of communism. The Frattocchie model began with an initial period in which training consisted of the organization and acculturation of the working classes, starting with workers and peasants, according to a schema influenced by the Soviet schools but where the socializing bent of the Italian institutes mitigated the sectarianism and dogmatism of Moscow. The aim of the training was to build the careers of future politicians capable of embodying the ideals of a party that demanded control, preparation, and discipline. For this reason, the Italian Communist Party schools represented an original example in teaching methods and curricula, handing down the memory of communism over time. The diaries, questionnaires, and testimonies of the students who attended the Frattocchie School in its 50 years of activity are important sources and a precious heritage to understand how the Communist “faith” became a vehicle of recognition and belonging. Even today the name Frattocchie is associated with a model of party school to be imitated in order to teach methods and principles to those who want to pursue a political career.

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The Stalinist Past in Contemporary Russian TV Serials: Reconfigurations of Memory

Author(s): Viktoriya Sukovataya / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2021

The two main issues that continue to be in the focus of hot public discussions in Russian society are the Great Patriotic War (the German–Soviet war of 1941–1945, as part of World War II) and the tragedy of Stalinism. While the Great Patriotic War was widely reflected in Soviet literature and cinema, the Stalinist issue was seldom represented in Soviet art. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a period when Soviet and post-Soviet art contributed much to the debates on the Soviet past, and several significant anti-Stalinist films and literary works were created. Since the early 2000s, the cultural situation in Russian society has changed and nostalgia of the Soviet past has spread in the mass consciousness. The purpose of this research is to analyze how the Stalinist past is reconstructed in public memory in contemporary cinema narratives. We arrive at the conclusion that since the 2000s, public interest has drifted from images of war heroism to ordinary people’ lives under Stalin; the contemporary public interest is not the war heroes and famous victims of repressions, but the everydayness of ordinary Soviet citizens who tried to build their private lives, careers, friendships, and family relations under the conditions of pressure from the authorities, spreading fear in the society, shortage of goods, and loss of loved ones. We concentrate on several representative Russian TV serials, such as “Liquidation” (2007), “Maryina Roscha” (2012), and “Leningrad, 46” (2014– 2015), because all of them are devoted to the first year of the Soviet peaceful life in different Soviet cities, such as Odessa, Moscow, and Leningrad.

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Zdarzyło się... 30 lat temu...

Author(s): Marcin Witkowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 14/2011

Dokumentacja fotograficzna "Białego Marszu", który został zorganizowany w Krakowie 17 maja 1981 r., w cztery dni po zamachu na Jana Pawła II. Fotografie zamieszczone w tekście pochodzą ze zbiorów Muzeum Historii Fotografii w Krakowie oraz prywatnych zbiorów Marka Studnickiego i Kazimierza Lichwiarskiego.

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Ks. dr Czesław Skowron (17 czerwca 1924 - 26 sierpnia 2012)

Author(s): Marcin Witkowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 15/2012

Biogram ks. dr. Czesława Skowrona (1924-2012), urodzonego w Choczni absolwenta wadowickiego gimnazjum i seminarium duchownego w Krakowie, kapłana archidiecezji krakowskiej i archiwariusza Kurii. W listopadzie 1952 r. ks. Skowron został zatrzymany przez funkcjonariuszy UB w związku z aresztowaniami księży podejrzanych o współpracę z podziemiem antykomunistycznym. Do lipca 1953 r. przebywał w areszcie śledczym na Montelupich. Ostatecznie nie stanął przed Wojskowym Sądem Rejonowym w Krakowie w tzw. "procesie kurii krakowskiej", w którym oskarżonym zarzucono m.in. szpiegostwo na rzecz USA i współpracę podziemiem, co nie oznaczało zwolnienia duchownego. MBP przygotowywało bowiem kolejny proces, tym razem chcąc "udowodnić" działalność szpiegowską biskupów krakowskich na rzecz Watykanu. Do procesu ostatecznie niedoszło. Po zwolnieniu z więzienia ks. Skowron pełnił przez kilka lat posługę jako wikariusz w kościele św. Anny w Krakowie a w latach 1959-1962 studiował Historię Kościoła na KUL uzyskując stopień doktora. Był autorem licznych publikacji, głównie związanych z kultem św. Jadwigi Andegaweńskiej, a także opracowania poświęconego fundacji klasztoru na Jasnej Górze. Ostatnie lata życia spędził w Domu Księży Chorych im. Św. Franciszka z Asyżu w Krakowie-Swoszowicach.

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