Employees Make the Difference!”: Career Trajectories of First Employees of the Higher School of Economics in Prague (1950s)

Abstract

The article studies the history of establishing the Prague Higher School of Economics in the 1950s and the career trajectories of first employees. This educational institution, opened during the active campaign of Sovietization of Czechoslovak science and education, considered by the Soviet authorities as a forge of new administrators and scholars. The article concludes by arguing the enormous role played by the staff members of the Higher School of Political and Economic Sciences in the establishing of the Higher School of Economics. It also notes the prominent role of staff members who came from the Czech Higher Technical School. Paradoxically, despite the active Sovietization the real influence of Soviet specialists on the work of the Higher School of Economics was very insignificant. The authors show that in the 1950s the process of staffing has not been completed yet. The shortage of staff was one of the reasons for the rapid progress of some persons up the career ladder. The establishment of the Higher School of Economics, on the one hand, marked the development of a new major ideological center of socialist Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, the study of the career paths of its first employees shows that the process of growing new elites went far beyond the preset frameworks, turned out to be more complicated than, for example, similar processes in the USSR in the 1920s – 1930s. The article finds out that the professional trajectories of many persons, who started out as passionate communists, will lead them on the path of criticism of dogmatic Marxism. Among the young employees were those who later enthusiastically joined the economic reforms’ movement of the 1960s and glorified the Prague Spring.