In the Space of Socialist Science: a Discussion of the Czechoslovak History Textbook (1953)

Abstract

This article focuses on the problem of expertise as a form of scientific communication between Soviet and Czechoslovak historians. At the end of 1953, a discussion of the first volume of the textbook “History of Czechoslovakia” (“Dějiny ČSR”) took place at the Institute of Slavic Studies. The textbook was prepared by a group of authors headed by the director of the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences J. Macek and sent to the Soviet Union for peer review. Expertise is considered in several contexts: 1) the situation in Czechoslovak historical science through the prism of the biographies of the textbook authors; 2) the specifics of the development of Soviet historiography and Bohemian studies in the early 1950s; 3) the formation of a communicative field among historians of the socialist countries.