Keeping Soviet Russia in the Czech Diaspora?

Abstract

The Hospodář was a twice-monthly magazine for Czech farmers in America, launched in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1891. In the 1920s it became more international as the United States shut out immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union became a leading subject in its editorials, columns and especially the hundreds of reader letters published every year. Transnational families were a window into the Czech communities in Volhynia and Crimea. Social Democrats, Communists and others argued about the Soviet Union’s merits as a workers’ and peasants’ state. Agronomist Stanislav Kovář became a regular columnist in Vologda and then Novorossiisk on the NEP and then collectivization in Soviet agriculture. Tolerant, largely written by readers, without political or religious affiliation, and international, the Hospodář was a productive forum for experience, imagination and discourse in the international Czech diaspora on the early Soviet Union.