The Politics of History-Writing in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The post1968 'normalisation' of Czechoslovakia was also a period of reestablishment of tight party and state control over all spheres of cultural life. Historiography became one of the first victims. While official historiography reverted to a highly ideological orthodoxy, an independent historiography, faithful to the libertarian spirit of 1968 (while moving far beyond the letter of the 1968 political legacy) developed its own attempt to 'treat the present as a problem of history' (Lukacs). Over the last decade historians have become perhaps the single most persecuted category of the intelligentsia. Some of them, for example, J. Tesar and M. Huebl, spent several years in jail in the 1970s and as a 'professional' group historians are heavily represented within the Charter 77 movement. The prime reason why they became one of the first targets of the 'normalisation' was their crucial role in shaping the intellectual background to the Prague Spring and, more particularly, in investigating the causes and the mechanisms of the stalinist purges of the late 1940s and 1950s as well as striving for the rehabilitation of the victims of the show trials. Obviously, to show that the party leadership still in power had been responsible for the deaths and persecution of innocent people had immediate political repercussions. Thus, throughout the 1960s there developed a close relationship between historical revisionism, the judicial revision of the stalinist purge trials and political revisionism (an admittedly inadequate term to represent the broad coalition of forces pressing for a complete overhaul of the political system). The two first revisionisms (historical and judicial) helped to discredit the Novotny leadership, which resisted any kind of 'destalinisation' after 1956 while, by freeing the victims of the purges, they also contributed to the emergence of an alternative political leadership. The events of 1968 showed the considerable impact of this phenomenon, though the case of the present leader, Gustav Husak, also reveals its limits. Sentenced as a Slovak 'bourgeois nationalist' in the 1950s, he was freed in 1960 and rehabilitated in 1963 thanks to the help of historians such as Milan Huebl, who also helped his comeback into Czechoslovak politics. The historical irony was that Husak fulfilled his ambition only as the ruthless successor to Alexander Dubcek. He eventually sent his friend Huebl to jail for five years. Huebl is today a signatory of the Charter 77 and one of the contributors to the historical samizdat. In 1975 historians attending the International Congress of Historians in San Francisco were presented with a small brochure entitled Acta Persecutionis listing the cases of 145 historians expelled from their research institutes during the massive purge that followed the Soviet invasion. In contrast the volume presented at a similar Congress last August in Bucharest was entitled Acta Creationis. Not that persecution had disappeared: in fact Vilem Precan, the editor of the volume, makes the depressing