The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism by Bradley F. s> Abrams (review)

Abstract

i68 SEER, 84, I, 2006 prepared to offer them its unconditional support and both stood to benefit from the likely attendant consequences of improved treatment for their minorities, increased cross-bordertrade, etc.. Horny'akargues, however, that no rapprochement could take place while both countries fluctuated between competing strategies for competing alliances with competing countries. In I927, for example, when both countries appeared to be on the brink of a rapprochement, Hungary broke off negotiations when Italy offeredherselfas an alternativeally. It naturallyfollows, therefore, that one would have expected this book to provide analysisof these competing strategiesshapingboth countries'foreign policies. Yet, although the impact of wider developments across Europe repeatedly receives consideration, the author offers almost no assessment of the influence of domestic political developments on the foreignpolicies of the two protagonists. The rise and fall of key players, governments, and even entire regimes, merits no more than a chapter heading or a solitarysentence. The foreignpolicyplatformsof thevariouspoliticalpartiesand interestgroups (whetherin government or in opposition) are entirely overlooked, little or no information is offered on the personal backgrounds, charactersand motivations of the individualsactuallydirectingthe two countries'foreignpolicy and only in the rarest of cases is there a sense of the internal debates within the Hungarian and Yugoslavgovernments.Forexample, it is only on pp. 229-30 that the authoroffersa briefbut tantalizinginsightinto the divergentattitudes towardsYugoslaviaof the two camps within the Hungarian foreign ministry; experienced diplomats from the old Ballhausplatzand new arrivalsinto the ministry.It was, however, precisely these divergentattitudes,the influence of various personalities, parties, organizations and publications that ultimately dictated the foreign policies of both countries and both countries' choice of where (andwhere not) to seeka rapprochement. This book, nevertheless,remains a significantpiece of scholarship.Yet the author's inability to break out of the narrowestdefinition of what constitutes diplomatic historyundermineswhat should have been a trulydefinitivework on Yugoslav-Hungarianrelationsin the firstdecade of the inter-warperiod. Department ofHistogy THOMAS LORMAN University ofCincinnati, Ohio Abrams,BradleyF. TheStrugglefor theSouloftheNation.Czech Culture andtheRise ofCommunism. The HarvardCold WarStudiesBook Series.Rowman and Littlefield,Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO and Oxford, 2004. vii + 363 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliographicalreferences.Index. ?59.99. THE first republic of Czechoslovakia (I9I8-38) has long appeared in the twentieth-century history of Central Europe as the bastion of democracy, surrounded on all sides by dictatorships and failed democracies. In the aftermathof the Second WorldWar,it was all the more tragicthat the reborn Czechoslovakia succumbed to the Communist tide in I948. Itsfirstvictim, in contrast to Poland, Romania and Hungary, was its proud and instinctive democratic tradition. Hitherto, the narrativeof the Communist takeoverhas REVIEWS I69 concentratedon theimmediatepost-warperiodandfocusedon the Czechoslovak Communist Party's(KPC) subversiveeffort,via the influence of Moscow, to infiltrate and contaminate Czechoslovakia's body politic. Conventional wisdom has regarded Czechoslovakia's political elite as innocent or naive bystanders to the takeover, with President Edvard Benes portrayed as the hoodwinked grandold man. BradleyF. Abrams'scontributionto the historyof post-Second WorldWar Czechoslovakia moves away from Cold War historiographyand re-examines the path to February 1948 which, he maintains, 'represented only the culmination of a break in the continuity of modern Czech history, not the break itself' (p. 275). It is a comprehensive interpretationwhich emphasizes the contributionnon-Communist intellectualsmade to Communism'spath to power. In particular, TheStruggle for theSoulof theNationargues that Czech intellectual society collectively provided 'a context in which the Communist partycould and did obtainwidespreadsupport,substantiallyeasing itspath to power' (p. 6). In this regard,Abramstracesthe failureof Czech democracyto the traumaticexperiences of the late I 930s and the Second WorldWar,which split asunder the political consensus the leaders of the first republic took for granted. The book approachesthe subjectfrom above, with an arrayof newspapers andjournals providing a substantialbody of evidence. It analyses the public narrativeof a broad swatheof Prague'sintellectualandpoliticalclasseswhich, as Abrams rightlyindicates, in the Czech case were one and the same thing. The political arena and the intellectualsvying for power are divided into four categories: Communist, Democratic Socialist, Czech Protestant and Czech Catholic. As Abrams observes, despite the political cleavages and doctrines that separated these groups, they all aimed primarily to contribute to the rebirth of the Czech nation. A crucial battle was fought, in particular, over Czechoslovakia's distant and recent past. Understandably, the need to reevaluate and redefinenational...