Prague Perspectives

edited by Lukáš Babka and Petr Roubal

published by The National Library of the Czech Republic - Slavonic Library, Prague 2009

ISBN 978-80-7050-575-5

Foreword

The following collected volume aims at presenting the work and life of one of the most versatile, inspirational, and controversial Czech historians of the 20^th century, Jan Slavík (1885–1978). Not only did Slavík initiate the disciplines of social and contemporary history into the Czech historiography, but worldwide he was possibly the first historian to analyse the Russian revolution and the subsequent development from a critical Marxist point of view. Though there is already substantial literature on Slavík, including his biography and reprint of some of his works, the book Jan Slavík (1885–1978): A Czech Historian of Revolutions represents the first attempt to portray this exceptional personality in all his – often contradictory – dimensions.

The first part of the book is dedicated to Slavík’s role in the development of Czech social sciences in the first half of the 20^th century and focuses on a several key disputes that Slavík had with the academic establishment of the period. Slavík’s aspiration to modernise the methodology and theory of Czech historiography, particularly in the direction of the contemporary sociology, caused possibly the biggest controversy. The articles of Zdeněk Beneš and Jiří Štaif show a specific position of Slavík as a critical outsider in the Czech academic framework, a position that he took primarily for his critique of the commonly held naively positivistic approach to historical sources as well as the lack of interest in understanding the long term trends and laws of historical development. It was typical for Slavík’s uncompromising character that the target for his sharp and often unjust criticism was not an average production of the positivistic main stream, but the work of Josef Pekař, his former teacher and the most prominent figure of interwar historiography. Miloš Havelka places this conflict into a broader context of the debate about the ”meaning of Czech history”. He shows how Slavík used Weber’s methodology as a tool for disqualifying Pekař’s interpretation of Czech history, but he also points out at limits of Slavík’s understanding of Weber’s works. These intellectual limits in broader sense are explored by Martin Kučera. What distanced Slavík most from Weber was his own left-leaning democratic vision of future social order, which could hardly coexist with Weber’s idea of value neutrality.

Another central theme in the first part of the book is the mapping of Jan Slavík’s relation to Marxism and the Marxist left. As the text of Jakub Rákosník shows, Slavík appreciated Marxism not for its ”truthfulness”, but for its ”usefulness” in the analysis of historical phenomena. On one hand, this eclectic approach allowed Slavík to combine Marxism with Weberian inspiration, on the other hand it earned him the label of ”idealist” among the Czech Marxists. This unorthodox approach to Marxism can be seen in Petr Čornej’s study of Slavík’s view of the Hussite movement. Together with Záviš Kalandra, who was later executed by the communist regime, Slavík established the conceptual base for Marxist interpretation of the Hussite movement as social revolution resulting from the crisis of feudalism, without accepting the Marxist dogma of class struggle as the only right interpretative framework. Petr Středa in his more general study of Slavík’s view of phenomenon of revolution shows that, it is precisely the refusal of the class struggle as a moving force of revolution and its replacement by a teleological ”process of convergence” that puts Slavík much closer to Tomáš G. Masaryk than K. Marx. The chapter on Slavík in the context of Czech social sciences is complemented by two other texts that go beyond the framework of interwar academic debates: Martin Nodl’s contextualisation of Slavík’s post-war work on early Middle Ages The Birth of Czech Nation and Jaroslav Bouček’s detailed survey of Slavík’s journalism.

The second part of the book looks at Slavík’s truly ”revolutionary” work on the Bolshevik revolution and on Soviet Russia in general. The continuity between Czarist and Soviet Russia in Slavík’s view is discussed by Vratislav Doubek. Texts of Václav Veber and Ľubica Harbuľová show Slavík’s fundamental contribution to the discipline of Soviet studies. Slavík can be seen as the first ”revisionist” who saw clearly the discrepancy between the Bolshevik program and the reality of (Soviet) Russia, a discrepancy that led in Slavík’s words to establishment of ”socialist feudalism, a hybrid of socialism and czarism”. Unfortunately Slavík’s influence remained limited to Czech linguistic territory, a fact that prevented the inclusion of his work into the broader European and world framework of Soviet studies. Slavík was a central figure for Soviet studies and for research on the Russian revolutionary movement not only as an intellectual inspiration, but also as a long-term director of Prague’s Russian Foreign Historical Archives, which – as the study of Lukáš Babka shows – became the most important centre of Soviet studies in its time due to its unique collections. Miluša Bubeníková outlines the nature of relations between Slavík and the interwar Russian exiles in Czechoslovakia. Slavík also was, as we can see in the study of Jiří Vacek, one of the few European intellectuals who was capable of writing an unbiased testimony of his visits to the Soviet Union.

Slavík did not let himself be confined by the academic boundaries of the discipline of Soviet studies but ventured passionately into journalistic disputes about the nature of the Soviet regime. Due to his unconventional standpoints, he was labelled as a ”Sovietophile” by the conservative right and at the same time as a ”Sovietophobe” by the Marxist left. This was also true about Slavík’s shows broadcasted in Russian from Prague during 1933, which, as Mikhail Sokolov showed in his archival study, found a responsive audience not only among the Russian exile but more importantly in the Soviet Union itself.

The volume is accompanied by two addenda: Dagmar Buráňová’s survey of Slavík’s personal papers at the Archives of the National Museum and Josef Hanzal’s study based primarily on Slavík’s diary from the period of enforced silence after February 1948. In addition to that, the book contains an extensive bibliography of Slavík’s works as well as publications about Slavík, which substantially extends and revises Jaroslav Bouček’s bibliography of the early 1990s, and thus provides a key base for further study of Slavík’s personality.

In conclusion, the editors would like to thank the Slavonic Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Masaryk Institute–Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as to the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague for support for the conference ”Life of Clashes”, which was organised by the Slavonic Library in April 2008 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Slavík’s death and which served as an inspiration for this volume. We would also like to thank the aforementioned contributors for their support in the publishment of this collective monograph.

Lukáš Babka and Petr Roubal