SOU OBÉ ĚJINY - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV - Akademie věd ČR

524 Soudobé dějiny XVI / 2–3
strengthening of political-cultural identity and the emphasizing of communication
between the rank-and-file and the leadership of the Party.
As the author demonstrates, the idea of ‘coming to terms with the past’ gradually
acquired a meaning amongst the Communists that was markedly different from
the meaning it had for most Czechs. The pragmatism of the subsequent leader,
Miroslav Grebeníček (born 1947), to a certain attenuated, but did not solve, the
fundamental dilemma faced by the Party, which consisted in the conflict between
the ‘logic of the electoral struggle’ and the ‘logic of voter representation’. The first
trend after the downfall of the reformists in 1993 included, in particular, neo-
Communist theorists (like the political thinker Miloslav Ransdorf, born 1953), who
sought to formulate Socialist alternatives acceptable to most left-leaning Czechs.
That also led them to attempt a more critical analysis of their own past than the
majority of their rank-and-file members would have done. The second trend,
the logic of voter representation, oriented to preserving and strengthening the
strong identity of Party members and supporters, was linked with the continuing
conservative majority of the rank-and-file represented by local activists, the Party
press, and some members of the Party leadership. All of them preferred the
programme of political and social populism. They tended to understand history as
the ‘politics of history’ – in other words, as a means to support their own identity
and to resist the hostile environment outside the Party. For both trends in the
Party, however, the challenge presented by anti-Communism – whether systemic
or spontaneous – remained, to the end of the 1990s, an important, if not the most
important, unifying motive. But it considerably limited their possibilities to raise
sensitive questions about their own past and to hold a potentially critical debate.
Material
The Tragic Case of Miroslav Dolejší and Eugen Vrba
Prokop Tomek
This article presents Miroslav Dolejší (1931–2001), the author of Analýza událostí
17. listopadu (Analysis of the Events of 17 November), the best-known conspiratorial
interpretation of the democratic Czechoslovak revolution of November 1989. It
does so, however, from a little known side of Dolejší, that is, as a talented man
and political prisoner of the Communist régime, who spent a total of eighteen and
half years behind bars. Dolejší was first arrested in 1951, and accused of working
with an American agent to found an underground youth organization that would
carry out a coup d’état. According to the author of the article this was probably an
operation provoked by the Czechoslovak secret police. Dolejší was sentenced to
twenty-three years in prison, of which he served nine before being released in the
presidential amnesty of 1960. Afterwards he showed his exceptional abilities: though
he had not finished secondary school, he became an expert in the field of systems