Czech Communist Intellectuals and the “National Road to Socialism”: Zdeněk Nejedlý and Karel Kosík,1945–1968.pdf (original) (raw)

Michal KopečEK

Czech Communist Intellectuals and the “National Road to Socialism”: Zdeněk Nejedlý and Karel Kosík, 1945−19681945-1968

The ambiguous relationship of radical socialism to modern nationalism was encoded already in the teachings of the “founding fathers” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In general, nationalism was a rival and enemy to revolutionary socialism as it postulated the formation of the proletariat as a force transcending national and state identities and operating on a supranational scale. At the same time, however, revolutionary socialists often used and frequently succumbed to the emotional reservoir of national identities for their own strategic purposes or conceptual claims. This chapter-taking as its point of departure the concept of “national road to socialism” in its dual meaning, tactical and theoretical-intends to show the complicated and dynamic development of the central motives (revolution, national emancipation) of twentieth-century “ideological storms” using the Czech and Czechoslovak example. It focuses on two major Czech communist political thinkers and activists Zdeněk Nejedlý and Karel Kosík. The “last Hussite” (J. Křest’an) and probably the most successful postwar ideologue of national Stalinism in East Central Europe, Nejedlý, and the Marxist revisionist rebel and star-philosopher of the Prague Spring, Kosík, represent two completely different existential, generational, and intellectual responses of the Czech radical left to the challenges of their times. Yet both tried, in their own way, to formulate the preconditions, conceptual framework, and pitfalls of the Czech “national road to socialism.”

The National Road to Socialism in Czech Politics and Political Thought 1{ }^{1}

The “national/specific road to socialism” is a political term taken from the history of socialist, and particularly communist, political theory and practice. In general, the term refers to the political strategy leading towards socialist society, which acknowledges a particular country’s situation, enabling among other things the possibility of replacing the “standard” revolution by evolutionary-if not parliamentary-development.

As a tactical instrument the “national road to socialism” originated in Czechoslovakia in the particular political conditions of mid-1946 and lasted as a usable political concept (rather than program) until the summer of 1948. At that point it became an important political and ideological tool of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the battle over the “meaning of socialism” but also in the struggle around the redefinition of national identity. 2{ }^{2} The direct incentive came from Stalin himself in his conversation with British Labor Party leaders, when he proclaimed the possibility of different roads leading to socialism. 3{ }^{3} Soon afterwards, “national roads” started to flourish all over the region, but in Czechoslovakia it gained particular importance. After the May 1946 general election, in which the Communist Party gained over 43%43 \% of the votes in the Czech part of the country, it seemed that if there was a land where the policy of gradual and parliamentary road to socialism (whatever these terms might have meant for the communist leaders and intellectuals) was possible due to the mass support and generally advantageous situation, it must have been Czechoslovakia. 4{ }^{4}

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1{ }^{1} For a critical reading and their extensive comments on earlier versions of this paper I would like to express my thanks to Johann Arnason, Eva Broklová, Miloš Havelka, Jiří Křest’an, Ivan Landa, Jan Mervart, Vítězslav Sommer, and Petr Šámal.
2{ }^{2} See esp. Christiane Brenner, “Zwischen Ost und West:” Tschechische politische Diskurse 1945-1948 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009) and Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
3{ }^{3} Cf. The British Road to Socialism, The Programme adopted by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party, January 1951, London.
4{ }^{4} See Gustav Bareš, Naše cesta kk socialismu (Prague: UV KSČ, 1947). ↩︎

The concept drew on crucial continuities of the post-1945 Third Republic and its central notions of “national and democratic revolution,” pro-Soviet international orientation accompanied by an emphatic Slavophile cultural turn, and, last but not least, the theory of “people’s democracy” - accepted throughout the legal-political spec-trum-as a specific stage in the gradual transition from capitalism to democratic socialism. At the same time, the “national road” also grew from the surge of nationalist feelings shortly after the war accompanied by the expulsion and transfer of the Sudeten-German population from the country. 5{ }^{5} The “national road to socialism” as a political program and strategic orientation desperately needed an ideological foundation outlining the continuity and congruity between the national and socialist traditions in Czech and Czechoslovak history. The Communist Party found an ideological justification of this kind in the work of a thus far marginal and atypical communist intellectual, historian and musicologist Zdeněk Nejedlý.

Albeit in a different terminological frame, the question of a “national road to socialism”-this time in the form of democratic socialism or “socialism with human face”-reappeared in Czech and Czechoslovak political discourse during the reformist 1960s. Not by chance did Czechoslovak reform communist historians of that time devote much of their energy to the first thorough analysis of the politics of the “Czechoslovak road to socialism” around 1946-1948. They viewed the era of de-Stalinization and their present reformist endeavor in many ways as a comeback to that concept and thus to the natural domestic conditions for building democratic socialism. 6{ }^{6}

Nevertheless, the conceptual shift from “national road” towards “national form” during the Prague Spring political debates epitomizes the difference in contexts as well as in essence between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. The reform communism of the 1960s drew a lot from the reinterpretation of national democratic traditions. Yet it was not Nejedlý, but his generation’s younger challengers and crit-

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5{ }^{5} For a detailed historical analysis, see Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, especially, 178-98.
6{ }^{6} See Vítězslav Sommer, Angažované dějepisectví: Stranická historiografie mezi stalinismem a reformnim komunismem (1950-1970) (Prague: Lidové noviny, 2012), esp., 405-29. ↩︎

ics, youthful and middle-generation reform communist intellectuals, whose historical and theoretical works provided the broader philosophical underpinning of the Prague Spring. One of them was Karel Kosík. His reconsideration of Marxism as political doctrine and philosophical approach as well as his vision of democratic socialism embedded in the particular Czech and Czechoslovak national context represented the most striking counterpoint to Nejedlý’s national communist vision.

Both “national roads,” in the 1940s as well as in the 1960s, drew from a rich historical intellectual and ideological reservoir. The “national road,” namely, as a more general political metaphor appeared in Czech socialist and radical socialist political thought and practice from the late nineteenth until the late twentieth century. In broader cultural terms, the leftist dilemmas with the national question were tied to the so-called dispute over the meaning of Czech history, a crucial and expansive cultural-political debate among leading Czech intellectuals and politicians spanning several decades. Initiated by Tomáš G. Masaryk’s fin-de-sciècle reformulation of the national-political program in his seminal book from 1895, Czech Question, it lasted until the end of the First Republic in 1938. Later, in a different context, the dilemmas about the role of a small nation and its cultural mission in the geopolitically sensitive central European space kept reappearing in Czech public debates throughout the twentieth century. 7{ }^{7}

Even though socialists generally aimed at overcoming state and national borders and highlighted internationalism at the expense of national loyalty, they simultaneously often used national identity bonds for their own purposes. An early and well-known example was the distinction made by Marx and Engels, in 1848, between the progressive “historical nations” with the right to independence and the reactionary nationalist movements of the “history-less peoples.” 8{ }^{8} Lenin’s doctrine of global revolutionary struggle further nurtured the ambiguity between socialism and nationalism by subverting Marx’s initial argument. Lenin made a distinction between the “exploiting” and the “exploited” nations and included the national liberation fight in colonies into the

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7{ }^{7} Cf. Miloš Havelka, Dějiny a smysl? Obsahy, akcenty a posuny “české otázky” 1895-1989 (Prague: NLN, 2001).
8{ }^{8} Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism. Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). ↩︎

making of the world socialist revolution. Additionally, Lenin’s theory of “socialist culture” that should have been present-at least in elements - in every national culture provided a clue to the prospective concept of the “socialist nation.” As he stated in one of his articles devoted to the national question, “in every national culture there are elements of democratic and socialist culture, however much underdeveloped, because in every nation there are working and exploited masses, whose living conditions necessary breed democratic and socialist ideology.” 9{ }^{9}

For the radical leftist thinkers in East Central Europe in the new emerging national societies before 1918, and in the “nation-states” that followed, the national question often represented a thorny issue. The solutions-provisional as they were-differed substantially. In the Czech context, similarly to the whole region, we can follow, in the second half of the nineteenth century, splits and schisms within the workers" movement and socialist camp along three major axes: the national versus the internationalist; the revolutionary versus the evolutionary; and the authoritarian versus the anti-authoritarian. 10{ }^{10}

Focusing on the first of these categories, we can see a major institutional and organizational split in Bohemia already at the turn of the century with the creation of the Czech National Socialist Party under the leadership of Václav Klofáč (1868-1942) as a counterpart to Social Democracy. Nationalist, socialist, but moderate in terms of its political tactics, the “national workers” attracted a significant amount of support from the Czech working class, the educated petty bourgeoisie, and the nationally minded intelligentsia. 11{ }^{11} During World War I, the national question was again one of the most, if not the most important division

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9{ }^{9} Vladimir I. Lenin, “Kritické poznámky k národnostní otázce,” in O proletářském internacionalismu a národnostní otázce (Prague: Svoboda, 1976), 131. Cf. Neil Harding, Leninism (Durham: Duke University Press 1996), 197-218.
10{ }^{10} Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baár, Maria Falina, and Michal Kopeček, A History of Political Thought in East Central Europe, sv. 1: Negotiating Modernity in the “Long Nineteenth Century” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 431-94.
11{ }^{11} Founded in 1897 as a socialist branch of the National Liberal Party, the national socialists became a major challenger to Czechoslovak Social Democracy. Until 1948, the two parties were the most important noncommunist socialist political subjects. After 1948 the party formally remained a part of the so-called National Front system during communist rule. Cf. Josef Krečmer, Václav Klofáč a jeho národní socialismus (Prague: Adonai, 2000). ↩︎

line within Social Democracy. On the one hand there was a reformist or revisionist branch of the party that adopted an increasingly patriotic position during the war. Represented, for instance, by the theorist of cooperative movement František Modráček (1871-1960), this branch started to dominate the party in 1917. On the other hand, the more radical (future communist) branch of the Social Democratic Party was represented by the journalist and outstanding theorist Bohumír Šmeral (1880-1941). It leaned towards the Austro-Marxist tradition and embraced internationalism during and after World War I, which pushed them progressively aside because of their alleged lack of patriotism. 12{ }^{12} Yet just few years later, after 1924, Šmeral and the German foreman Karl Kreibich (1883-1966), two major figures of the founding generation of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia established in 1921, came under fierce criticism for not being internationalist enough. They were attacked by both the local left-wing radicals within the Communist Party and the Executive of the Comintern after the latter adopted its strict policy against the “new small imperialist states” established as a result of the Versailles system. The Comintern changed its policy only in mid-1930 with the rise of Popular Front tactics. 13{ }^{13}

Under the circumstances, the adherents of the leftist revolutionary movements in Czechoslovakia and in the whole of East Central Europe showed a considerable discursive as well as strategic variety with respect to the question of national identity and nationalism during the 1920s and the 1930s. These tribulations foreshadowed in many ways the complexity of the radical socialist negotiations on national and nationality question establishing diverse traditions out of which the concepts of “national road” after World War II developed. 14{ }^{14}

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12{ }^{12} Bernard Wheaton, Radical Socialism in Czechoslovakia. Bohumir Šmeral, the Czech Road to Socialism and the Origins of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (1917-1921) (New York: East European Monographs, 1986); Zdeněk Kárník, Socialisté na rozcestí. Habsburk, Masaryk, Šmeral (Prague: Svoboda, 1968).
13{ }^{13} Ben Fowkes, “Communist Dilemmas in Two Multinational States,” in Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern. Perspectives on Stalinization, 1917-1953, ed. by Norman LaPort, Kevin Morgan, and Matthew Worley Houndmills (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 206-25.
14{ }^{14} Alexej Kusák, Kultura a politika v Československu 1945-1956 (Prague: Torst, 1998), esp., 71-140. Cf. also Jacques Rupnik, Déjiny komunistické strany Československa. Od počátkủ do převzeti moci (Prague: Academia, 2002). In ↩︎

Zdeněk Nejedlý and Karel Kosík:

Two Communist Intellectuals, Two Generations, Two Spaces of Experience

Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878-1962) belongs to the turn-of-the-century generation of critical intellectuals who took up the challenge of mass politics and revised the political project of their forefathers. His path to the Communist Party was complicated, as he became a member only in 1938 at the age of sixty. 15{ }^{15} Until the early 1920s, he belonged to left liberal or civic radical circles-called the “realists,” coming mostly from academic or journalist professions. They were organized around the founder of the group, professor of sociology, future founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš G. Masaryk. Nejedlý not only was one of his great admirers, and remained so until late in his life, but he considered himself as a bearer of Masaryk’s political program calling for a completion of the Czech “national rebirth,” a conception that substantially complicated Nejedlý’s relationship with the interwar radical left. 16{ }^{16}

With the leftist political radicalization in the aftermath of World War I, Nejedlý flirted with the anarcho-syndicalist tendencies represented by the journalist, poet, and literary critic Stanislav Kostka

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Slovakia the situation obviously differed due to the different context. In the 1920 s, the younger generation of leftist intelligentsia was concentrated around the journal Dav. For them the national question was of great importance. Apart from the social democratic leadership of Ivan Dérer, all Slovak socialist and communist groups and streams were contesting the official Czechoslovakist discourse as well as the nationalism and autonomism of Andrej Hlinka’s populists. See, e.g., Ján Rozner, “Dav a problematika jeho doby,” and Karol Rosenbaum, “Prinos Davu k riešieniu vztahov Čechov a Slovákov,” in Dav, spomienky a štúdie (Bratislava: Vyd. SAV, 1965), 7-116; 171-88.
15{ }^{15} For a comprehensive biography of Nejedlý, see Jiří Křest’an, Zdeněk Nejedlý: politik a vědec v osamění (Prague/Litomyšl: Paseka, 2012).
16{ }^{16} Zdeněk Nejedlý, Z prvních dvou let republiky (Prague, 1921). Cf. Jiří Křest’an, “Zdeněk Nejedlý a Komunistická strana Československa 19211925. Přispěvěk k historii vztahů mezi KSČ a levicovou inteligencí,” in Bolševismus, komunismus a radikální socialismu v Československu, vol. 1., ed. by Zdeněk Kárník and Michal Kopeček (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR - Dokořán, 2003), 15-42. ↩︎

Neumann (1875-1947) and with left-wing social democrats led by Bohumír Šmeral. Nejedlý’s writings of the time were full of admiration for revolution, which he saw as a purifying storm necessary to change the immoral foundations of bourgeois society. But his visionwith all his sympathy for both Russian revolutions of 1917-was very Masarykian at that time. It stressed above all the cultural and moral aspects of the desired change. Initially, Nejedlý was critical of the newly established Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz). He disagreed with what he saw as negativism, dogmatism, internal incoherence, and lack of intraparty democracy. In the early 1920s, he leaned toward the national socialists among whom a number of his friends and colleagues, former Masarykian “realists,” belonged. Yet he did not join any of the socialist political parties. He decided instead to be active in the civil society sphere where he put to good use his experience with associational life and established the Socialist Society in 1921. Four years later, he created the Society for Economic and Cultural Cooperation with the Soviet Union. 17{ }^{17}

Nejedlý’s nationalism, which combined Masarykian and neoRomantic motives (e.g., he admired key Czech cultural figures of the nineteenth century such as Bedřich Smetana, Josef Kajetán Tyl, Božena Němcová, Josef Mánes, and Alois Jirásek) 18{ }^{18} clashed with the decisively antinationalist and often anti-Czechoslovak sentiments of the radical leftist groups. This situation determined Nejedlý’s distance toward the CPCz until at least the mid-1930s. Nejedlý’s idiosyncratic combination of national revivalist myths with Masarykian interest in modern social issues did not find much positive reception in the Party. On the contrary, Nejedlý was heavily criticized, along with other “bourgeois professors,” at the Party’s first congress in 1923. One of the chief party ideologues, an adherent of the theory of specificity of Czechoslovak communism, Karl Kreibich did stand up in Nejedlý’s defense. Yet the voices in the Party who represented the growingly

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17{ }^{17} Jiří Křest’an, “Společnost pro hospodářské a kulturní styk s SSSR a obraz Sovětského svazu v prostředí české levicové intelligence (1925-1929),” in Bošlevismus, komunismus a radikální socialismu v Československu vol. 2, ed. by Zdeněk Kárník and Michal Kopeček (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR - Dokořán, 2004), 84-109.
18{ }^{18} Zdeněk Nejedlý, Velké osobnosti (Prague: Mladá fronta, 1951). ↩︎

influential Bolshevik orientation, such as Pavel Reiman (1902-1976) or S. K. Neumann, in line with Comintern internationalism, stressed the reactionary role of all national sentiments including that of the Czech national movement and “Masarykism.” 19{ }^{19}

It was CPCz’s adherence first to Popular Front policy and laterin between the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the Molo-tov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and then again after summer 1941-to the nation’s defense and national traditions that paved the way to reconciliation between Nejedlý and the CPCz accomplished during his wartime exile in Moscow. This development had been reinforced by the USSR’s turn to nationally oriented historicism during the Great Patriotic War. Nejedlý’s radio speeches to the nation broadcast in occupied Czechoslovakia as well as his writings full of patriotic pathos, national self-esteem, and clearly recognizable historical references turned him into the crucial communist interpreter of the national-liberation struggle during World War II. 20{ }^{20} Neither in Moscow during the war, nor later after the liberation in 1945, did Nejedlý belong to the CPCz’s inner power circle. While in Moscow, Stalin craftily manipulated Nejedlý as his potential favorite replacement of President Edvard Beneš if the latter was not cooperative enough. Such ambitions however triggered aloof reactions, if not open irony, from the most of the CPCz leaders in exile in Moscow. 21{ }^{21} After 1945, Nejedlý was not very proficient in the rules of the Communist Party power game. Aspiring for the highest ideological position, he never really challenged the chief Party Stalinist ideologue Václav Kopecký (1897-1961). Yet at the same time, Nejedlý was one of the few major intellectuals with undisputed academic and public credentials whom the Party eagerly put forward in the cultural and moral “struggle of the progressive forces against fascism.” For this reason, he played a crucial

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19{ }^{19} See Stanislav Kostka Neumann, Krise národa (Prague: Otto Girgal, 1930); Pavel Reiman and Gustav Breitenfeld, eds., O Rakousku a české otázce: [Sbornik k 50. výročí úmrtí Karla MarxeJ Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin (Prague: K. Borecký, 1933); Jan Šverma, Česká otázka ve světle marxismu (Prague: K. Borecký, 1933); cf. Jiří Křest’an, “Zdeněk Nejedlý a česká cesta ke komunismu,” Paginae historiae, Sbornik Národního archivu č. 18 (2010): 302-10.
20{ }^{20} Cf. Zdeněk Nejedlý, Moskevské stati (Prague: Nakl. Svoboda, 1946).
21{ }^{21} Křest’an, Zdeněk Nejedlý, 296-312. ↩︎

role as cultural icon and intellectual authority legitimizing the communist road to power in Czechoslovakia after 1945. 22{ }^{22}

Different historical experiences generating different mental, epistemological, and ideological horizons characterized the life story of Karel Kosík (1926-2003). He belonged to the generation of Totaleinsatz, himself a member of the left-wing procommunist youth resistance organization Předvoj (Vanguard), for which he was interned in Terezín in 1944. He finished his studies at the Charles University in Prague in 1947 and at the Moscow Lomonosov University in 1949. Because of their enthusiastic support and activism in establishing Stalinism in Czechoslovakia, his generation is also called “the generation of blue shirts” (part of the uniform of the svazáci-the Czech “Komsomol”) or the generation of the “communist youth” (mládi komunismu). 23{ }^{23}

Kosík was among the leftist radicals studying philosophy at the seminar of the only truly Bolshevik professor at Charles University after 1945, the Prague-born mathematician and philosopher Arnošt (Ernst) Kolman (1892-1979). 24{ }^{24} As one of its most active members, Kosík worked at the communist cultural weekly Tvorba lead by the head of the agitprop department of the Central Committee of CPCz, Gustav Bareš (1910-1979). This faction represented the Bolshevizing hard-core craving for a radical break with the bourgeois democratic culture and national traditions. It is not surprising that this milieu did

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22{ }^{22} Jiří Křest’an, “Intelektuálové bez rozumu? Učenec Zdeněk Nejedlý a fascinující půvab komunismu,” in Kárník and Kopeček, eds., Bolševismus, komunismus a radikální socialismus, vol. V, 15-41.
23{ }^{23} For a generational approach in analyzing twentieth-century Czech culture, see Miloš Havelka, “Česká kultura a politika před různými horizonty generační zkušenosti,” in Ideje - dějiny - společnost: studie kk historické sociologii věděni (Brno: CDK, 2010), 332-61.
24{ }^{24} Kolman came from an educated Prague Jewish family starting his public activity as a cultural Zionist. During World War I, he was captured on the eastern front and turned to communism, joined the Bolshevik party and worked as Red Army and Comintern party functionary. Later he became one of the main ideological watchdogs in the field of Soviet science. He was involved in several ideological smear-campaigns and obtained the so-called Soviet Red Professoriate title in the early 1930s. Immediately after World War II he was sent back to the liberated Czechoslovakia as an intellectual envoy of Sovietization and a leading communist propaganda functionary. Cf. Ernst Kolman, Die verirrte Generation. So hätten wir nicht leben sollen. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1979). ↩︎

not view the concept of the “national road to socialism” favorably. They did not share the warm emotional attachment to the nineteenth century national traditions preached by Nejedlý. Yet with Arnošt Kolman being sent back to Moscow by Gottwald himself for his exorbitant Bolshevik radicalism in 1948, and their major protector, the general secretary of the Party Rudolf Slánský (1901-1952) falling victim to a 1952 show-trial, the radicals, albeit numerous in the apparatus, never ventured to challenge Nejedlý’s succesful national Stalinist master-narrative in a public attack. 25{ }^{25}

These radicals began to feel disillusioned with the regime as soon as 1953, which lead many of them, with Kosik at the forefront, to confront the Party leadership in 1956 after the twentieth congress of the CPSU for its half-hearted de-Stalinization. In the late 1950s, Kosik worked as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences. He turned into the spokesperson of the critical Marxist intelligentsia based in editorial boards of several influential journals such as Literární noviny or Kultúrny život. Kosik’s main cultural and philosophical interests at the time involved the reconsideration of national political traditions in direct contrast to Nejedlý’s interpretation as witnessed by Kosik’s major work Czech Radical Democracy (1958). Furthermore, he was one of the front combatants striving to emancipate local Marxist philosophy from the direct supervision by the Antonin Novotný Party leadership. Despite the temporal setback due to the huge, Moscow orchestrated antirevisionist ideological campaign after 1958, revisionist intellectuals such as Kosik, Ivan Sviták (1925-1994), or Robert Kalivoda (1923-1989) “survived”-often in the position of researcher or cultural journalist and editor-well into the 1960s. At that point, they became an important part of the communist reform movement and visible cultural and intellectual actors of the Prague Spring. 26{ }^{26} With the publication in 1963 of probably the most important Czech Marxist philosophical work ever, The Dialectics of the Concrete, his close collaboration with the Yugoslav Praxis group and his wide reception among Western Marxists, Kosik’s fame grew beyond the borders of the

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25{ }^{25} Cf. Petr Šámal, ““Česká otázka” ve světle stalinismu: Karel Kosík a koncept levicového radikalismu,” Soudobě dějiny, vol. 12 (2005): 45-61.
26{ }^{26} Cf. Michal Kopeček, Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce. Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední Evropě 1953-1960 (Prague: Argo, 2009). ↩︎

Czechoslovak cultural space, turning him into one of the icons of East European Marxist renaissance in the 1960s.

Nejedlý Triumfans: Communists as the Heirs of the Hussites and National Awakening

At the end of World War II, communists in East Central Europe were anything but indifferent towards the legacies of their respective national histories. Already before that the Party ideologues and intellectuals were at pains to place communists into a national historical past depicting them as components of the patriotic whole. After the war, the patriotic discourse turned into an important instrument of the communist propaganda, an indispensable part of the parties" effort to increase their credibility among the population. The universalist revolutionary doctrine and generally the Marxist-Leninist narrative of allegedly lawful historical development culminating in the dissolution of all nations in a global communist society remained at the heart of their political identity. But the radical rhetoric of the dictatorship of proletariat and class struggle were immersed in a more inclusive “national and social revolution” and in calls for “national unity.”

In Czechoslovakia, the endeavor to reach coexistence if not harmony between the “progressive national traditions” and the commu-nist-led cultural revolution took political shape only after the Party leadership started to advocate for a “national road to socialism” in the summer of 1946. This was the point when Nejedlý’s progressivist historical interpretation stressing the plebeian and egalitarian democratic elements of Czech culture and employing pan-Slavic rhetoric, proved a convenient discursive framework. Nejedlý summarized his grand vision in an extensive lecture for the Socialist Academy in 1946 entitled Communists, the Heirs of the Great Traditions of the Czech Nation, which was first published as a Central Committee brochure. Later the booklet was republished several times and became the most important ideological pronouncement of Czech national Stalinism. 27{ }^{27}

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27{ }^{27} Zdeněk Nejedlý, Komunisté—dědici velikých tradic českého národa (Prague: ÚV KSČ, 1946). Quoted from the edition published in Prague by Československý spisovatel in 1951. In the present article I use the notion of ↩︎

Here Nejedlý depicted the supposedly progressive line of Czech history and stressed, echoing earlier bourgeois conceptions of Palacký and Masaryk, the legacy of the fifteenth-century Hussite “revolutionary” period as well as the initial phase of the national revival in the first half of the nineteenth century. In his reading, these two periods represented a heyday of progressive forces in Czech history, whose culmination and final victory came in 1945 with the “national democratic revolution.” In the later editions of the booklet, another final station was added: the communist take-over of 1948.

The lecture portrayed communists as direct heirs of the revivalist patriotic struggle and of the “Czech people” (český lid)'s long-term struggle for social justice and democracy. Despite the overwhelming power of Czech communists already since mid-1945, the undertone of Nejedlý’s lecture was defensive, directed against the widespread belief that communist ideology was alien to Czech democratic culture. He applied two important conceptual innovations to the interpretation of national history: the Marxist developmental historical perspective along with the class analysis; and, his own idiosyncratic understanding of national traditions as embodied in the historical memory of the “common people.” Claiming an adherence to class-based conceptualization, he applied a binomial view differentiating between two fundamental layers of society. On the one hand, there was a “true nation” composed above all by the “people’s strata” (lidové vrstvy) and the progressive part of the intelligentsia, which, according to Nejedlý, always sided with the “revolutionary movement” and which he understood in a quite un-Marxist way as a class-neutral body. On the other hand, there was a “nation of lords” (panský národ) that usually betrayed

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“national Stalinism” in a pragmatic way relating to a merger of the Stalinist political vision of social transformation and its vocabulary with a distinct nationalist historical identity narrative. In contrast to some authors using the notion of “national Stalinism” as a general term characterizing the nature of communist system in its whole existence in some countries such as Romania or Albania, I use it exclusively for the time of “high Stalinism” in East Central Europe, that is, approx. 1948-1955. Cf. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for all Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Bogdan Cristian Iacob, Stalinism, historians and the nation: history-production under communism in Romania 1955-1966. PhD Dissertation in History, Budapest: Central European University, 2011. ↩︎

the nation for its own class interest. These two categories, however, changed over time. A social layer that might have been progressive in one historical period (e.g., the gentry in the high Middle Ages or the Czech bourgeoisie up to the 1860s) could turn conservative and reactionary in later years.

The only permanent and reliable indicator of progress and the bearer of true national tradition was the “people’s strata” whose major representative in the modern age was the working class. The historical memory of the people was ultimately the only competent arbiter of “truly national traditions.” Nejedlý maintained that “it is characteristic that in the good memory of the nation only those [historical actors] remain that went along with the people’s revolutionary movement and remained faithful to it.” 28He{ }^{28} \mathrm{He} had two favorite examples: Jan Hus (c. 1369-1415), the priest and preacher whose teaching and execution by the Konstanz Council in 1415 gave birth to the Hussite movement; and, the famous warlord of Taborite Hussites, the yeoman Jan Žižka of Trocnov (c. 1360-1424). According to Nejedlý, they both held a special place in the historical memory of the Czech nation that clearly overshadowed other favorite historical personalities such as Comenius or Emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg.

Nejedlý, albeit educated as a positivist historian, rejected the supposed objectivity of historical science. Drawing on Masaryk’s effort to seek in historical cognition a justification for the national political program, Nejedlý sought the historical-philosophical “meaning” of national history. Yet compared to Masaryk, he understood history and historical tradition in an activist and instrumental sense. This found expression in various quasi-historical bon mots that Nejedlý repeated with gusto disregarding that they were often ridiculized. “The communism of Jan Žižka is surely much closer to the Czech national tradition than the fascism of Emperor Sigismund [of Luxembourg, 1368-1437],” he reiterated in Communists, the Heirs. Even more wellknown became another bon mot from the book substantiating Nejedlý’s claim that Hus was above all a social revolutionary and not a religious thinker. "Today Hus would be a leader of a political party and his major platform would not be a church pulpit, but Prague’s [palace]

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28{ }^{28} Nejedlý, Komunisté, 18. ↩︎

Lucerna 29{ }^{29} or Wenceslas Square. And his party would be very close-we can be sure of that-to us, the communists." 30{ }^{30}

Deeply rooted in national Romantic mythology, Nejedlý was convinced about the exceptionally progressive character of Czech traditions. He constantly compared them in his lecture to the German ones. The prevailing reactionary traits of German national history made it, as Nejedlý maintained, particularly difficult for the current German comrades to dig out something progressive out of it. Even more often he referred to the friendly Slavic nation of Poles, who in his view were too much influenced in their national traditions by the aristocracy, its conduct of honor and its detrimental individualism. In contrast, at the core of the Czech national traditions Nejedlý found only such quasi protocommunist characteristic traits as “folksiness” (lidovost) and democratism, progressiveness (pokrokovost) and revolutionary attitude (revolučnost). They all have found their full historical blossom in the “Hussite revolution” especially its most radical branch the “utopic communist Taborite republic” and, once again, in the young, revolutionary democratic Czech bourgeoisie of the 1830s and the 1840s. Its third and final historical triumph, Nejedlý assured, had come to fore in 1945. 31{ }^{31}

However much of Nejedlý’s procommunist national history narrative seemed to be backing up the celebrated “national road to socialism” and, in general, the concept of “people’s democracy” accepted also by the other Czech noncommunist socialist parties, its real triumph came only after the definitive abandonment of the “national road” policy and the Communist Party’s shift to Stalinist and Sovietization policies after the 1948 February coup d’état. Without a doubt, the purge of “bourgeois-nationalist” deviators within communist parties and the emphatic antinationalist rhetoric were ideological pillars of the founding period of communist dictatorships in the region. Especially after the rift with Yugoslavia in the summer 1947 and the inception of the Cold War, any remark about a national road to socialism was seen

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29{ }^{29} The Lucerna was traditionally one of the favorite gathering places in Prague for communist political mass agitation.
30{ }^{30} Nejedý, Komunisté, 99-100. Cf. Jiří Křest’an, Česká otázka v pojetí Zdeňka Nejedlého (Prague: SÚA, 1996).
31{ }^{31} Nejedlý, Komunisté, esp., 40-67. Cf. Křest’an, “Zdeněk Nejedlý a česká cesta ke komunismu.” ↩︎

with utmost suspicion in the Kremlin. Yet, it did not mean the abandonment of the nationalist stereotypes in local communist discourses. It was Stalin himself, even after 1948, who sometimes urged other communist leaders to pepper their political campaigns with national phrases. The anti-Zionist and anticosmopolitan campaign of 1949 was strongly supplemented with commonly understandable nationalist tropes in the USSR. 32{ }^{32} Flirtation with nationalist and, at times, xenophobic rhetoric generally characterized Stalinist leaderships in many countries of East Central Europe. Similarly, the newly established Marxist-Leninist schools of historiography were at pains to combine the Soviet revolutionary doctrine with “progressive” national traditions. 33{ }^{33}

Yet in the Czech case-not the Czecho-Slovak, as Slovaks were mostly left out of the overall historical picture acquiring mostly a role of mere object of Czech nationalist political campaigns in the modern era-this attempt proved to be particularly successful. It took the form of Nejedlý’s somewhat naïve but, at the same time, powerful construction of continuity between the “Hussite revolution,” the national awaking, and the socialist revolution. It epitomized the efforts of the Stalinist elites to create a moral-political unity of the new order based on the adoption and internalization of the communist project and morality, yet represented and imagined exclusively as a national community.

Nejedlý, a former petty bourgeois, left-wing professor, became probably the most successful national Stalinist ideologist of his time in East Central Europe. This was partly due to a chain of coincidences, such as the fact that Nejedlý never explicitly mentioned in his seminal lecture the concept of the “national road to socialism,” as if guessing that it would not have a long life. Simultaneously, there were deeper structures of his organicist nationalist thought that proved to be compatible with similarly organicist and homogenizing elements of Bol-

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32{ }^{32} Žores Medveděv and Roj Medveděv, Neznámý Stalin (Prague: Academia, 2003), 269-84.
33{ }^{33} Cf. Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitimizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warsaw: PAAN/TRIO, 2005), 192-221. For elaboration on the Czech, East German, Polish, and Slovak Stalinist historiographies on national question, see Maciej Górny, Przede wszystkim ma być naród. Marksistowskie historiografie w Europie ŚrodkowoWschodniej (Warsaw: Trio, 2007); for Romania, Iacob, Stalinism, historians. ↩︎

shevism. In this way, Nejedlý mediated between the deeply engrained mental world of traditional Czech nationalism (represented at best by the literary oeuvre of Alois Jirásek, a historical novelist and a favorite of Nejedlý) and the Stalinist cultural project. 34{ }^{34}

For example, Nejedlý extolled, already in the early 1920s, the idea of the need to create a “new human being” by means of coercive utopia. In his 1925 book on Jan Hus he maintained that “people are how the world creates them.” 35{ }^{35} Very pessimistic about human nature, he preached that people must be forced to do social good and thus become good characters, which went against the logic of Masarykian piecemeal work (drobná práce) and social gradualism. Deep in Nejedlý’s historical and political imagination there was a yearning for idyllic harmony that was accompanied by strict binary thinking. He came close to the Lenininst idea of “two cultures in one nation,” the progressive and the reactionary ones that must be separated by cleansing revolutionary forces. 36{ }^{36} His interwar writings were full of diatribes against the “lords” nation" parasitizing the people. The liquidation of the former would bring about the desired end of the hopeless pathology of national divisions. Last but not least, Nejedlý was convinced about the role of the charismatic leader and his intuitive insights in bringing historical truths to the people. This motif had deeper roots in his neo-Romantic understanding of artistic creation, which could

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34{ }^{34} In an intriguing essay Jacques Rupnik pondered about the “domestic roots” of Czech Stalinism. He did not employ the concept of “national Stalinism” and wrote about two basic communist streams in modern Czech history, one (à la Šmeral) characterized by radical democratic concepts and another (à la Gottwald) typical of the authoritarian Bolshevik doctrine. In his view, the domestic tradition of Czech Stalinism goes back to the late 1920s Bolshevization of the Party. Yet, his reading is not tied to a discussion of Czech nationalist ideology. See Jacques Rupnik, “Kořeny českého stalinismu,” in Acta contemporanea (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR, 1998), 319-35. By contrast, the present paper tries to show that there were also other preconditions for the relatively successful performance of Czech Stalinism and these were rooted in fundamental domestic nationalist topoi.
35{ }^{35} Zdeněk Nejedlý, Mistr fan Hus a jeho význam sociální (Prague: Vortel a Rejman, 1925), 6, quoted by Křest’an, “Intelektuálové bez rozumu?,” 25.
36{ }^{36} Although in 1946 he attributed this concept not to Lenin, but to Stalin and his influential Marxism and the National Question from 1913, see Nejedlý, Komunisté, 9-10. ↩︎

simultaneously reveal deep but plain truths through its instinct and genial naivety. 37{ }^{37}

Some authors consider Nejedlý within the left-wing intellectual milieu, both before and after World War II, as a nationalist and traditionalist thinker or, in a catchy metaphor, as a representative of a “Biedermeier communism.” 38{ }^{38} In a broader regional comparison of postwar Stalinist historiographies, Nejedlý’s fundamentally “optimistic Marxist interpretation” strongly echoing previous liberal nationalist historical schools does not seem to be an exception. 39{ }^{39}

The most eloquent example of Nejedlý’s traditionalist and nationalist tendency was his devotion to the work of Alois Jirásek (18511930), a prolific author of historical novels and dramas and one of the most adored but simultaneously criticized in the history of Czech modern literature. 40{ }^{40} Taking over Palacký’s Romantic interpretation of national history with an emphasis on Hussitism, Jirásek-probably more than any other author-influenced the historical imagery of the Czech population. His traditional realist style of writing, his emphatic patriotic tone celebrating key chapters of Czech statehood and national past along with his plebeian tone did not find much positive echo amongst the fin-de-siècle modernist men of letters in Bohemia. Yet he was a widely popular writer already before World War I. The conflagration along with the concomitant rise of the patriotic struggle for the independent Czech and Czechoslovak statehood further augmented his popularity. During the war he was widely read and appreciated even in the educated strata of the society. In later years, politically allied with the right-wing National Democrats of Karel Kramář, he was officially promoted and published in the Czechoslovak republic. At that time, Nejedlý established himself as one of the most eloquent defenders of Jirásek’s literary oeuvre against critical voices coming mainly from the left and the avant-garde. Nejedlý thus naturally felt fully entitled to become the gatekeeper of Jirásek’s legacy after 1945 and Klement

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37{ }^{37} Nejedlý, Komunisté. See also Nejedlý, Tyl, Hálek, Jirásek (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1950). Cf. esp. Křest’an, “Intelektuálové bez rozumu.”
38{ }^{38} Kusák, Kultura a politika v Československu, esp., 87-91, 153-55.
39{ }^{39} Górny, Przede wszystkim ma być naród, see esp. the conclusion, 403-28.
40{ }^{40} See, e.g., Alexandr Stich, “Kopací míč Jirásek,” in Literatura věc veřejná (Prague: NLN, 2004), 155-66. ↩︎

Gottwald’s communist leadership gave him full support. 41{ }^{41} A massive state-orchestrated “Operation Jirásek” (Żiráskovská akce) coordinated by Nejedlý was implemented. It included a complete edition of Jirásek’s writings under the title “Bequest to the Nation” (Odkaz národu) in 32 volumes, the inauguration of a museum, or feature films based on his novels. 42{ }^{42}

Though a source of ironic comments among the radical communist youth, Nejedlý’s adaptation of Jirásek’s traditionalist historical imagination became a biding norm for a broad spectrum of low and medium-level agitators, artists, and scholars. The emerging group of socialist realist novelists formed mostly by middle-aged, established authors (Miloš V. Kratochvíl, Karel J. Beneš, Václav Kaplický, František Kupka) became more or less variants of Jirásek, whose work was considered by Nejedlý not merely historical novels but historiographical accounts, compensating for a yet nonexistent Marxist historical production. This was the main reason why Jirásek’s collected works followed an unusual-for a fiction writer-chronological principle determined by the time period the respective volume focused on starting with the ancient times of old Czech legends all the way to the twentieth century. 43{ }^{43} Czech Stalinist historiography took over from them not only the grand narrative of national history and its progressive traditions, but also its plebeian stance, revolutionary rhetoric as well as the inflamed, patriotic pathos. 44{ }^{44} Jirásek in Nejedlý’s appropriation also became

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41{ }^{41} From Nejedlý’s huge output on Jirásek, see, e.g., Zdeněk Nejedlý, Alois Jirásek: Studie historická (Prague: Svoboda, 1949), idem: Čtyři studie o Al. Jiráskovi (Prague: Melantrich, 1949), and idem: Alois Jirásek a společenský význam jeho díla (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1951).
42{ }^{42} For detailed analysis of the “Operation” and its broader cultural context in terms of legitimization strategies of the communist rule, see: Petr Šámal, “Znárodněný klasik. Jiráskovská akce jako prostředek legitimizace komunistické vlády,” in Zrození mýtu. Dva životy husitské epochy. K poctě Petra Čorneje, ed. by Robert Novotny and Petr Šámal (Prague/Litomyšl: Paseka, 2011), 457−72457-72.
43{ }^{43} Ibid., 468-69.
44{ }^{44} Cf. Joanna Królak, Hus na trybunie: Tradycje narodove w czeskiej powieści historycznej okresu realizmu socrealisticznego (Warsaw: ISZPUW, 2004); Maciej Górny, Między Marksem a Palackým. Historiografia w komunistycznej Czechoslowacji (Warsaw: Trio, 2001), esp., 25-31. ↩︎

a model for Stalinist historians for criticizing the traditions of domestic bourgeois historiography for instance in a current anticosmopolitist campaign. 45{ }^{45}

Less overwhelming but not without impact was Nejedlý’s attempt to formulate tasks for the “new philosophy” in the peoples" republic. In a lecture at the Philosophical Union in January 1946, reworked and published only in 1950, he came up with harsh criticism of the traditional Czech “scholastic philosophy” (školská filosofie) that he considered isolated from real life and mere imitation of philosophical thinking in other countries. 46{ }^{46} Most of these influences were allegedly of reactionary nature and among them he enumerated Kant, Herbart, Nietzsche, Driesch, and Husserl. Nejedlý’s postwar dismissal of German philosophy and idealism was in striking contrast to some of his earlier writings that mirrored his pre-World-War-I inclination to hermeneutics and neo-Kantian methodology in human science. 47{ }^{47}

In order to overcome the putative reactionarism and scholasticism of Czech philosophy, Nejedlý suggested the creation of a new national philosophy based on completely different grounds that strikingly recalled his general concept of national history. The new philosophy had to be recreated on the basis of principles such as folksiness, democratism, and progressivism. These values were epitomized by progressive figures such as Jan Hus, Petr Chelčický, František Palacký, or the greatest nineteenth-century Czech natural scientist Jan Evangelista Purkyně. 48{ }^{48} Despite criticism from academic philosophers back in 1946, Nejedlý’s conceptualization of Czech philosophy proved to be rather successful. Most of the philosophical historiography turned its focus from “professional” philosophers to much broader “philosophical thought” in Czech history. Such disciplinary populism was later

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45{ }^{45} [Josef Macek, et. al.], Proti kosmopolitanismu ve výkladu našich národních dějin (Prague: Nakl. ČSAV, 1953). Cf. Górny, Przede wszystkim ma być naród, esp., 247-59.
46{ }^{46} Zdeněk Nejedlý, “Slovo o české filosofii,” Var no. 1 (19 March 1950): 1-16.
47{ }^{47} See esp. Zdeněk Nejedlý, Nietzscheova tragédie (Prague: Bedřich Bělohlávek, 1926), id., Richard Wagner, vol. 1, Richard Wagner romantik, 1813-1848 (Prague: Melantrich, 1916).
48{ }^{48} Nejedlý, “Slovo o české filosofii.” ↩︎

rebuked by young radical Marxist philosophers in the second half of the 1950 s.

Nejedlý, a relatively weak player in intra-party politics, was surely not the creator let alone the main driving force of the CPCz’s national Stalinist cultural policy. But he was one of its symbolic figures, its spokesperson, and doctrinaire. He would have achieved little if his activity had not have been complemented by the involvement of other powerful party decision-makers such as Václav Kopecký, Jiří Hendrych, Ladislav Štoll, who were seconded by influential artists and critics such as Vítězslav Nezval or Jiří Taufer. This group appropriated a position defending the cultural continuity between socialist revolution and the previous national culture. Such synthesis counterbalanced radical Bolshevik or Proletkult projects within the ideological apparatus of the Party, which advocated for a complete break with pre-1945 traditions and aimed at a proletarian cultural revolution. 49{ }^{49}

The history of national literature and the definition of progressive heritage became a cultural battlefield across the entire Sovietized Eastern Europe. The Zhdanovian understanding of socialist realism demanded to purge modern literary history of all possible avantgarde and nonconformist artists, who usually formed the backbone of the radical leftist culture in the interwar period. In Czechoslovakia, the highest authority of Stalinist literary life was Ladislav Štoll (19021981), the rector of the Party-political college. He provided a biding interpretation of socialist poetry in his notorious keynote speech at the 1950 plenary session on poetry of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers. He denounced the entire interwar Czechoslovak avant-garde, including many procommunist and left-wing poets and theoreticians such as František Halas, Josef Hora, Jaroslav Seifert, or Karel Teige. In contrast to the supposedly decadent and formalist art, he put forward the example of poet and political journalist Stanislav Kostka Neumann. The latter had formerly been an anarchist, who, unlike other fellowminded colleagues, fully endorsed Stalinist policies including the show trials of the 1930s, while publicly endorsing the official Soviet artis-

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49{ }^{49} For the political and power background of cultural politics during the Stalinist era, see Jiří Knapík, Únor a kultura. Sovětizace české kultury 19481950 (Prague: Libri, 2004), and Kusák, Kultura a politika. ↩︎

tic doctrine. 50{ }^{50} Štoll belonged to the most powerful group of communist cultural politicians headed by the minister of propaganda, Václav Kopecký. In contrast, Nejedlý and to some extent Kopecký himself extolled more “tolerant” and broader definitions of socialist realism. 51{ }^{51}

Such a “traditionalist” and relatively moderate approach to cultural policies allowed for the preservation of connections with the bulk of nineteenth-century national revivalist and realist art. Paradoxically, it also enabled occasional references to the interwar avant-garde. For some of its representatives, such as Nezval, this connection alone was a compromise worth of the effort and the dangers that the involvement in the highest echelons of the Party presupposed. 52{ }^{52} In general, however, the partial-cultural-continuity doctrine stood in contrast to the radical Sovietization policies of the CPCz leadership in other areas of life such as collectivization, political Gleichschaltung, sweeping nationalization and centralization of the economy, or ruthless atheization of the society.

Whereas for many the partial-continuity theses was a mere strategic position, for Nejedlý it meant much more. Not all of his interventions were as successful as his engagement with Jirásek’s work and not all historical constructions proved flexible enough to stand the challenges of the revolutionary times. Throughout his life, Nejedlý felt a strong emotional tie and intellectual debt to his teacher Masaryk. He therefore tried hard to preserve at least a part of Masaryk’s legacy in the first postwar decade. In a brochure published in 1950 by the Ministry of Information, Nejedlý distinguished between two phases in Masaryk’s life and thought. During the first, Masaryk, in spite of his

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50{ }^{50} Besides S. K. Neumann, Štoll extolled also the gifted poet Jiří Wolker (1900-1924) who died young of tuberculosis and who is considered the main Czech representative of modernist proletarian poetry. See Ladislav Štoll, Třicet let bojů za českou socialistickou poezii (Prague: Orbis, 1950). Cf. Michal Bauer: Souvislosti labyrintu: Kodifikace ideologicko-estetické normy v české literatuře 50. let 20. století (Prague: Akropolis, 2009).
51{ }^{51} For an analysis of the literary criticism debates about the role of national literary traditions, see Petr Šámal, “Cesta otevřená. Hledání socialistické literatury v kritice padesátých let,” in Z dějin českého myšlení o literatuře 19481958, vol. 2 (Prague: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2002), 583-609.
52{ }^{52} Cf. Milan Drápala, “Iluze jako osud. K vývoji politických postojů Vítězslava Nezvala,” Soudobé dějiny vol. 3 (1996): 175-218. ↩︎

idealist humanistic and thus antirevolutionary worldview, played a predominantly positive role as a ruthless critic of the late bourgeois Czech society, of its nationalist phantasies and antisemitic myths. Last but not least, he was an unwavering opponent of Austrian imperialism. The fatal change came in 1917, as Masaryk, according to Nejedlý, failed to understand the world-historical meaning of the Bolshevik revolution and decided to go against it. October 1917 was a “watershed that ends the previous epoch and announces the new one, the age of socialism. A watershed that not only cuts history, but also the lives of individuals … and it also split the life and work of T. G. Masaryk.” 53{ }^{53} Nejedlý admitted that after the founding of the republic, Masaryk only served as a quasi-humanist legitimation for the bourgeois class rule and grew increasingly isolated.

However, if the partial-continuity-theses might have worked in selected areas of art and older historical traditions, Masaryk’s political legacy was a different matter. Soon there would be no leeway for distinguishing positive and negative phases of his life or his achievements. In an effort to break with the Masaryk myth within the broader strata of the population, Nejedlý was marginalized and the radical left unleashed an all-out attack on the failures of “Masarykism” from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint. One of the actors involved in this campaign was the young Marxist philosopher, Karel Kosík.

Kosík in the Limelight:

From Radical Democracy to Democratic Socialism

Though Nejedlý’s vision of the communist national heritage served as the basis for mass historical propaganda after February 1948, it did not resonate with young Marxist intellectuals and activists, who worked in the party apparatus, labor unions, educational institutions, or the editorial staff of the daily Rudé právo and the cultural weekly of the Party, Tvorba. They had much more radical ideas about rebuilding Czech and Czechoslovak culture through revolutionary change inspired by the Soviet model, which had been augmented by Stalin’s thesis about

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53{ }^{53} Zdeněk Nejedlý, T. G. Masaryk ve vývoji české společnosti a čs. státu (Prague: Min. informací a osvěty, 1950), 8. ↩︎

the “sharpening of class struggle” after the victory of the revolution. They had a very different vision of the future than the older generation represented by Nejedlý and Štoll, and often commented on the work of the “old codger” (dědek) Nejedlý with irony and sarcasm. The radicals despised his high esteem of Czech bourgeois culture as much as his intuitive psychological approach to history which neither corresponded to the historical materialist conception of history nor was it dialectical. Efforts to reform Nejedlý’s historical conception took place in internal and informal debates and were introduced through faint suggestions, political journalism, or collections of sources rather than by open confrontation. The main reason was radical leftists" distrust of the Party leadership in the cultural sphere. Several instances confirmed such reservations. First was the ousting of Arnošt Kolman, the teacher and patron of the young radicals, to the Soviet Union in 1948. In the fall of the same year, after the Party announced the so-called sharp course against reaction, they appeared to be vindicated and on the rise to power. However, another assault against them came, which had direct impact on some of their positions in the Party apparatus and some journals: the scandal of the so-called anti-Party pamphlet in the summer of 1949, which targeted Vítězslav Nezval. 54{ }^{54} Finally, the leftist radicals lost most of their power-political mainstays with the crackdown against the so-called second center around the Party secretary general Rudolf Slánský in 1951-1952 and the subsequent purge of the “sectarian elements” in cultural politics. This campaign brought an end to the militant communist cultural weekly Tvorba and sidelined the most important radical leftist figures in cultural politics such as Gustav Bareš and Pavel Reiman.

In this context, the young radicals could not afford to challenge Nejedlý directly. Nevertheless, the two fundamental historical periods which formed the backbone of Nejedlý’s historical interpretation, fifteenth-century Hussitism and the nineteenth-century “national rebirth,” became targets of radical leftist revisionism. A reconsideration of Hussitism took on a radical mantle in the books of medievalist Josef Macek. He stressed the role of the most radical social groups such as chiliasts and Adamites in the “Hussite revolutionary fight.” Macek did

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54{ }^{54} Knapík, Únor a kultura, 176-244. ↩︎

not intent to question Nejedlý’s fundamental narrative though. On the contrary, he claimed allegiance to both Nejedlý and Jirásek. 55{ }^{55}

Nejedlý’s narrative was more directly revised in terms of the political and ideological legacy of nineteenth-century Czech nationalism. The most important figure in this respect was Karel Kosík who begun to publish his first contributions to the history of radical democrats in Bohemian lands immediately after February 1948. 56{ }^{56} Kosík followed Lenin’s theory of two cultures in one nation, progressive and reactionary, yet unlike Nejedlý, he was much more radical in applying the class concept to history. He condemned the esteemed leaders of the Czech liberal national movement of 1848, František Palacký and Karel Havlíček, as the ideologues of bourgeoisie and the creators of the alliance with the nobility and the monarchy. He emphasized the importance of radical democrats such as Josef Václav Frič, Emanuel Arnold, or Karel Sabina, who were much less influential in the Czech case than their counterparts in the Polish or Russian cases. For Kosík, these personalities represented the direct predecessors of the socialist and the workers’ movement. The revision of the liberal democratic

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55{ }^{55} Josef Macek, Husitské revolučni hnutí (Prague: Rovnost, 1951). Cf. Macek’s political and academic biography: Bohumil Jiroušek, Josef Macek: mezi historii a politikou (Prague: VCDV, 2004), esp., 32-49. Similarly, philosopher Milan Machovec provided a radical interpretation of Jan Hus’s teachings as an explicit revolutionary program and presage of communist utopianism, but his historical instrumentarium was explicitly drawing from Nejedlý and Jirásek, see Milan Machovec, Husovo učení a význam v tradici českého národa (Prague: Nakl. ČSAV, 1953). It was only at the beginning of the 1960s that the radical Marxist challenge to Nejedlý’s portrayal of the Hussite period by Robert Kalivoda appeared: Robert Kalivoda, Husitská ideologie (Prague: Nakl. ČSAV, 1961). Yet, for Kalivoda, portraying the Hussite revolution as one of the first early-bourgeois revolutions in Europe meant less engaging with Nejedlý. Kalivoda polemicized above all with the entire preceding bourgeois Hussite historiography, with Engels’s conceptualization of German peasant wars as well as with other Czech Marxist historians of Hussitims, such as Josef Macek and František Graus. Cf. Martin Nodl, “Kontinuita a diskontinuita husitologického bádání 50. a počátků 60 . let 20. století,” in id., Déjepisectvi mezi vědou a politikou. Uvahy o historiografii 19. a 20. Stoleti (Brno: CDK, 2007), 105-22.
56{ }^{56} Karel Kosík, "Třídní boje v české revoluci 1848,"Tvorba vol. 17 no. 35 (1948): 693 and vol. 17 no. 36 (1948): 716. ↩︎

and national Stalinist interpretation of the nineteenth century therefore consisted in repudiating the “utmost reactionary” Austro-Slavic, activist, and liberal democratic political line of Palacký in favor of its “progressive antithesis,” that is, the radical democrats, however unsuccessful they had been in their own time in terms of political mobilization at home or in exile. Another important motive was the internationalist activity of the radical democrats and their close connection to Russian radical democracy, especially to Herzen, which in Kosík’s eyes prefigured the internationalist and pro-Soviet orientation of progressive Czech and Czechoslovak politics in the twentieth century. 57{ }^{57}

In his interpretation alternative to Nejedlý’s traditionalism, Kosík was influenced by Czech Marxist journalism and historical writings from the 1920s and 1930s, when the Communist Party’s cultural organs were under the control of the most radical young leftist generation challenging the ideological roots of Czechoslovak republic and the Masaryk’s national-political project. Symptomatic from this point of view were the writings of Jan Šverma, close ally of Klement Gottwald, who in the essay Czech Question in Marxist Light (1933) challenged Masaryk’s conceptions of the ideal of humanism as the basic element of Czech national history. Instead, Šverma portrayed historical development as a reflection of class struggle. 58{ }^{58} Inspired by him and other Marxist authors, some of whom could not be quoted anymore as they were already anathema for the regime (Záviš Kalandra, Jan Slavík), Kosík rejected Nejedlý’s inversion of Masaryk’s original idea of humanism into his peculiar vision of folksiness, progressiveness, and popular democratism as unifying factors of progressive forces in Czech history. Kosík replaced it with the central motive of revolution and “revolutionary liberation struggle” that formed the backbone of modern progressive Czech historical development. Thus, he abandoned the traditional notion of national “rebirth” or "awak-

[1]

57{ }^{57} Ibid., see also Karel Kosík, “K některým otázkám národně osvobozeneckého boje českého lidu v XIX. století,” Nová Mysl vol. 7 no. 1, (1954): 3752, vol. 7 no. 2, (1954): 162-82.; Karel Kosík, ed., Češti radikální demokraté: výbor politických statí (Prague: SNPL, 1953).
58{ }^{58} Jan Šverma, Česká otázka ve světle marxismu (Prague: K. Borecký, 1933); see also Pavel Reiman and Gustav Bareš, eds., O Rakousku a české otázce (Prague: K. Borecký, 1933). ↩︎

ing" still used by Nejedlý, preferring instead the category of "nationalliberation struggle."59

The reconsideration of nineteenth-century political traditions in Bohemia led Kosík to lambast “Masarykian legends” and misconceptions that, in his view, heavily influenced Czech philosophical and historical thinking and endured in the minds of many fellow Marxists. As a radical adherent to the cultural revolution in the minds and hearts of people, Kosík took part in the anti-Masaryk campaign organized by the Party culminating in 1953 and 1954. 60{ }^{60} Somewhat paradoxically a radical Stalinist “reckoning” with Masaryk’s political and intellectual legacy came relatively late and marked the beginning of the de-Stalinization period in Czechoslovakia. It completed a lengthy process of communist reevaluation of Masaryk from a partly progressive figure to which communists themselves claimed allegiance, to seeing him as a leading representative of bourgeois reaction and world counterrevolution.

Kosík’s major contribution to the “demystification” of Masaryk came out in a thematic issue of the official philosophical journal in summer 1954. 61{ }^{61} He took advantage of the ideological offensive called for at the Party 10th Congress in June the same year. He launched a sweeping criticism of Masarykism as a bourgeois reactionary ideology and of its remnants in Czech intellectual life. His outraged article was not a direct attack against Nejedlý or any other communist politician who had professed a close relationship to Masaryk few years ago. None of them was named. Yet Kosík was clearly aiming at Nejedlý too when he pointed out that after 1945 and even more after 1948 any positive evaluation of Masaryk’s political views, historical role, or philosophi-

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59{ }^{59} Cf. Petr Šámal, ““Česká otázka” ve světle stalinismu.” For an account stressing not just the discontinuities, but also what connected Kosík with Nejedlý, see Kristina Andělová and Jan Mareš, “Hledání české radikální demokracie: Karel Kosík a filozofie (českých) dějin,” Dějiny - teorie - kritika, vol. 11, no. 2 (2014): 183-211.
60{ }^{60} See, for example, Jan Pachta, Pravda o T. G. Masarykovi (Prague: Orbis, 1953); Václav Král, O Masarykové a Benešově kontrarevoluční protisovětské politice (Prague: SNPL, 1953); Václav Král, ed., Dokumenty o protilidové a protinárodní politice TGM (Prague: Orbis, 1953); Dragoslav Sleǰ̌ka, “Masarykovská lžihumanita - ideologický nástroj buržoasní reakce,” Filosofický časopis vol. 2, no. 3 (1954): 215-29.
61{ }^{61} Karel Kosík, “O sociálních kořenech a filozofické podstatě masarykismu,” Filosofický časopis vol. 2, no. 3 (1954): 196-214. ↩︎

cal stance were unacceptable forms of “theoretical conciliation” and “renunciation of proletarian partisanship.” Through a substitute target of criticism-Kosik’s generational peer and Nejedlý’s follower, philosopher Milan Machovec-Kosik demolished Nejedlý’s interpretation of Masaryk. The most confused and dangerous of all misleading theories about Masarykism, Kosik pointed out, was the theory about “two phases” in Masaryk’s development and about the “relative progressiveness of Masaryk’s worldview and political stance in the 1880s and the 1890s”-the main ideas that Nejedlý presented in his 1950 brochure. This “Proudhonist view” of Masaryk stressed his relatively progressive role in fighting antisemitism, nationalist mythology, or his support for universal enfranchisement. But it did not recognize, Kosik maintained, the “parasite-opportunist stance of bourgeois politicians, who only temporarily take a ride with the healthy streams of science and society in order to be able to gain capital for their own goals, that is, for the salvation of capitalism.” 62{ }^{62}

In Kosik’s rendition, the analysis of the “social roots and philosophical essence” of Masarykism pointed to its “reactionary character” from the very beginning, in the 1880s. At that time the adaptability of Masaryk’s thought, his illusionary democratism, his seeming interest in social question, all this made Masarykism a convenient bourgeois instrument of the enslavement of the masses. Confined to a rather smaller circle of bourgeois intelligentsia before the Great War, it became, after 1918, the republic’s bourgeois mainstream, the “ideology and politics of Czech bourgeois nationalist supremacy over Slovaks and other nations, the ideology, and politics of vassal dependency on Western powers, the ideology and politics of exploitation of the working people disguised by phrases about love and humanity.” This ideology, Kosik maintained, was destroyed in the 1938 Munich crisis but it rose up again after 1945 in defense of the “counter-revolutionary ideology of democratic socialism” represented by right-wing social democrats, proving once again its reactionary nature. 63{ }^{63}

By the mid-1950s, times were changing abruptly and the unfolding de-Stalinization brought about the life-changing wave of disillusion for the “generation of blue shirts” that Kosik belonged to. This

[1]

62{ }^{62} Ibid., 200.
63{ }^{63} Ibid., 205. ↩︎

resulted in a shift in political identity among the younger radical Marxist intellectuals, who started to turn their radical critique from the bourgeois past and its culture to the current state socialist establishment. At that time, the Czechoslovak communist cultural policy landscape, always divided into several conflicting factions, started to reorganize itself into two, loosely connected and heterogeneous groups. On the one hand, there were the Party ideologues who were originally of radical (Jiří Hájek, Jiří Hendrych) or “moderate” (Ladislav Štoll, Jiří Taufer) provenance. They tried to slow down any independent cultural movements that were capitalizing on the nascent de-Stalinization ethos. On the other hand, there were the heirs of the former interwar avant-garde, led by the charismatic poet Vítězslav Nezval, along with writers gathering around the newly founded Literární noviny. They were joined by the emerging literary generation, gathered a bit later around the journal Květen (Miroslav Červenka, Miroslav Holub, M. Florian, Milan Kundera, Jiří Šotola). The latter tried to initiate a partial renewal of the legacy of the interwar avant-garde and to trigger a loosening of restrictions, the improvement of the independence of culture from direct political oversight, and a reevaluation of socialist realism. In time, this critical current amplified its criticisms of Party policies and the most flagrant blunders of Stalinism in culture. It found expression in audacious speeches of several Czech and Slovak writers, such as František Hrubín, Dominik Tatarka and Jaroslav Seifert, at the Second Congress of the Czechoslovak writers in April 1956. 64{ }^{64}

Kosík sympathized with the latter group and soon became one of its public icons. He took part in one of the most symptomatic public debates in 1956 regarding the relationship between ideology and science, which appeared on the pages of Literární noviny. Ivan Sviták, a colleague of Kosík, started the debate with an article castigating the state of social sciences in Czechoslovakia. That was paradoxical in Sviták’s view, given the fact that the main scientific contribution of Marx

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64{ }^{64} See Kusák, Kultura a politika, 394-95 and Petr Šámal, “Cesta otevřená.” For a detailed analysis of the artistic and political development of the group around the journal Květen, see Ivo Fencl, Vize a iluze skupiny Květen (Prague: Pražská imaginace, 1993). For the writers" congress proceedings, see Michal Bauer, ed., II. sjezd Svazu československých spisovatelů: 22. -29.4.1956 (Prague: Akropolis, 2011). ↩︎

and Lenin consisted in their method of analyzing social phenomena. He called for a renewal of this fundamental quality of Marxist social theory and for abandoning the political oversight over philosophy premised on the idea that the “most highly ranked person in the Party is always most highly right.” 65{ }^{65}

Kosik joined the discussion on the relationship between ideology and science, a problem that will prominently figure in his work for many years to come. The difference between ideology and science was supposed to consist in the relationship between the system of categories of a given thought and reality. “Ideology sees categories, ideas, thoughts as something autonomous, self-sufficient, absolute, whereas for Marxist theory categories and ideas are expressions of reality, because they express “forms of being or conditions of existence” of reality itself.” Consequently, Kosik thought that one of the main tasks of Marxism was to discover why and how dogmatic thought under Stalin came into being. 66{ }^{66} For both authors, true Marxism was identical with science and, therefore, incompatible with ideology. Science as an objective discovery of reality and ideology as a subjectivist system and political instrument were, in their view, two distinct ways of thinking and acting. Both philosophers were subsequently harshly criticized for their “revisionist views” by the highest echelons of the Party. At this time tough, it did not mean an immediate danger to their academic position. 67{ }^{67}

The first serious conflict with the Party establishment and his attachment to the concept of autonomous scientific and cultural creation made Kosik less straightforward in his political criticism of nine-teenth-century liberal democrats. Yet, the thrust of his commentary on Nejedlý remained. The late 1950s saw Kosik completing in a way his

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65{ }^{65} Ivan Sviták, “Některé příčiny zaostávání teorie,” Literární noviny vol. 5, no. 16 (1956): 5.
66{ }^{66} Karel Kosík, “Hegel a naše doba,” Literární noviny vol. 5, no. 48 (1956): 3.
67{ }^{67} For a broader picture of the Czech Marxist philosophy of the time, see, e.g., Nikolaus Lobkowicz, Marxismus-Leninismus in der ČSR. Die tschechoslowakische Philosophie seit 1945 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1962), Nikolaus Lobkowicz, Česká filosofie ve 20. století. Směry, osobností, problémy (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 1994). See also the periodization of the process of de-Stalinization of Czechoslovak science suggested by Antonín Kostlán, “Věda v Československu v letech 1953-1963: Zamyšlení nad současným stavem bádání a jeho možnostmi,” in Věda v Československu v letech 1953-1963 , ed. by Hana Barvíková (Prague: Archív AV ČR-Agenda, 2000), 567-88. ↩︎

mostly implicit but steady, decade-long polemic with Nejedlý in two major aspects: the understanding of modern Czech history, especially the period of the “national revival,” and the conceptual approach to the history of philosophy. At the same time, in 1958, Nejedlý himself was far from being the main target of Kosik’s philosophical and political critique. As previously in the case of Masarykism, Kosík did not feel the need to fight primarily against Nejedlý per se as rather against the conscious as well as unconscious followers of Nejedlý’s (in fact, Masarykian in its origins) “historical idealism” clothed in Marxist vocabulary. The other major vices of current would-be Marxist thought that Kosík strove to uproot were “vulgar economism,” which degraded Marxism merely to a method of identifying external preconditions of certain culture or philosophy, and “abstract doctrinairism,” which was content with finding the simplest political or ideological label for any historical phenomenon. 68{ }^{68}

In the realm of political traditions, Kosík strove to put more stress on his methodological perspective applied to correct Marxist interpretations of the modern Czech national movement. He kept the notion of “national-liberation struggle” but connected it to the idea of historical progress and revolution. This way, it was an integral part of the development of European democracy and the “world’s revolutionary front.” This universalizing Marxist historical perspective naturally continued his criticism of the prevailing idealist, Masarykian bourgeois interpretation of Czech national history, which was simultaneously a substitute for the inherent critique of Nejedlý’s national Stalinist interpretation.

Kosík summarized several years of studies and analyses in his major book on Czech Radical Democracy in 1958. Alexej Kusák characterized the work as a “bible of Czech communist leftist radicalism.” 69{ }^{69} It seems however that it was more the bible of new Czech Marxist history of ideas, approached from a historical materialist and dialectical point of view, or in the contemporaneous vocabulary “a history of philosophy as philosophy.” Kosík stuck to most of his previous motives but applied

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68{ }^{68} Karel Kosík, “Dějiny filosofie jako filosofie,” in Jiřina Popelová and Karel Kosík, eds., Filosofie v dějinách českého národa (Protokol celostátní konference o dějinách české filozofie v Liblicích ve dnech 14.-17. dubna 1958) (Prague: Nakl. ČSAV, 1958), 9-24.
69{ }^{69} Kusák, Kultura a politika, 269. ↩︎

a more “hermeneutical” approach in an effort to understand the social and political activities of the bourgeois democrats from their own class perspective. Kosik examined radical democracy as a specific political and intellectual stream. Unlike in his previous writings, he tried hard to put its evolution into context and to confront it with other ideological and political traditions of the time that, in order to be a credible partner to radical democrats, had to be conceived in their own right. Importantly, he also departed from the previously privileged connection of Czech radical democrats to their Russian counterparts and stressed radical democracy as a universal European phenomenon. His emphasis on the European rather than East European historical context for explaining the “Czech question” and thus the need to understand the current fate of progressive politics in the context of world historical developments already anticipated his political journalism during the 1968 Prague Spring. 70{ }^{70}

Yet in order to understand Kosik as the future “philosopher of praxis,” his turn to the national question in 1968 and his reevaluation of Palacký, Havliček and Masaryk, we have to turn to another, perhaps even more consequential area of his thought, that is the epistemological questions in Marxism. It was a prominent topic in the works of other “Marxist revisionist” thinkers in East Central Europe of the time such as the Pole Leszek Kołakowski or the Czech Ladislav Tondl. 71{ }^{71} Kosik’s thinking in this realm followed two major lines, the reconsideration of the history-of-philosophy approach and the overcoming of Stalinist “vulgar economism” in current Marxist social theory.

The national history of philosophy had been a long-debated subject among Czech Marxist philosophers, culminating in a conference on “Philosophy in the History of the Czech Nation” held in April 1958 in the Academy-owned chateau in Liblice near Mělník. The keynote speech by Kosik marked an important turning point from the prevalent conception of the history of philosophy constructed along Nejedlý’s line, which demanded that the attention of historians of philosophy be directed primarily at the “progressive figures” of Czech science, culture, and politics rather than at “scholastic philosophy.” In contrast,

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70{ }^{70} Karel Kosík, Českà radikální demokracie: příspěvek kk dějinám názorových sporů v české společnosti 19. Stoleti (Prague: SNPL, 1958).
71{ }^{71} Cf. Kopeček, Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce. ↩︎

Kosik defended a narrow definition of philosophy and the historiography of philosophy as an autonomous field with a specific methodology and perspective. 72{ }^{72}

Against the attempts to offer an abstract definition of progressive and reactionary elements in the past and against similarly flattening dogmatism, which saw philosophy merely as the search for the simplest class-political or ideological labels, Kosik saw nonsimplified, full-blooded Marxism as the objective knowledge of reality. It was the "reproduction of this reality as a concrete totality that is an evolving unity of essential assessments. 773{ }^{773} Every phenomenon, whether spiritual or material in nature, must be understood and elucidated using its categorization in a specific historical totality, in which it exists and evolves. In Kosik’s view, Marxism worth of its name should provide an analysis of a work of philosophy not just based on the text alone. It must be placed in a given social context, but not as a representative of or derivative from the contemporary economic-social conditions: "Philosophy can influence an entire epoch; it can enter all its spheres and become the philosophy of an epoch only because it is a concentrated intellectual expression of the epoch itself. Philosophy is a conscious intellectual reproduction of the basic problems of its time, which grow out of the real structure of the society and in specific forms influence culture, science, and everyday life. 774{ }^{774} This basic generative principle of the Marxist approach to the past had its origin, in Kosik’s view, in Hegel’s understanding of the Zeitgeist which-on an idealistic basis-expressed the unity and internal coherence of different forms of social consciousness. In Marx, it is then scientifically explained through an analysis of social being as the summary of different forms of social consciousness including political opinions, philosophical creed, artistic production, moral principles, prejudices etc., which interconnect specific social-historical consciousness as a whole. 75{ }^{75}

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72{ }^{72} Kosik, “Dějiny filosofie jako filosofie.”
73{ }^{73} Ibid., 13.
74{ }^{74} Ibid., 18.
75{ }^{75} In spite of significant methodological, generational, and intellectual ties, Kosik spoke up against Kołakowski and indirectly against the epistemology of the nascent “Warsaw school of history of ideas,” which, in his view, went too far in reducing the history of philosophy to a history of worldviews. Cf. Josef Zumr, “Kosíkovo pojetí dějin českého myšlení 19. století.” in Marek Hrubec, Miroslav Pauza, Josef Zumr, et. al., Myslitel Karel Kosik (Prague: Filosofia, 2011), 21-32. ↩︎

Kosík highly appreciated Hegel’s impact in epistemology. Hegel’s dialectics and categories of logic inspired him in his criticism of the prevailing Stalinist interpretation of Marx’s theory of class as well as of the notion of class as understood in Western sociology. It was Hegel’s merit, Kosík wrote, that he conceived of Being as a process, a dialectics of the mediated and the immediate. Whereas Hegel elaborated his theory in terms of logic of notions, Marx redefined it as material process taking the shape of mediation between things and objective reality. Nevertheless, Hegel’s scheme of the relationship between the general (abstract) and the singular (concrete) as an organic relationship was preserved. Hence, any real cognition, especially the Marxist one, has to follow the dialectics of the abstract and the concrete, wrote Kosík in his 1958 article that anticipated his concept of the “dialectics of the concrete” elaborated a few years later. The general Marxist categories such as “class,” “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” etc. are abstract designations serving as orientation points for a research that, on the basis of concrete historical contextualization, has to convey these notions as “concrete abstractions” of the given notion. Only in this way could the positivist empiricism as well as the mechanistic collection of empirical facts under the heading of unchangeable notions, characteristic of Stalinist Marxism, be overcome. After such an exposition, Kosík moved on to a general critique of “vulgar materialist” (read Stalinist) understanding of Marxism. The latter reduced it to a theory of the primary role of the economic factor, and therefore was a crude misinterpretation of the complexity of Marx’s teachings. Economy in Marx’s texts did not mean just a distribution of wealth in the society, but more generally, the entire social-economic structure of the given historical epoch. Hence, the notion of “class” that, for instance, Weber understood in strictly economic terms, meant for Marx a “societal totality of various aspects and designations.” Thus, true class analysis means a reproduction of reality as a dialectic unity of economy, politics, social, and intellectual life determined by the structure of society. 76{ }^{76}

Such conceptual framework as well the emphasis on Hegel’s legacy hint at Kosík’s reading of Georg Lukács, especially his early work History and Class Consciousness. Kosík did not admit to this source

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76{ }^{76} Karel Kosík, “Třidy a reálná struktura skutečnosti,” Filosofický časopis vol. 6 no. 5 (1958): 721-34 ↩︎

of inspiration due to Lukács’s contemporary reputation as an archrevisionist. 77{ }^{77} According to Sviták’s testimony though, the copy of the German original of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, stolen from the University Library in Prague, had circulated in the mid-1950s at the Institute of Philosophy, and influenced not only Kosík but also many of the Institute’s younger scholars. 78{ }^{78}

His caution notwithstanding, Kosík along with Sviták, Kalivoda, Tondl, and a few others became targets of the antirevisionist Party campaign in 1958. Symptomatically, it did not bring much harm to most of the criticized intellectuals, which was a great difference from the situation just a few years ago. In Kosík’s case, it only enhanced his stature as maverick Marxist philosopher, which echoed positively in the broader cultural sphere and made him into one of the icons of intellectual rebellion and the 1960s Czechoslovak reform communist movement. If he is sometimes seen as the unofficial philosopher of the reform movement and of the Prague Spring, we have to bear in mind that this was so in two different ways. Both of them did not fully correspond with the understanding of reform among its major political leaders. The first one is well-known and relates to his Marxist “philosophy of praxis” that he embarked on at the end of the 1950s and that resulted in his most famous work the Dialectics of the Concrete, published in 1963. 79{ }^{79}

Based on the renewed interest in the “philosophy of Man” or a Marxist anthropology also inspired by phenomenology and existentialism, Kosík embarked in this volume on a systematic Marxist reconsideration of the relationship between economic structure and human practice. The anthropological dimension in his treatise had clear counterparts in social ontology as well as epistemology. 80{ }^{80} Kosík’s elaborate and philosophically grounded justification of individual as well as collective activity aiming at reconstructing and humanizing the world and

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77{ }^{77} The Moscow-orchestrated propagandist campaign against revisionism in Marxist thought and communist practice took Lukács as an exemplary case.
78{ }^{78} Ivan Sviták, Devět životů (Prague: SAKKO, 1992), 113.
79{ }^{79} Karel Kosík, Dialektika konkrétního. Studie o problematice člověka a světa (Prague: Nakl. ČSAV, 1963). English edition: Dialectics of the Concrete. A Study on Problems of Man and World (Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel, 1976).
80{ }^{80} Cf. Ivan Landa, “Kosíkova dialektika konkrétního,” in Erazim Kohák and Jakub Trnka, eds., Hledání české filosofie (Prague: Filosofia, 2013), 231-59. ↩︎

the social environment was soon recognized as a ground-breaking philosophical treatise. More generally, it was understood as an emphatic intellectual support for the current Czechoslovak reform movement. It had been read and appropriated as a critical, yet constructive, Marxist philosophical standpoint by hundreds of reform communist intellectuals, artists, and Party activists. Such impact put the hawks in the Party leadership in a difficult position. Even if they understood the subversive potential of the book, due to its unexpected popularity in the cultural press and public discussions, they could hardly intervene ruthlessly against Kosik. The status of celebrity, even among philosophers, brings sometimes particular advantages. 81{ }^{81}

Yet the second way that turned Kosik into a (critical) philosopher of the Prague Spring, and which is less known, is his contribution to the discussion on the national question that along with “socialist democracy” formed the backbone of public political discourse in 1968/1969. Kosik stands as a symbol of both: the emancipatory pathos of the reform communist project of “socialism with a human face” delineating itself from capitalist liberal democracy as much as from Stalinist dictatorship; and, the restructured 1968 Czechoslovak (“national” cum grano salis) way to Socialism. In his effort to link up historically the project of the Prague Spring to Palacký and Masaryk as the originators of modern Czech “national program,” Kosik represented a broad and undefined “Czech national reform communist” stream within the Party.

The renewed interest in nation-building and nationalism studies in social and human sciences was palpable, in Czechoslovakia, as well as elsewhere in the Eastern bloc in the 1960s. 82{ }^{82} In contemporary Marx-ist-Leninist theory, the creation of the “socialist nation” was a priority. It should have had basically three stages derived from Lenin’s theory of nation-building: first, the phase of liquidation of the major antago-

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81{ }^{81} Jan Mervart, “Dialektika konkrétního v zrcadle sporů mezi aparátem ÚV KSČ a kulturní obci,” in Myslitel Karel Kosik, 55-77.
82{ }^{82} See, e.g., Jiří Kořalka, Co je národ? (Prague: Svoboda, 1969). Cf. also Michal Kopeček, “Historical Studies of Nation-Building and the Concept of Socialist Patriotism in East Central Europe 1956-1970,” in Pavel Kolář and Miloš Reznik, eds., Historische Nationsforschung im geteilten Europa 19451989 (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2012), 121-36. ↩︎

nisms within the nation following the socialist revolution; second, the further development of the socialist nations, resulting in the leveling of their development; and third, the final stage of confluence of nations leading ultimately to the world-wide communist society. On the basis of these assumptions, some Czech and Slovak Marxist theoreticians made an effort to restructure the Czechoslovakist idea into a “national political society” project based on autonomous development of two distinct nations connected by the principles of the Czechoslovak statehood and socialist patriotism. 83{ }^{83} These attempts were grounded in the assumption that the roots of inequality and national tension were mainly in the economic sphere, even though active socialist indoctrination and fight against the old bourgeois nationalist feelings remained important components of the socialist nation-building. 84{ }^{84}

The Marxist historical studies of nations and national movements further challenged the Stalinist neo-Romantic Czech historical masternarrative symbolized by Nejedlý and his Communists, the Heirs. The radical Marxist historical reconfiguration of national history and of the progressive traditions provided by thinkers such a Kosík or Kalivoda did not find a direct counterpart in the texts of their fellow Czechoslovak Marxist historians in most cases. 85{ }^{85} Nevertheless, historical studies in many ways followed a very similar line of inquiry. Marxist historians embraced a broadly conceived research of the national question

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83{ }^{83} See, e.g., Jan Šindelka, Národnostní otázka a socialismus (Prague: Svoboda, 1966); Erika Kadlecová, Socialistické vlastenectví (Prague: SNPL, 1957). Cf. Juraj Marušiak, Slovenská literatúra a moc v druhej polovici pät’desiatych rokov (Brno: Prius, 2001), 61-87.
84{ }^{84} For a longer-term perspective on this assumption that was at the heart of the Czechoslovak statehood and of the liberal as well as Marxist understanding of the Czechoslovak idea, see Vladimir Bakoš, Question of the Nation in Slovak Thought: Several Chapters on the National-Political Thought in Modern Slovakia (Bratislava: Veda, 1999); Carol Skalnik-Leff, The National Question in Czechoslovakia 1918-1987 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), esp., 236-40.
85{ }^{85} However much Kosik and Kalivoda shared the intention to revive Marxism as a viable epistemological position and philosophical approach and to apply it to historical analysis, they differed significantly in their interpretations of the current situation in the 1960s. See Jan Mervart and Kosík, Kalivoda, “Sviták a Pražské jaro 1968,” in Kohák and Trnka, ed., Hledání české filosofie, 195-211. ↩︎

and modern nation-building in the Bohemian lands and Slovakia. The most important and influential of these approaches became the theory of small-nations-building in European history by Miroslav Hroch. 86{ }^{86} His research had been supplemented by studies on the Czech-German relationship in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy as well as by a handful of works devoted to the national question within the Czech, Slovak, and all-Austrian workers movements and the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party. 87{ }^{87} These studies stressed the class antagonisms within the national movement while also applying a more sophisticated and differentiating view of the role and development of the national question within the labor movement in Bohemian lands and Austria. They elaborated more carefully on the mutual conditioning of the base and superstructure in Marxist terms. They portrayed the interplay of the economic-social conditions and the political, ideological and intellectual trajectories in nuanced and dialectical way working with very different methodological instrumentarium from Nejedlý and his generation.

Last but not least, the reformist Marxist historians drew on an alternative line of “progressive historical tradition” derived from or inspired by, to some extent, Kosik’s seminal work on Czech radical democrats. A red line going from the liberal nationalist democratization movement in the Vormärz era, through the radical democrats of 1848, the incipient workers movement in the 1860 s, to social democracy and its now reappreciated leader Bohumír Šmeral had been drawn

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86{ }^{86} Miroslav Hroch, Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Völkern Europas. Eine vergleichende Analyse zur gesellschaftlichen Schichtung der patriotischen Gruppen (Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philosophica et Historica, Monographia XXIV) (Prague: Charles University, 1968).
87{ }^{87} See, e.g., Jiří Kořalka, Severočéti socialisté v čele dělnického hnutí českých a rakouských zemí (Liberec: Severočeské nakladatelství, 1963); Jiří Kořalka, Všeněmecký svaz a česká otázka koncem 19. Stoleti (Prague: Nakl. ČSAV, 1963). Zdeněk Šolle, Socialistické dělnické hnutí a česká otázka 1848-1918 (Prague: Academia, 1969). See also a popularizing attempt at Marxist historical analysis of Czech nationalism in the nineteenth century by František Červinka, Český nacionalismus v XIX. století (Prague: Svobodné slovo, 1965). What is interesting from our point of view is C̆ervinka’s inspiration by both, Kosik and Nejedlý, even though in the latter’s case Červinka drew mostly on his interwar writings. Cf. also Josef Kočí and Jiří Kořalka, The History of the Habsburg Monarchy (Houston: Rise University Press 1966). ↩︎

in many important historical works. 88{ }^{88} The unmistakable comeback of the latter gained special importance as an expedient historical tradition for the Party historians at the Institute of Party History and similar institutions. In an effort to historically substantiate the Czechoslovak reform project, they constructed a specific line of radical democratic socialist tradition starting with Šmeral, through the popular front era of communist politics and antifascist resistance movements during World War II, and up to the beginnings of the “Czechoslovak revolution” in the mid-1940s. In this way, the Czechoslovak reform project in the 1960s was seen as the culmination of an alleged historical continuity of democratic socialist endeavors in Czechoslovak history. 89{ }^{89}

The tentative result of the 1960s Marxist historical studies in nation- and state-building as well as modern social and political history was a much more nuanced historical picture of national societies (Czech and Slovak, less so Bohemian German). It not only challenged the organicist view of Nejedlý and his followers, but it put aside the binary categories of progressive versus reactionary national culture, which were derived from Lenin and were still a part of the official Party propaganda and the ideological discourse. Similar results characterized also the other social sciences flourishing in the reformist period. The sociological research of the second half of the 1960s, for instance, was instrumental in providing arguments for the recognition of the variety of “interests” in socialist society as a fundamental motive of the reformist debates. The sociologists maintained that political analysis of social structure necessarily presupposed an analysis of the differentiation of interests among society’s social classes. 90{ }^{90} Consequently, the political process in socialist democracy should have been understood as an

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88{ }^{88} For the 1960s renascence of interest in “Šmeralism,” see, e.g., Kárník, Socialisté na rozcestí; Otto Urban, “Bohumír Šmeral a František Modráček jako představitelé dvou ideologických linií v české sociální demokracii před první světovou válkou,” Československý časopis historický vol. 11, no. 4 (1963): 432-44; Ján Mlynárík, “Dr. Bohumír Šmeral a slovenská národnostná otázka v počiatkoch komunistického hnutia,” Československý časopis historický vol. 15, no. 4 (1967): 653-66.
89{ }^{89} See Sommer, Angažované dôjepisectví, esp., 344-429.
90{ }^{90} See the representative collective work of the time: Pavel Machonin, et al., Československá společnost: sociologická analýza sociální stratifikace (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969); Cf. Michael Voříšek, The Reform Generation: 1960s" Czechoslovak Sociology from a Comparative Perspective (Prague: Kalich, 2012). ↩︎

assertion of interests of one social group against the interests of other groups, a topic that became a part of open political discussion in 1968.

The political representation of the different social interests (i.e., socialist democracy) and the national question (i.e., the future of the Czechoslovakist project) became the two towering questions of the political process of the Prague Spring. 91{ }^{91} The earlier hope cherished by the Party ideologues and some Marxist theorists that, along with the economic progress, Slovak national sentiments would start to merge with the morally and politically higher socialist patriotism based on the Czechoslovak statehood, proved to be of no avail. In 1968, Slovak self-determination and the federalization of the country’s political and administrative system became one of the major Prague Spring concerns, and the effort to save the Czechoslovakist project with the help of socialist patriotism capitulated vis-à-vis deeply ingrained national feelings of the majority population in both parts of the state. Nevertheless, the challenge to the Romantic understanding of national history as contrasted with modern Marxist, class-based historical portrayals in a broader Central European or European perspective reached its climax during these years. 92{ }^{92}

The political debate of the period gave birth to a tentative and only vaguely formulated “civic socialist” approach to the potential Czechoslovak “political nation-building.” It involved a correlation of class and cultural analysis in the notion of the “political nation.” It also comprised the reconsideration of the relationship between two distinct but mutually interconnected national societies, Czech and Slovak. Such reappraisal was tied to the project-in broad outline rather than in elaborated detail-of “socialist pluralism.” The latter was a model envisaging the re-introduction of the fundamental civic liberties of rep-

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91{ }^{91} For an analysis of the uneven evolution of the reformist project throughout the 1960s challenging the engrained common-place that the Czech reformists strove, above all, for democratization, whereas Slovaks for federalization, see Jan Mervat, Naděje a iluze. Čeští a slovenští spisovatelé v reformním hnutí 60. Let (Brno: Host, 2011).
92{ }^{92} See, e.g., the popularizing collective work of leading Czech historians trying to deconstruct some of the most engrained nationalist historical myths: František Graus, ed., Naše živá i mrtvá minulost. 8 eseji o českých dějinách (Prague: Svoboda, 1968) with contributions by Graus, D. Třeštík, F. Šmahel, J. Petráň, M. Hroch, J. Kořalka, B. Loewenstein, and V. Olivová. ↩︎

resentative liberal democracy as well as the mechanisms for securing the basic rights and freedoms in a political order that preserved its fundamentally socialist character. 93{ }^{93}

At that point, Kosík, for the last time, intervened at the center of the political discussion. He addressed both crucial issues: socialist democracy and the national question. The most important of his political journalism from that period was a long essay “Our Current Crisis” published as a series during the spring and summer of 1968. 94{ }^{94} He argued that the historical meaning of Socialism lies in the liberation of man, and Socialism could historically be justified only when it provides a revolutionary and liberating alternative to exploitation, injustice, lies, mystification, lack of freedom, and indignity. Up to that point, Kosík maintained, Socialism did not carry out such promises and instead created, in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe, “a weird mixture of bureaucratism and Byzantinism, monstrous symbiosis of State and pagan Church.” Socialism that amounted only to a change in the means of production was, for Kosík, a farce. 95{ }^{95}

It was not only Socialism, though, that was in crisis in 1968, but the nation too. Kosík returned to his favorite topic of Czech political traditions and reconsidered the classical political responses of past Czech national political leaders such as Palacký, Havlíček, and Masaryk to their time. Unlike his writings of the 1950s, he now exam-

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93{ }^{93} See, e.g., the contemporaneous political journalism of Michal Lakatoš, Zdeněk Mlynář, František Šamalík in Jiří Hoppe, ed., Pražské jaro vv médiích. Výběr z dobové publicistiky (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR, 2004). Cf. also Jozef Žatkuliak, “Iná emancipácia? Česko-slovenská jar a slovenská spoločnost’,” in Ivan Šedivý, Jan Německ, Jiří Kocian, and Oldřich Tůma, eds., České križovatky evropských dějin: 1968 (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR, 2011), 91−10491-104.
94{ }^{94} Karel Kosík, “Naše nynější krize,” in Stoleti Markéty Samsové (Prague: Český spisovatel, 1992), 25-62, quotation from p. 35. Originally it came out in the weekly Literární listy in April 1968. In English: “Our current crisis,” in: Karel Kosík, The Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Observations from the 1968 Era (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 17-51. Not by chance, the title referred to a political treatise of Tomáš G. Masaryk of the same name, from 1895, where Masaryk endeavored to resume and analyze the major elements of the “political crisis” of his time from the perspective of his broader cultural-political program laid out in his Czech Question.
95{ }^{95} Kosík, “Naše nynější krize,” 48-49. ↩︎

ined their political programs of Austro-Slavism or Czechoslovakism on the basis of moral concepts such as Palacký’s devotion (božnost) and Masaryk’s Humanität (humanita). Such personalities did not merely represent class-interests, but they endeavored to inscribe the “Czech question” into moral and universal European frameworks. Idealist as these approaches were, they represented an effort to elevate “national life” from mere “biological existence” focused primarily on the survival to a full-fledged national-political program. At stake was how to turn the “small nation” in between the great powers (Russia and Germany) into true historical subject. Kosik argued that Czechs have to understand the question of democratic socialism in the same vein: a universal historical problem related to the European and global context of democracy. Nonetheless, the “practical test of the Czech question was after all the Slovak question.” 96{ }^{96} The Czechs" inability to understand the Slovaks" desire for federation and the overall ignorance of Slovak emancipation demands was, in his view, derived from the inability of Czech political thought to overcome its basically national Romantic confines and to reach a “statehood level,” a necessary condition for keeping the Czechoslovak state alive. Yet despite his sensitivity for Slovak requests, Kosik remained, similarly to most Czech intellectuals of the time, deeply bounded to his own national context. He expressed the Czech part of the wished-for transformation from ethnic to political nationhood; he did not do any effort to understand the Slovak part of the story.

Despite his active support for the Prague Spring, Kosik was a pessimist. In contrast to his earlier belief in existential revolution, he did not really see a chance to change human nature. The Gramscian revolution of man’s essence, Kosik wrote, always threatens to turn from man’s liberation to man’s total manipulation. Following with a critical eye the prevailing “productivist” arguments of the technocratic communist reformers and the developing consumer culture of Czechoslovak socialism, Kosik arrived at a skeptical Zivilisationskritik position, not very far from the contemporary views of the Frankfurt school. He was fundamentally pessimistic about the ability of Western democracy to renew its inner forces and reform itself. He had little faith in “Eastern” socialism’s capacity to genuinely democratize itself. He thus

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96{ }^{96} Ibid., 40. ↩︎

anticipated both Czechoslovak critical dissident writings (Jan Patočka, Václav Havel) on the crises of Western democracy and post-totalitarian misery, and-less straightforwardly-the postmodern critique of Western rationality. For Kosik, the major crisis of his time affected both capitalism and socialism. Its thrust was the belief in boundless development of production as the ultimate goal of both systems. Furthermore, it was a crisis of the unbounded historical process of subjectivation that turned individual human beings into accessories of the “system of modern production, the mystified, but the only real historical subject of nowadays.” 97{ }^{97}

Epilogue: 1989-the Victory of the “National Road” over Socialism

Kosik was indeed a philosopher of the Prague Spring. Yet he was its critical and skeptical philosopher. Over forty years old, deeply marked by his disillusion with Stalinism and his own involvement in it, he was no longer an enthusiastic true believer. He wholeheartedly supported the project of “socialist democracy” and kept emphasizing its emancipation potential, even though he was rather pessimistic about the possibility to carry it through in practice. He was a Czechoslovak patriot critical of ingrained nationalist stereotypes. He viewed with growing doubt the Czech reactions to Slovak national emancipation as they were voiced during the free public debates of 1968 and 1969. If there was, for Kosik, a national form (as opposed to national road) of socialism in 1968, it must have been in the sense of the Czechoslovak political nation and its project of democratic socialism. It was an ambitious reformulation of the national-political program inspired by similarly ambitious examples from the past such as that of Palacký or Masaryk. Kosik along with many other reform communist intellectuals during and after 1968 believed that the Prague Spring provided Czechs and Slovaks with a unique historical opportunity that required daring and responsible political and civic action.

Nejedlý, who represented the preceding attempt to square the internationalist socialist ideal in Bolshevik version to particular Czech

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97{ }^{97} Ibid, 54. ↩︎

national contexts, was by no means a viable alternative in 1968. His historical-philosophical concept of communists as the heirs of progressive Czech historical traditions and his whole oeuvre clearly had lost most of its attractiveness already a decade before. Even the most sympathetic accounts striving to stress the humanist and Masarykian elements in Nejedlý’s work remained skeptical about the possibility to revive Nejedlý as a viable element of Czech or Czechoslovak political and cultural tradition. 98{ }^{98}

Kosik became even more pessimistic and alienated after 1969. It was not only because of the military invasion of Czechoslovakia, but mainly because he started to interpret the military occupation as a historical proof of the failure of democratic socialism. His mood turned for the worst after 1989, which, from his point of view, was not only the restoration of the worst kind of greedy capitalism possible in his country, but it also brought about the breakup of Czechoslovakiaa danger he warned about in 1968. He saw the clear victory of the “national road” over “Socialism.” With a certain kind of poetic license drawing on the notions of this essay, we might say that the liberal transition engineered by Václav Klaus’s governments (1992-1997) represented a specific attempt at a Czech "national road to capitalism."99 The resignation of progressive and emancipatory politics combined with a turn towards nation-centered political culture among Czechs and Slovaks represented developments which Kosikḥad remarked disapprovingly already in the 1970s and 1980s. After 1989, due to his “nostalgic” 1968-er leftist views and embittered rhetoric, Kosik became yet another “old codger” and persona non grata in the new era of Czechoslovak and Czech democracy and capitalism-building. He was a self-conscious marginal stoutly holding on to his resolution to speak a different, “antediluvian” language in the public debate lam-

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98{ }^{98} See, esp. František Červinka, Zdeněk Nejedlý (Prague: Melantrich, 1969), “Oldřich Janeček, Zdeněk Nejedlý v letech 1939-1941,” Revue dějin socialismu no. 6 (1968): 845-74. It is quite significant that Cervinka considered Nejedlý above all as politically progressive in his “leftist realist” period in the 1920s, and his quest for a broader leftist coalition (including the communists) across the political parties. For the overall reception of Nejedlý’s work after 1956, see Křest’an, Zdeněk Nejedlý, 409-28.
99{ }^{99} Cf. Martin Myant, The Rise and Fall of Czech Capitalism. Economic Development in the Czech Republic since 1989 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003). ↩︎

basting the general loss of poetics and creative potential in favor of the “calculating logic” of global capitalism. 100{ }^{100}

It is only after the mid-2000s that Kosík started to be read and reinterpreted again by young left-wing intellectuals striving to find a new identity for genuinely radical democratic thought and politics. In reaction to the economic, social, and political crisis of capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they are turning not only to his late, anti-globalization and anti-capitalist writings, but to his earlier works too, such as to the Dialectics of the Concrete. 101{ }^{101}

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100{ }^{100} See, for instance, Karel Kosík, Predpotopní úvahy (Prague: Torst, 1997); Karel Kosík, Poslední eseje (Prague: FÚ AV ČR, 2005).
101{ }^{101} See, for instance, several contributions in the volume Hrubec, Pauza, Zumr, et. al., Myslitel Karel Kosík. ↩︎