As a young boy, I (Jan Holzer) would often pass by a wall that had these grand white numbers written on it.
2:0
That graffito shouted out the result of an ice hockey match between the Czechoslovakian and Soviet national teams at 1969 Ice Hockey World Championship in Stockholm. The otherwise mundane sporting clash became legendary in Communist Czechoslovakia, as this particular victory constituted a kind of consolation for August 1968 when armies of five Warsaw Pact states (led by Soviet forces) invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR). In the view of Kremlin political elites of that time, lead by Leonid I. Brezhnev, an invasion was the only way of halting the reform process of the so-called Prague Spring and the realisation of the doctrine of “socialism with a human face” which they—more or less accurately—considered dangerous for the stability of the entire communist bloc.
The present volume does not aim to critically reflect on the 1968 events. 1 The regard for Russia and all things Russian at that time dropped to an all-time low among Czechoslovak citizens at that time. It was not by chance that the derogatory term “Russkies” (“Rusáci”) rose in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, as it which articulated a particular political and social “archetype” attributing all the vices of Communism to Russia. This is how an ever increasing part of the Czech society voiced its negative opinion on Communism—notwithstanding the fact that linking Communism exclusively to its Russian source was a merciful self-delusion, for radical (revolutionary) socialism that got entrenched in modern Czech politics long before the Russian revolutionary developments took place, and had distinctively Central European—or perhaps Austrian-Hungarian—roots.
After the 1989 events and fall of Communism, the possibility of reinvigorating Czech sympathies towards Russia sounded like a pure political fantasy. The then catchphrase in Czech politics was the “Return to Europe” which in fact became reality after the Czech Republic joined the NATO and later the European Union—even though it took longer than many in Central Europe expected. The Czech Republic, as the successor state to Czechoslovakia, which disintegrated in 1992, finally seemed to have become an enduring part of the West, of its political structures and civilisation values. It was the same West which, represented by French and British political elites’ actions, was said to have betrayed Czechoslovaks in München in 1938; the same West from which the country was forcibly ripped away after the Second World War. Curiously, another “ice hockey miracle” served as a symbolic affirmation of this alleged return home: The surprising triumph of the Czech national team in the 1998 Nagano Olympic Games, the first ever Winter Olympics which featured star players from the National Hockey League. 2 At last, we were back in the West—and this time, truly “for eternity”…
However, recent developments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) seem to support the claim that, over and over again, our projections tend to be “overtaken by history”. Notions such as threat, risk, worry or fear, which were gradually dropping out of the Central European public vocabulary after 1989, have suddenly started gaining in substance as well as importance. All of a sudden, the historically oft-cited Czech oscillation between the West and the East (Balík et al. 2017), one that was thought to have been resolved by the collapse of Soviet Communism (understood in the Czech context as Russian communism, as noted above), reappeared. What is more, it now incorporates important security considerations. 3
Contributors to the present volume believe that this situation calls for an up-to-date study investigating the Czech understanding of current affairs in CEE. The CEE region, which provides the broader geographical backdrop to this book’s individual chapters, is analysed mainly in a diachronic perspective. The book examines the security dimension of contemporary Czech politics, understood as current external orientation of the Czech state. In accordance with recent conceptual trends in social sciences, this implies examining of all manifestations of security issues in the realms of politics, economy, culture, media, mentality, and so on. However, we also take into consideration the problem of historical and structural presumptions, that is, old controversies and conflicts over the definition of interests and value orientations of the Czech polity, as well as over the determination of fundamental foreign policy goals of the Czech state and its relationship to major external actors.
After all, social scientific analysis of any given security constellation presupposes identification of relevant actors. Contemporary CEE are quite understandably populated by a wide range of both state and non-state actors, among which the European Union and Russia play pre-eminent roles. Both have substantial influence over the CEE geopolitical and geo-cultural region; both not only aspire to transform this region but have the power to do so. Nevertheless, in the present volume we frame the security dimension of Czech politics exclusively with reference to Russia—its statehood, regime, polity, history, economy, and culture.
One might naturally ask why the Czech–Russian relationship should be considered unique or otherwise useful for analysis of the security situation in CEE. Controversially, for the last two centuries, Russia has represented a ubiquitous, or even internally constitutive, and at the same time dichotomising topic in Czech culture and politics. The relationship to Russia is a weighty concern for all Central European national polities (for some, e.g. Poland, this debate has become even more intensive). No other CE country is however as internally riven in its stance on Russia as the Czech Republic; nowhere else in the region does the Russian issue divide both the political landscape and the society itself as much. What is more, the distribution of sympathisers and critics is remarkably balanced here—or more precisely, there are regular swings of support towards the respective (opposing) trends. This is evidenced by the recurrent changes of foreign, political, and mental inclinations of the Czech polity and the accompanying uncertainty regarding its desired place either in the West or in the East. This could serve as a first-take concise justification of the subject matter of the present volume.
Early traces of a deeper Czech engagement with the Russian question can be found in the realist, anti-Russophile, and often ironic work of Karel Havlíček Borovský (1886), the founder of Czech journalism. On the other hand, still in the second half of the nineteenth century the young Czech political society witnessed the emergence of an exceptionally spirited Slavophile movement, at least with regard to the CE context. The Slavophile current was an understandable response on the part of some Czech elites to the extremely complicated realities of the contemporary Czech–German relationship—and specifically to the then-thriving non-Slavonic projects of modern state- and polity-building (that is, Pan-Germanism and Austrianism) in the Central European—then Habsburg-ruled—geopolitical space (Kořalka 1996, pp. 90–137). In short, the Russian question was a permanent element of both Czech national renaissance and regular political life in the nineteenth century.
From the very beginning, Czech–Russian relations involved an important security dimension because they reflected the broader Europe-wide security developments. Here we leave aside cases of Russian military involvement in the CE region, for example during the Napoleonic wars, 4 even though they certainly contributed to the image Russia developed within the Czech society. Russia however played a distinct role during the First World War when it endorsed the demands for national self-determination raised by exiled Czech political elites; among other things, Russia allowed the formation of the Czechoslovak Legion on its territory.
In other words, Russia remained the centrepiece of heated intellectual and public disputes also during the twentieth century within the Czech society: a subject of both assent and dissent, of hope and rejection. Notable contributions included the brilliant study of the Russian revolution by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1915/1916)‚ 5 or the critical analyses of Bolshevism by the historian Jan Slavík (e.g. Slavík 1936) which were among the first of their kind worldwide. As regards contemporary political events, the continuing presence of an influential Russian element was evidenced by the phenomenon of Czech Pan-Slavism which cut across party affiliations, as well as by the turn of the radical wing of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party to Soviet-inspired ideas (and later, at the turn of 1920s/1930s its complete submission to the decision-making mechanisms of and ideological direction by the Moscow leadership, in the name of “internationalism”). There was also an internationally significant factor in that interwar Czechoslovakia became a major refuge for “white” anti-Communist émigrés. This had tragic ramifications both during the Second World War (as groups of these emigrants collaborated with the Nazi regime) and after, when forcible deportations ensued and many emigrants were murdered by the NKVD.
After Germans were eliminated from the Czech territory via post-war expulsion of the German minority, a central assumption formulated earlier by the father of Czech historiography, František Palacký, may be argued to have been resolved by history. Palacký (1836/1848) identified the “German issue”, or the incessant clashes and competition between Germans and Slavs, as the heart of what became known as the Czech question. Russia, which had always constituted a natural counterpoise to the German motif within Czech conscience, culture, as well as politics, was now invited to replace Germany as the new substance of the Czech question—and remained so for the rest of the twentieth century.
This is why the arrival of Soviet troops in the Czechoslovak territory in 1944–1945, Soviet support for the Communist co...