Hajek M. Memoirs about the Czech Lefts / editor and the author of the afterword G.P. Murashko; translation from the Czech language G.P. Neshchimenko. Moscow; Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2019. 488 p.

Abstract

This article reviews the memoirs of the Czech politician and historian Miloš Hajek, which reflects on key moments from the so-called “short twentieth century”. Structurally, the book consists of ten sections with concluding remarks prepared by the famous historian Galina P. Murashko and nominal and annotated indexes of the culture, literature and art mentioned. Besides the description of his own life, M. Hajek also shows the path that Czech society took from the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Such complex questions as the attitude of the population towards Jews and manifestations of Czech nationalism are considered. The role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the political life of interwar Czechoslovakia and the evolution of its program after the end of World War II are shown. A lot of attention is paid to the organization and activities of the Prague Spring resistance movement and its influence on the reassessment of author’s life views as well as to other prominent communist personalities in Czechoslovakia. The memoirs describe the genesis and development of the human rights movement, the growth of protest activity of different groups of the population in the second half of the 1980s, the interaction of the so-called “street” with the organised opposition and the devaluation of leftist ideas in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The undoubted merit of Miloš Hajek’s book is his desire to show the “unvarnished” history and chronicle events without attempting to evaluate them, whilst taking into account the consequences that they had.